Anitra's Tomatoes

Anitra's tomatoes are awesome. I just want to share that fact.

Some other plants. I don't know what they are.

A view of most of the garden.

Anitra's Baby

A view of Union Hotel Garden, worked mostly by Anitra, from above:

Here's another shot of it from the side. Click on it for a bigger version. Kale, sugar pod peas, nasturtiums. We've been eating the nasturtiums, they're yummy. The garden is 70 square feet, roughly in the form of a right triangle, about 10 feet and 14 on its sides.

Technorati Sucks, Week 9

Furniture of My Life.

Anitra Freeman, my love and lovely unlawful wife, gets on jags. Once she helped found a commune, donating all the money herself -- the ultimate in jag-getting-on. Other lesser jags have been the internet (13 years jag), computers in general (since before the first Star Wars), the Society for Creative Anachronisms, where she liked to specialize as a Jewish aristocrat in 12th Century Moorish Spain, sea-chanteys (she has a website for them), song parodies à la the Raging Grannies, science fiction (she has a website for it), the fantasy classic Silverlock by John Meyers Meyers whose name is a jag (she has a website for it), mystery novels (she has a website for them), webrings for a couple of years (she was managing 18 and a member of 80 more, each membership signifying another frikkin' website). Her current website incorporates all her previous websites and is one giant fucking jag, consisting of over 2,100 webpages and growing jaggerifically.

There's the jag she calls seeking dialog with conservatives, and which I call teasing the fundamentalists. This has been done primarily over the internet and has gone on for 10 years, although it shows signs of moderating. At the exact moment now that I write she is "dialoging" moderately with a moderate creationist. They are in fact arguing online about which of them is most moderate.

A recent jag that went south was the book-trading-by-internet jag which started with the attempt to unload a bunch of books while replacing them with fewer, so creating more space in which to live. It didn't work. She has more books than ever and you can't breathe in my room without getting a book entangled in your nose-hairs.

The latest jag is the one I reported in this week's Adventures in Irony column, gardening in the Union Hotel garden plot. The Union Hotel is not really a hotel but the subsidized apartment building we live in. It's downtown, but it has a tiny yard which overlooks the southern entrance to the Seattle railroad tunnel, and they've recently created a 72 square foot garden there.

This is one of her jags that has become part of the Furniture of My Life. She not only helps tomato plants have sex with themselves, and pours stinking compost juice on everything, she gets out there and sprinkles jars and jars of my own hard-to-find and to afford cayenne pepper, to keep the outdoor rats from raiding the plants. She spent yesterday putting netting over the plant babies to keep the birds out. Her room is getting packed with garden crap, including newborn seedlings in pans of dirt that she dotes over more than you would cuddly kittens. (She'd put them in my room, too, but the books are in the way.)


[Above: What healthy people adore. Below: What Anitra adores.]


Yesterday UPS dropped off two pounds of fucking worms (literally fucking each other in peat moss) in a box the size of two bread boxes at the Union. They were addressed to Anitra. Anitra ordered them. They will be put in a special worm bin that hasn't arrived yet. In the meantime they are living in IN OUR BATHROOM in the box they came in, which has been filled out with compost (i.e. vegetable shit) plus worm food she made herself. The worm food, which I call buffalo shit, is made of old fruit, old vegetables, old bread, coffee grounds, a little old bone meal (for calcium! worms need calcium for their teeth!) and old shredded newspapers to keep their precious dirt loose and aerated.

That, that buffalo shit, as I call it, was in a large deep pan in our refrigerator this morning where it had spent the night aging un-lidded so as to best infuse the other contents of the refrigerator with the delightful aroma of buffalo shit -- an example of the Furniture of My Life.

Also, this morning, I checked my email, and found I hadn't heard from Technorati.