Safe Houses for Writers
Mexico has a safe house for oppressed writers from around the world.
I wonder if I qualify? I'm forced back into the working world by my birds who demand more and more bird seed, fish who will only eat food sticks from Dr. Foster, and an organic garden that demands only the best supplements. Do you get forced to pick tomato worms at dawn because you can't use insecticides? At least the frogs in the goldfish pond eat them. Every little weed gets picked by hand in the blazing sun. Worms are carefully transpanted from the stink pile to the garden to break down the three-year-old leaf mulch that I have to rake up each fall.
The slave labor continues by the chopping and stacking of wood to create fires to keep warm during the winter, and during the summer, I have to pick flowers and arrange them in vases for the lady of the house. Laundry, vaccuuming, dishes, dusting, car maintenance, grass cutting, and deer thinning must be done in order to receive, ah, well, favors. I guess I should be glad for small things. She doesn't know how to work a Kalashnokov.
Safe house in Mexico, heck, I'd settle for 10 days at the Writers Retreat Workshop.
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3 comments:
Your garden is already growing? I just got around to planting seeds in starter pots.
Gathering wood here is as much about cleanup as fuel. The in-laws cut up a tree off a fence yesterday and told us to come & get it. They even cut it to size; all we have to do is split the bigger pieces & load it up.
So… if you'd got the job at Cisco or Red Hat, who would have been doing the slave labor?
Last fall, some volunteer tomato plants started growing. In early November, I potted them and put them in my sunroom. I ate the first red tomato this morning. I have about sixty tomatoes on the vine. My wife didn't think I could do it, but all I said to her was, "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah."
The snow peas are sticking their heads up. We have carrots (nice and sweet since all the sugar is in the roots). We have green onions. Bok choi, various lettuce, beets, and some other things that she put in are in the ground, but not up yet.
C or RH would be wonderful, but I'm at MI grading student papers. Sigh! Boring, but it's something for now.
The big tree I'm working on is 44 inches in diameter. I'm going from the top down (it is on it's side in the forest). I don't know how I'm going to finish the last twenty feet, BUT I WILL!
Not tomato worms! Don't have any in my garden, thank goodness. They're scary. But I'm familiar with the potato beetle in all it's life stages, and have held them briefly in my hand before plopping them into a can of water to drown. Sometimes I get a twofer-- a mating pair. At least their last moment was pleasure.
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