Gardening versus City of Heroes

Over the weekend, I spent a bunch of time digging around in the dirt, finishing up a new garden bed and starting work on the bed by the patio that I really didn't expect to have to complete this year. Chris wandered by and offered me the services of Marina's 13-year-old son, Jacob. Typically this means that Chris feels Jacob has spent too much time indoors playing computer games and needs to get some exercise, so no matter what I answer the kid will be dragged out and put to work doing something. Still, I normally decline as I'm horribly picky about how my gardens are set up, especially in the initial digging phase, and this doesn't mesh well with having help from disinterested parties who just want to be done so they can go back to playing. But at the time that Chris asked, I had a bunch of dirt that needed to be hauled from Point A to Point B. So Jacob got to haul dirt instead of playing Runescape.

It's worth noting that Jacob has a few characters on John's City of Heroes account, and is well aware of my addiction to the game. During the course of digging, he asked me "Which do you like better, gardening or City of Heroes?"

It's a fair question coming from the kid who got co-opted into helping me whether he liked it or not, but it startled me because when it comes right down to it, I hate gardening. I garden because of the end result, not because I enjoy the process. To me, it's a means to an end. This is why I'm so picky about how a garden is dug initially, because I'm a firm believer in spending the extra time to dig out every single piece of organic material that has the slightest chance of taking root or harboring weed seeds, and then mulching the hell out of the resulting bed. It may take me 10 times longer to dig the bed, but I spend a lot less time weeding it out later on. (This is also why my mother is no longer allowed to plant flowers on my property, because she offered to "help" and then produced gardens that are impossible to maintain because she's fond of roto-tilling the dirt and planting, and then mulching a month later after the weeds have gotten a good hold.)

I'm aware that there's people who believe in leaving the organic material because it will compost and feed nutrients to the wanted plants. I think they're insane.

Nothing gets me through those last few weeks of winter, the ones when it seems like the snow and the cold will drag on forever, than seeing crocuses poking out through the slush. Daffodils make me insanely happy, which is probably why I have about 200 of them planted around the property. Irises remind me of the house we lived in when I was in high school, because my Mom had at least 50 planted around. The huge flowers on the hibiscus behind the pool are gorgeous, and I enjoy just sitting on the patio and looking at the array of colors growing around me. But the actual process of gardening... I get bitten by an array of insects, from mosquitoes to ants. Muscle aches are bad enough that I go through a bottle of ibuprofen every summer, and it's rough on my knees (I've tried kneepads, and they're bloody well uncomfortable). I constantly have random little bruises from where I knelt on a small stone or whacked myself with a tool or found out the hard way where the tree roots grow. I breath so much dirt that blowing my nose afterwards produces nasty black mucus. The idea that some people garden for fun is incomprehensible to me. Of course I'd rather be inside playing City of Heroes, but gardening is my exercise, with a colorful side effect next year. Some people pay $300 a year to join a gym, I pay $300 a year (or quite a bit less, depending on the year) for bulbs and mulch and I go to town.

My reward for this?



These asters were an impulse purchase last fall, when Home Depot had them on a clearance rack because they looked half-dead. I bought four for $1.99 each. Every time I walk by them, I'm tremendously proud, because all four of the half-dead plants bloomed quite well this year:


(The plant in the middle is a rhododendron that was previously planted in an area too shady for it and transplanted this summer; I'm hoping that it will have a similar recovery next year.)

Gardening versus City of Heroes

Over the weekend, I spent a bunch of time digging around in the dirt, finishing up a new garden bed and starting work on the bed by the patio that I really didn't expect to have to complete this year. Chris wandered by and offered me the services of Marina's 13-year-old son, Jacob. Typically this means that Chris feels Jacob has spent too much time indoors playing computer games and needs to get some exercise, so no matter what I answer the kid will be dragged out and put to work doing something. Still, I normally decline as I'm horribly picky about how my gardens are set up, especially in the initial digging phase, and this doesn't mesh well with having help from disinterested parties who just want to be done so they can go back to playing. But at the time that Chris asked, I had a bunch of dirt that needed to be hauled from Point A to Point B. So Jacob got to haul dirt instead of playing Runescape.

It's worth noting that Jacob has a few characters on John's City of Heroes account, and is well aware of my addiction to the game. During the course of digging, he asked me "Which do you like better, gardening or City of Heroes?"

It's a fair question coming from the kid who got co-opted into helping me whether he liked it or not, but it startled me because when it comes right down to it, I hate gardening. I garden because of the end result, not because I enjoy the process. To me, it's a means to an end. This is why I'm so picky about how a garden is dug initially, because I'm a firm believer in spending the extra time to dig out every single piece of organic material that has the slightest chance of taking root or harboring weed seeds, and then mulching the hell out of the resulting bed. It may take me 10 times longer to dig the bed, but I spend a lot less time weeding it out later on. (This is also why my mother is no longer allowed to plant flowers on my property, because she offered to "help" and then produced gardens that are impossible to maintain because she's fond of roto-tilling the dirt and planting, and then mulching a month later after the weeds have gotten a good hold.)

I'm aware that there's people who believe in leaving the organic material because it will compost and feed nutrients to the wanted plants. I think they're insane.

Nothing gets me through those last few weeks of winter, the ones when it seems like the snow and the cold will drag on forever, than seeing crocuses poking out through the slush. Daffodils make me insanely happy, which is probably why I have about 200 of them planted around the property. Irises remind me of the house we lived in when I was in high school, because my Mom had at least 50 planted around. The huge flowers on the hibiscus behind the pool are gorgeous, and I enjoy just sitting on the patio and looking at the array of colors growing around me. But the actual process of gardening... I get bitten by an array of insects, from mosquitoes to ants. Muscle aches are bad enough that I go through a bottle of ibuprofen every summer, and it's rough on my knees (I've tried kneepads, and they're bloody well uncomfortable). I constantly have random little bruises from where I knelt on a small stone or whacked myself with a tool or found out the hard way where the tree roots grow. I breath so much dirt that blowing my nose afterwards produces nasty black mucus. The idea that some people garden for fun is incomprehensible to me. Of course I'd rather be inside playing City of Heroes, but gardening is my exercise, with a colorful side effect next year. Some people pay $300 a year to join a gym, I pay $300 a year (or quite a bit less, depending on the year) for bulbs and mulch and I go to town.

My reward for this?



These asters were an impulse purchase last fall, when Home Depot had them on a clearance rack because they looked half-dead. I bought four for $1.99 each. Every time I walk by them, I'm tremendously proud, because all four of the half-dead plants bloomed quite well this year:


(The plant in the middle is a rhododendron that was previously planted in an area too shady for it and transplanted this summer; I'm hoping that it will have a similar recovery next year.)

So much for relaxing

In my quest for maintenance, one of the things I am attempting to maintain better is myself. I have a daily checklist of items I don't do but ought to. I don't get through it all every day yet (it's not long, just full of things that aren't habits yet), but I'm trying.

One of the things on it is to relax before bed, in an effort to sleep better. Since I don't actually know how to meditate, I simply stretch for about 10 minutes and then try to sit quietly and breath deeply for another 10 minutes.

And then I end up thinking about Thomas Lannom, which pretty much kills any hope of quieting my mind.

Mr. Lannom was my seventh-grade social studies teacher. He had a slightly caustic attitude with a tendency to pick on people in a friendly-yet-sarcastic way. That also describes about 90% of my friends, so of course Mr. Lannom was one of my favorite teachers. I picked on him right back, too. I'd like to say that I was as gentle and careful about not hitting people's sore spots as he was, but I was twelve so I'm sure I lacked any finesse whatsoever. Still, he never seemed to hold it against me, and once in a while when things were going poorly, I'd talk to him about the trials and tribulations of Being Twelve. He never picked on me during those conversations, nor did I pick on him.

One day one of my fellow students fell asleep in class. Mr. Lannom woke him up in a not-so-gentle way (I can't recall if he threw something or dropped a heavy book; he'd been known to do both), and when the student used the excuse of not being able to get to sleep the night before, Mr. Lannom suggested a technique to help-- breathing in deeply through your nose and out through your mouth, and concentrating on your breath. I have no idea if it worked for the other sleepy student, but it helped me stop staring at the ceiling for an hour after going to bed.

What none of us knew was that Mr. Lannom was a recovering alcoholic. By the time he stopped drinking, he'd done massive damage to his liver. He was dying, slowly and painfully. When I was in eighth grade, we came back from Christmas Break to a terse announcement that Mr. Lannom had passed away. But he didn't just "pass away", he took his own life to escape the excruciating pain, and it didn't take long for that information to surface and be passed around the entire student body. As kids are wont to do, tasteless jokes arose and were also passed around, and I lost what little respect I had for the students I went to middle school with.

And as is common when someone close commits suicide, I spent many years wondering if there was anything I could have done to help him, or if any of my sarcastic comments had ever hit too close to home. I highly doubt that the ramblings of a twelve-year-old were what drove him over the edge, and about the only thing I could have done for his physical pain would have been to develop a cure for cirrhosis overnight, but deep down it still nags, even to this day.

Two decades later, when I try to sit quietly for any length of time, I end up concentrating on my breathing because it's the only thing that doesn't make my mind wander off into fantasy-land and get me riled up again. And when I breathe deeply, I naturally slip into the cycle of breathing that Mr. Lannom taught me so long ago, breathing in through my nose and out through my my mouth. And then suddenly, I'm thirteen and missing one of my favorite teachers and hearing my peers make crass jokes that make me want to throttle them all. So much for relaxing.

So much for relaxing

In my quest for maintenance, one of the things I am attempting to maintain better is myself. I have a daily checklist of items I don't do but ought to. I don't get through it all every day yet (it's not long, just full of things that aren't habits yet), but I'm trying.

One of the things on it is to relax before bed, in an effort to sleep better. Since I don't actually know how to meditate, I simply stretch for about 10 minutes and then try to sit quietly and breath deeply for another 10 minutes.

And then I end up thinking about Thomas Lannom, which pretty much kills any hope of quieting my mind.

Mr. Lannom was my seventh-grade social studies teacher. He had a slightly caustic attitude with a tendency to pick on people in a friendly-yet-sarcastic way. That also describes about 90% of my friends, so of course Mr. Lannom was one of my favorite teachers. I picked on him right back, too. I'd like to say that I was as gentle and careful about not hitting people's sore spots as he was, but I was twelve so I'm sure I lacked any finesse whatsoever. Still, he never seemed to hold it against me, and once in a while when things were going poorly, I'd talk to him about the trials and tribulations of Being Twelve. He never picked on me during those conversations, nor did I pick on him.

One day one of my fellow students fell asleep in class. Mr. Lannom woke him up in a not-so-gentle way (I can't recall if he threw something or dropped a heavy book; he'd been known to do both), and when the student used the excuse of not being able to get to sleep the night before, Mr. Lannom suggested a technique to help-- breathing in deeply through your nose and out through your mouth, and concentrating on your breath. I have no idea if it worked for the other sleepy student, but it helped me stop staring at the ceiling for an hour after going to bed.

What none of us knew was that Mr. Lannom was a recovering alcoholic. By the time he stopped drinking, he'd done massive damage to his liver. He was dying, slowly and painfully. When I was in eighth grade, we came back from Christmas Break to a terse announcement that Mr. Lannom had passed away. But he didn't just "pass away", he took his own life to escape the excruciating pain, and it didn't take long for that information to surface and be passed around the entire student body. As kids are wont to do, tasteless jokes arose and were also passed around, and I lost what little respect I had for the students I went to middle school with.

And as is common when someone close commits suicide, I spent many years wondering if there was anything I could have done to help him, or if any of my sarcastic comments had ever hit too close to home. I highly doubt that the ramblings of a twelve-year-old were what drove him over the edge, and about the only thing I could have done for his physical pain would have been to develop a cure for cirrhosis overnight, but deep down it still nags, even to this day.

Two decades later, when I try to sit quietly for any length of time, I end up concentrating on my breathing because it's the only thing that doesn't make my mind wander off into fantasy-land and get me riled up again. And when I breathe deeply, I naturally slip into the cycle of breathing that Mr. Lannom taught me so long ago, breathing in through my nose and out through my my mouth. And then suddenly, I'm thirteen and missing one of my favorite teachers and hearing my peers make crass jokes that make me want to throttle them all. So much for relaxing.