Here be aromantics

Got outside and watered some plants just now. The self-heal and arnica are in the ground as of this weekend, but the salad burnet is still waiting to get planted, along with the chamomile and dill we picked up at the nursery last week. They'll be fine, though. I'm also still trying to figure out where to put the lemon balm where it won't take over everything. I could put it in a pot, I suppose, but last year I did that and it didn't re-seed itself at all so I had to start over again.

There's another bed I've been letting grow into a bit of a catch-all butterfly garden until I sort out what to plant there long-term, and it'll probably have some of the oregano come back that I tried to take out last year. Oregano is pernicious, but also delicious, so I don't necessarily mind, as long as I can keep it from crowding out everything else again. Maybe I'll put the lemon balm there too and let them duke it out over the season. I'm not reclaiming that bed for myself this year, anyway.

Lots of things are blooming. The comfrey and the borage just put out flowers, which are gorgeous as always. Though the borage somehow planted itself in a crack between the steps instead of the garden bed this year, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to move it so it doesn't get stepped on and can seed itself somewhere better next time. The calendula is going absolute gangbusters already, so that's promising for a good harvest this year. I'll have to make more salves or something to make good use of it all. Maybe an arnica-calendula blend? I'll have to think on it.

On another note, poking around on DW is reminding me just how many fandoms I haven't gotten into yet. It makes me so happy to see book reviews and the like, too! It would be a good idea for me to get back into a regular reading habit, I think. It's been hard to find the time, and when I do pick up a book, I usually feel compelled to read something that's serious non-fiction and/or somehow related to research I'm doing for my writing. It's usually depressing stuff, even if it's also very good and interesting, and I could stand to read something more light-hearted from time to time. For some reason I just have a hard time prioritizing happier things. But maybe seeing people get excited about things on DW will help me break out of those habits. If there's an incentive of getting to chat with people about it, I imagine that might make it easier.

Anyway. Blogging is a nice hobby. I'm finding it calming to reflect on the easier beats of the day. The rest we can just pretend doesn't exist, which is nice to do for a little while. I'll be off to dance class soon, attempting to go in person instead of resorting to online like I had to do last week. One of these days I'll be able to get back to dance more than once a week, but probably not yet. And then when I'm home later I might see if I can crank out another chapter, but that might be wishful thinking.

Life has slowed to a crawl again, after the third ER visit in as many months this past week. I won't get into the specifics of it, but suffice to say, my capacity these days is limited.

I was able to get some gardening done today though, so that's a small win. The elecampane and the valerian are in the ground now instead of their too-small pots. Still lots of self-heal and the salad burnet to plant, but they're still tolerating their conditions for now, so I can wait to worry about them until another day when I'm feeling up to being out in the world for awhile.

I've been having a lot of fun with Dreamwidth so far. I've always wanted to learn more html but never had a reason for it, and getting my writing projects posted up by chapter has been a fun crash course. I'm thinking more and more these days of pivoting in a coding and software direction when my current career expires, especially since I'm running Linux now too. It seems like something I'd be fairly good at. I like human languages, so why not computer languages?

I'm not upset that I was pushed in an arts direction when I was young, since that's been valuable to me in its own way, but I do feel sometimes like I was robbed of a more lucrative potential by not being encouraged to consider pursuing the harder sciences. It's a different mindset and set of skills, and while I wouldn't say I don't have those skills, I do think it's fair to admit that they have been undernourished. But I've been loving all the data work I've been doing for my job lately, and I find myself gravitating to those tasks more than anything else these days.

Not that I'm planning on another career pivot anytime soon. But it doesn't hurt to prepare. There's enough writing on the wall that it would be foolish to think my current path will continue to be sustainable forever.

Anyway. I'm still working out what to write about here, so forgive any meandering or inconsistencies for awhile while I get my feet under me. I'm no less excited for the potential of this site now as I was when I joined up a week or so ago. I knew Tumblr wasn't working for me, but I don't think I realized just how mind-numbing and isolating of an experience it was. How wonderful to have actual interactions online again!

Here we are on day whatever on dreamwidth. I could go back and look to see how many days it's been, but I know it's not a lot.

I've been pondering what I can write here that anyone would find remotely interesting. Then I realize, I'm not an influencer or anything, so who the fuck cares, actually? I'm not here for clout. I don't need to impress anyone. There are no rules. I can write whatever I want, and maybe people will read it and maybe they won't, and maybe they'll like it and maybe they won't, and it doesn't really matter because this is a corner of the internet I can reserve for myself and use as I see fit. I wish there were a way to make things private to just logged-in members of the site like I do on Ao3, but I can deal.

So today I'll talk about gardening! Because that's all I did today, and I am T I R E D. It's been an ongoing project to reclaim the front yard from all the ornamentals the previous owners put in so I can make the space actually useful. Between last fall and this spring, I've taken out ~10 stumps, some of which were full plants at first, and some of which I'm guessing were once things the previous owners didn't want but didn't feel like dealing with themselves. I kept finding stumps I didn't even know about partially buried in the ground among other things they had planted, so I guess they just cut some things and left the root systems to rot.

10 stumps is a huge number considering it's not that big a space. Only 8x12 or so. I'm so curious to know what it looked like before the previous owners did all their landscaping.

Anyway, I finally got everything cleared out and put down fresh soil this past week. Today was the day for laying the pathway, so I spent a few hours hammering in edging and laying down cardboard and stepping stones. I didn't finish, so I'll still have to finish the edging and put down the woodchips to finish up the path, and then FINALLY I can plant all my poor little guys who I started as seeds way too early who are so desperate to be set free from their itty bitty pots...

I kept writing after that and went off on a tangent about the story I'm writing, and then deleted it because that's a whole different subject and doesn't need to be in the same post as the gardening stuff. Maybe another day I'll share all those thoughts, but not today. The gist of it was that I wish I had had time for writing today, and then I realized I could have time for writing if I stop writing this blog post, so maybe that's what I'll do!