An Occult Apperatus

 I live in an apartment, and I don't have a yard.  What we do have is a tiny little back patio, and what I've been doing is growing a few nasturtiums in pots out there every Summer.    

This is where we hang out and talk shit.

I never get tired of nasturtiums. You just cannot beat this intricate flower form - and the hummingbirds adore them!

Look how nicely this little bush form is draping!

This year The Biker presented me with a drilled-out plastic bucket he'd made and told me "Grow a vegetable dammit. You can do it." 

  So I took a white fingerling potato and set the eyes out. Lo and behold they grew.  If the tree rats don't rob me I might actually have enough in there to make a potato salad. We shall see at the end of the month.

Yeah, that's a rogue nasturtium growing in there with them. Yeah, they look ratty. It's late in the season and I've been culling the leaves as they turn yellow.  These were big, fluffy, tall plants there for awhile, though. 

WARNING: HONESTY

The loss of my garden was a huge blow. I feel it still. I couldn't even drive around the neighborhood that first summer, going past everyone's wonderful gardens in bloom, without crying. Lord how I wept. It was dumb.  I also felt cursed too. Like I was the kiss of death or something. No it doesn't make any sense. But I did.

Cursed or not, by the end of our first month in the apartment the windowsills were full of carrot tops, celery hearts and other things all rooted and growing in water glasses. I longed for a real houseplant, though; I mean, celery isn't ideal for that purpose, so I forced myself that first January to go to a good nursery and buy a ficus, figuring that I'd have to actively set a ficus on fire to kill it.

Anyway, I began to lavish a ridiculous amount of care on the ficus, and it has thanked me by continuing to be aggressively alive.

(BTW that is a picture of my husband's great grandfather in a hot rod that he built.)

Shortly thereafter I was at a garage sale and found a little spider plant that I made myself buy. Same rationale - I'd have to run over a spider plant to kill it, was my thought.  Well...it didn't go quite that way. The thing immediately began trying to climb out of its pot and nothing I could do made it happy. This was a big dramatic thing to me at the time.  After months of this, I finally took the last little crown, just  a little button of green, and set it in an egg cup full of water.  And look at this thing three years later!  

Variegated spider plant showing off it's pretty, silvery roots. This vase is sixteen inches high and made of lead crystal. Yes.  I bought my spider plant a mansion. 

And there we go. 

Nobody Talks About The Oort Cloud

  We have had strange weather lately. Suddenly, Nature decided it was November. The temperature plunged overnight to 65f. The sky was overcast. Trees began to color up and drop leaves.  Then an about face! No warning! Two days later and BOOM it was 93f, dead still; there was heavy fog in the mornings and it was so humid it was difficult to breathe. Oh, and still overcast. Yeah. Nobody was having any fun.  

Then blammo! we had three solid days of torrential rain, because why the fuck not. 

The rain dropped straight from the sky in huge bucket-sized raindrops, and it was warm, disgusting, soupy rain, too.  Well, I thought, screw this. I'm gonna go spend money on things I don't need.  So I drove down to the old Bellingham Antique Mall and figured I'd look around for old records.   

I have had better ideas. Driving there was no fun; the whole inside of my car was damp and hot and stinky, and the windows kept fogging up. My destination was a giant warehouse that sits right on Puget Sound, an old, old wooden building that's been marinating in the aroma of Low Tide since before statehood - and I was headed for the basement of that building, which is where they keep the used record store, and hippies. Lotta hippies. Hippies all over the place down in there. 

It was FUNKY in that basement, people. It was STANK. And I had to go down a lot of stairs! By the time I got to the bottom of those stairs, I was pretty stank too.   All that old paper, the old rugs, the building timbers, the sheer gross, rank, dank smell that came up off all that stuff was so thick that it was enough to choke aFINEFINE OK.  

Fine.  I was in a stinky hot basement during low tide on Puget Sound. I didn't die.

In fact, I saw cool things there! I saw this:

This sign hung at the end of a fence up on Mt. Baker for years, and I kept threatening to steal it every time I drove past.  "No no no," said my family. And they got all weird about it. So I did not.

You see this shit?  $145. Will they get it?  Every dime.

I tell you, I have AN EYE for these things. 

I am kicking myself for not having gone out one dark night with a pair of side cutters.

                                         

                                                OO AND LOOKIT AT WHAT I BOUGHT!!!!!

OMGWTFBBQEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!    

Publicity shots!!!! 

TOS PUBLICITY SHOTS!!!!!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!! 

SPOCK AND KIRK ACTION PHOTO!!!!  

OO and this too, still in the cellophane:

Now these are six for a nickel, practically. They're all over the Internet. But it's the kind of obscure Star Trek stuff I like, and I didn't' have to pay twenty-three dollars for shipping. And the stories are by Allan Dean Foster!       

Was I stoked? Was I over the moon?  YES.

Did I risk my life by walking down a super icky low-tide alley full of meth heads several minutes later as I rushed to my car, feet not touching the ground, to secure my prizes? Yes. 

I was protected by the power of Star Trek. I had that maniac glint in my eye. Nobody wants to fuck with an elderly Trekkie who's high on bargain acquisition, y'all.

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Presenting Food Dehydrator Theatre!  Today we bring you our interpretation of Twelfth Night:

Hi I'm Viola and I'm shipwrecked here in this land. So is my twin brother who is probably dead. I'm going to go dress up like a boy so see ya.

Hey I'm her twin brother Sebastian and I'm not dead, but I'll just settle into the background for awhile.

Hey check me out I'm Duke Orsino!  I own dinosaurs! 

 

YEAH!! I'm Duke Orsino and I'm going to eat this crusty dog with my stomach! WOOOOO I'M CRAZY!!

I am the Holy Infant of Prague. I don't really come into the story but I thought I'd say hi. So yeah.

AAAA! WOOOO! Cray-zee wackiness ensues!  Everybody pretends to be other people! WOO!

AAA I'm Sebastian, remember me?  A dugong ate my face and now I'm dead!  The End!! TA DA!

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Some months back I thought to myself 'Self, you need to flow with the times. You should go out into the world and scout for visual content! No more racking your brain for big chunks of text!  People are all about the images these days!'

And this was a lot of thinking, so I rested. I had a beer. I pre-treated my laundry.

So then. I went out, I got pictures, I did posts.

I have done my 'Super average, on-the-ground' posts about places nearby.

Check 'Grocery Shopping in Large Bleak Warehouse-Type Spaces'.

Done 'Old Cookbooks'. Ditto 'Weird Cookbooks and Recipes.'

Done did 'Old Weird Things I See In Resale Stores'.

I think what I'm going to do is to continue in this vein. I might even do a 'Me Cooking A Thing' post.

You? Should go fill your air with tires.  Yup.