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stone wall exercise
Monday, April 13 2015
My sleep last night seemed to consist of one long Eleanor coughing fit, though of course her fits were only occasional and I slept through the spaces between them. She still has kennel cough, and her coughing is just as bad as ever. We've run out of the torbutrol, so I've been giving her two teaspoons of Tussin DM instead, though it hasn't helped much and neither have the antibiotics. This morning Gretchen took her temperature and it was normal (a little over 101 degrees Fahrenheit), but we she set up another appointment with the Hurley vet anyway.
I couldn't help myself, so this morning I watched the second episode of season five of Game of Thrones because, well, I had it. This took me a week into the future, beyond all the online recaps and spoiler specials. When I told Sara Poiron about this via Facebook private message, she was so jealous that she wanted to participate. But she was handicapped by three things: her computer was a Chromebook, she'd never bittorrented before, and her brain is not wired to follow a series of instructions precisely. I was able to overcome the first issue with a Chrome OS app called Bitford (which will happily run on a normal Windows PC, reachable via the Chrome Apps menu). But it only seemed to work with .torrent files, not the much more common magnet torrents. After much back and forth and irritation, I think Sara managed to download an .mp4 of episode 2 to her Chromebook. I don't know if it had the software to actually play it though.
It was a beautiful sunny day with temperatures in the 70s. A huge feature of this time of year is the lack of annoying insects, and I took advantage of the situation to complete the building of the retaining wall for the new cabbage patch. After that, I ran a sheet of weedblock along the wall (to better retain the soil behind it) and, then disposed of all the household's compost (and some fallen pine boughs) directly behind the new wall. The compost consisted of two partly-filled composter drums of kitchen wastes, as well as a very-full composter drum of humanure from the brownhouse. The latter had been composting since September, and the resulting material was surprisingly well-digested and (aside from a few small pockets) completely inoffensive. In fact, even some of the humanure from off the top of a big 30 gallon bucket (which hadn't been stirred since it was extracted from the brownhouse basement in September) had decomposed enough for use in the garden. Once I'd laid down that layer of material, I covered it all with a layer of sandy loam from the pile that was delivered some years ago when I needed a lot of soil for the garlic patch. That soil has always been a disappointment; it's mostly just sand, with almost no organic matter or clay, and you can tell how bad it is by how few earthworms choose to make it their home. I thought today that my new cabbage patch might require another load of soil, but from what I can tell by searching the internet, Croswell Enterprises (the company that delivered that unsatisfactory soil) is the only soil provider advertising in this area. And they don't appear to offer any clay-rich soils. As always, if I want good soil, I have to go to the Esopus Valley and dig it myself. (The loam from the river bank across Wynkoop from the Hurley Mountain Inn is perfect garden soil.)
As I puttered around in the yard, Gretchen sunned herself in a chaise lounge placed in the driveway. Dogs and cats were scattered around nearby, taking similar advantage of the beautiful weather.
By the end of the day, all the wall building and compost lugging had induced a much-needed ache in my arm muscles, which haven't really been used for any arduous tasks for many months. I definitely need more exercise; while soaking in the bathtub this evening, I looked down at my belly and was dismayed by its domelike shape.
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