the things you do for love

[dragonlady7]

This evening as I was painting the inside of a bathroom door I had the door shut so I was alone in the room, and I was singing The Mountain Goats' "Love, Love, Love" to myself because it reverberated so nicely, but I couldn't remember most of the lyrics, so I kept humming most of it, and kept coming around on variations of almost getting the chorus right.
some things you do for money
and some you do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

It was a busy day today, and it started off with Farmkid, freshly awakened, coming into my bedroom and asking me to read to her from The Serpent Sea, which I've been reading to her. (We've gotten as far as Moon's arrival at Viridian Sea. Yes, we've read the other two books of the trilogy. Yes, they're adult books; we started when she was around four, and I know the books so well I was able to just... slightly edit some of the violence down, and elide the sex somewhat, and honestly the book's messages are perfectly reasonable and a child can absorb them. There's major character death but I put the book down and discuss it with her sometimes, and she hasn't really had trouble with any of it. There are a lot of questions, though, you kind of have to be ready for that. But she loves it. She has an excellent memory and has had no trouble picking up the story even though we set it aside for months at a time, which I think is unusual at her age, but. She has vivid memories of things that happened when she was two, so I guess she's a little unusual, but really everyone's unusual in different ways and it's about time someone in this family had a decent memory.)

My mother arrived and took over care of Farmkid, so I went out to work; I pulled out yurt bits from the barn attic, because my dad was coming over and I thought we were going to try to set up the yurt, though I'd said to him maybe we could do some site preparation instead. I should have been working on that, but I wouldn't have known what we needed, to prepare.
I went and helped in the greenhouse, since Dad said he'd come at 10. So I got my camphor basil seeded, and my Japanese Indigo, and I should have seeded the buglewort but the seed packet didn't explain well. I'll seed it when I come next; things were kind of hectic in the greenhouse. The planters they had going spare were weird 50-cell circular ones, so I seeded 50 cells each of those two plants. I also have woad to seed but that wants direct seeding.
Then Farmsister set me to pinching the tops of all her snapdragons; it's best to do that to seedlings so they'll branch out, and it's exacting work that's difficult to rush. She had to go work on something, meanwhile.
I took off my overshirt and sat in the intense sun in the greenhouse. On Sunday when I played outside with Farmkid I found a rash on my chest later, that I worried was the sun hives I used to get. But it went away, and today all my time in the greenhouse was enough to give me some freckles on my arms, but no hives. So I'm cautiously thinking it's still gone; I didn't have trouble last year, but I've been so shy of the sun-- but I got sunburnt twice, so I'd definitely have hived up if I were going to. (I burnt the shit out of myself in Kyrgyzstan-- the altitude didn't help-- and was fine, so.)

When I was done with the snapdragons, Dad showed up, and he had come prepared to do site prep out at the yurt space. There was a twisty tree I wanted to take down, which was drooping over and taking up a lot of room near the yurt and shading out the rest of the site and making a lot of mosquito habitat, so. It overhung a farm implement-- apparently a flail chopper, the thing is called, which is apparently a real thing, although it absolutely sounds fake-- and so I hadn't taken it down before. We tried briefly to move the flail chopper, but it was very heavy, with all its weight pushed forward onto a car scissor jack that we didn't have the adjuster thingy for. So instead, Dad went up on a ladder-- it took us about an hour to locate this ladder, there was a lot of running around-- and cut off pieces of the tree until enough was gone to be sure it wouldn't land on the fucking flail crapper or whatever, and then he cut it up and I stacked it neatly so it could dry to burn later.
We didn't destroy the fling slapper, and didn't even drop the tree on anything, which took some doing, so it was generally accounted a triumph.

Then Dad left, and lunch involved a visit from some new farmers in the area, who are operating a startup little farm right down in South Troy, in the city limits, next to a baseball field. They seem lovely, and like good people to know.

After lunch Farmsister pointed out the snapdragons I'd missed (d'oh!) so I finished those, and then cleaned the kitchen from the lunch mess that had gotten hastily abandoned in all the excitement of the visitors, and then the storm front that had been threatening all day rolled in, with some snappy wind gusts.
Everyone came inside; Veg Manager was reviewing his plan and budget for the huge deer fence he's putting in to protect the garden, which has suffered terribly from deer the last few years. (The fence is going to go right around the yurt, which does somewhat affect my landscaping plans, so I'm glad to know about it. The current issue is corner posts, which we're not sure how to engineer.)
BIL eventually pointed out that it was going to rain the rest of the day, we weren't likely to do more farm work, and so Farmsister and I would be well-served to just-- give up and go to Middle-Little's and start painting.

So we did. I redid the trim between kitchen and living room, onward to the bathroom door, and I was inside the bathroom singing The Mountain Goats when Middle-Little got home from work and was surprised at how much we'd gotten done, having expected us to only get there after 5.
We broke for dinner, and M-L bought us dinner at the next-door restaurant, which was lovely.
I got a sandwich called the Hugo Award, which was fantastic. I took a photo and was going to Instagram about my Hugo Award but I don't know who on there would know what one is...
(The bun was made out of plantain tostadas, and it had pulled pork, and it was generally fantastic.)

After dinner I finished the bathroom door, and touched up the rest of it, and then we rearranged the living room furniture and then Farmsister wouldn't let us leave until Middle-Little proved that she'd moved enough stuff to sit on the couch and walk through the doorway of the apartment. We've had too many incidents where M-L says "no no I'll take care of it later" and then we come back and it's still just as it was. ALTHOUGH I should say in her defense since we painted on Saturday she'd continued and gotten the ceilings in two rooms rolled without us!!! which is a Lot, and more than she'd done on her own at any other point in this process! so!! Progress.

I guess M-L is telling herself she's going to revenge herself upon me by coming and doing some work on my house but I'm so convinced that Dude will never actually make any decisions about the house so it won't happen so I'm not really worried.

Comments

[unicornduke]

yay for getting the tree down! Sounds like a super busy day all around

[dragonlady7]

I am excited to have that tree down, because now I can plant things in that space and make it be more of a garden and less of a waste area full of brush piles and mosquitoes and Virginia Creeper.

While Dad was chainsawing and I couldn't help, I pulled all the garlic mustard I could find.

[unicornduke]

fuck virginia creeper, that shit is horrible.

[dragonlady7]

As we were trying to cut down the tree dad took a pair of loppers and chopped the virginia creeper and grapevines into short pieces because they kept tripping us, and when you're cutting down trees you really need to be able to run away, dad says.

[unicornduke]

lmao that is very true. grapevines are terrible too. I was walking at Peebles Island the other day and just looking at all the huge grapevines they've got. They're taking down trees!

[dragonlady7]

Grapevines are at least sort of cool sometimes? And I do have some tentative plans to get better at harvesting them and making grapevine wreaths, which are good bases for dried floral-and-feather decorations we could actually sell at the farmer's market. But the vines themselves-- they're kind of awful really.

[unicornduke]

oh yeah that's a great idea for them! Something lol

[oracne]

This is a very soothing post.

[dragonlady7]

Getting A Lot Done is really soothing, I find-- even though I don't get to write much, my mental health tends to be better at the farm because there is always activity I can hitch myself to and be Useful, you know? :)