Cranky. Old. Man?

Our impending new raised planter is still showing as scheduled to arrive tomorrow while we're both home/not working, so here's hoping!

We just spent a while sifting through some seed listings on the Halifax Seed website (and I mostly kept myself from looking at tomato seeds, since we are not growing any tomatoes from seed*).

*I really wish there were some indication of what tomato varieties will be offered as seedlings, and also wish I knew if the different plant nurseries tend to offer similar varieties of tomato seedlings or not. (ALSO-also, we need to decide whether to focus on trying a few different types to see how we like them vs. focusing on a few determinate plants with the intention of just processing most/all of the fruit into sauce.)

(The seedling sale from a relatively nearby nonprofit that I'm hoping to make it to does offer a short list of potential varieties of things, with the caveat of "These are all the options that we have intended to grow but as all farmers and gardeners know, not every crop pans out. We apologize in advance if some of these options are unavailable, or not ready." For tomatoes, it says "Roma, Brandywine, Scotia +more! / Tropical Sunset, Sungold, Red Torch +more!")

But as noted yesterday, we don't plan to put tomatoes in the actual planter anyway. Thoughts for the actual planter so far: ( thoughts + variety notes )

Seasonal crunch is over! Feels like freedom, if you ignore the part where I still have, y'know, a job + freelance stuff. Increased freedom. We'll go with that.

My day off yesterday entailed such thrilling things as sleeping in and then taking ages to get up because Jinksy came to snuggle*; finishing my breakfast and tea by around noon; getting some banking done; washing my hair; vacuuming the two main levels of the house; spending several full hours being a cat-lap for Sinha; and starting in on a new novel for the first time since March Break or so.

*When I texted scruloose to say good morning, they said, "When my first alarm went, it was competing with Jinksy over on your other side rumble-purring so hard I swear the mattress was reverberating with it."

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Reading: A couple more chapters of Braiding Sweetgrass, and I've finished Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks, which has a fair number of recipes but is, as the title indicates, more of a family history than a cookbook.

And last night I didn't want to spend much mental energy on choosing what fiction to read, so I decided to just go with Tough Guy, the third Game Changers novel. I imagine in the not-too-distant future I'll pick up the ebook "box set" of books 4-6 just to have them on hand.

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Watching: We're caught up on The Pitt and have seen five episodes of One Piece season 2, and I imagine we'll finish the latter before backtracking for the last couple-few episodes of Frieren. (I've also made note of this elsewhere, but to reinforce it in my brain: after The Pitt finishes, I need to remember to cancel our Crave subscription again.)

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Eating: After the crunch ended on Thursday, scruloose and I ordered from a new (?) Korean BBQ place (bb.q Chicken) that a stranger in the local Bluesky feed had mentioned was good. We tried the bone-in Classic Fried Chicken (very minimal spicing, but very solid) and the boneless Golden Fried Chicken, the description of which didn't indicate any particular spiciness, but it turned out to be right on the edge of my comfort level...but also a really delicious seasoning to go with the heat, so I'm counting that as a definite win. The place offers a whole array of flavor options, so I imagine we'll be trying it again.

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Weathering/Growing: Yesterday was sunny and relatively warm, and now we're back to a slightly-chilly rainy/damp stretch, but a few days in the forecast will theoretically get back up into the double digits.

At my instigation, we're going to take another stab at Doing Garden Stuff this year. ( VERY preliminary notes )

Easter Monday. I slept pretty badly (repeatedly waking, and not taking ibuprofen when I first woke with a headache; I've absorbed the notion of "if possible, don't take ibuprofen if you're going to be lying down right afterward" and this tends to result in this exact situation of "wake up in the night with headache, tell self you'll go back to sleep and it'll go away [which never works], wake again later with no reduction in headache, take ibuprofen when about to lie back down anyway").

I had slightly larger, albeit still small, ambitions for today prior to the bad sleep, but we ventured out briefly on an unsuccessful quest for scones (we verified the shop was open and I even called ahead to try to make sure they had scones, but I got voicemail and no one returned my call, so we gambled and lost). Ah well.

( all the rest is various food talk [with a bit about eating + blood glucose aggravation] )

We're not observing Easter in any way, other than being grateful for the four-day weekend (today being the third day). The work crunch continues, so this reprieve is a real mercy. (Am I starting a rewrite after this post? Yes. But I did take yesterday fully off, and Friday's work consisted only of reading through this translation.)

Reading: Very, very little, although I've been picking away some more at Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks.

Watching: The main thing is that, since the crunch has not kindly wrapped up, I've given up on my initial notion of holding off until it's over to start season 2 of the live-action One Piece. scruloose and I are two episodes in. (If we'd decided to actively dedicate the weekend to it, we could've watched the whole thing before Tuesday, but have opted against that.) No Chopper yet. *vibrates*

Weathering: Yay for spring and all that, but so far it's a very Nova Scotian spring--a lot of the province had a bunch of snow and ice on Friday, with more of the same today. We're mostly getting very chilly rain here, which is bad enough.

Meat-puppetry (kinda): Within the last week or two, the length of my hair went from "this is more effort than I like to keep it off my face, but hey, having a ponytail is still novel" to "IT'S TOUCHING ME MAKE IT STOP", and thankfully Ginny was up for chopping it (mostly) all off last night when she and Kas were over. It's now back to being VERY short without the drastic step of simply buzz cutting it; there's even enough length at the front that some of it's still dyed from (I think it was?) December. Such a relief.

(Ginny cuts her own hair, Kas' hair, and my hair, and mine is veryvery different from either of theirs--dead straight and slippery and, although I didn't know this until I was at least in my thirties, very thick despite being very fine. So when she does my hair, there just keeps being more of it, even with a quarter or a third of it buzzed right down in an undercut, and it slides away from whatever she's trying to do with it. On top of that, I only actually get her to do it maybe twice a year, so she doesn't really have a chance to get used to my hair, but she gamely makes it work anyway and I appreciate it. ^_^)