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The Pool Chronicles
I’ve come to realize that there is no escaping the pool. Firstly, I seem to have spawned a child who thinks chlorine is one of four major food groups and secondly, we live in an apartment that has a rinky-dink wall-unit air conditioner that is about as effective (and smelly) as one you’d find in a cheap hotel. So when the weather heats up, we end up at the pool. There’s just no fighting it.
I know I should not complain about this. What a horrible, terrible place to be stuck, right? The pool? Play your sad violin for me while I take pictures of my chipped pedicured feet propped up on this reclining lawn chair beside a dog-eared novel and a pretty pot of sun-drenched geraniums. Le sigh.
It’s beautiful here. There are so many worse places I could be stuck. Perhaps a gray wool covered cubicle next to the bathroom in an icy cold air conditioned office where people play darts all day long and open stinky cans of tuna in the break room nearby.
It’s the pool, for crying out loud. I cannot complain.
It’s just that I’m stuck here! For hours and hours (it seems) and you can only suck down so much wifi on your phone before your battery goes dead. Not to mention, I have a ton of work I should really be doing back at home. That is IF I could get any work done with a kid who’s whining to go to the pool and IF I wasn’t sweating to death.
After much thought on the matter, I’ve come to a conclusion that I have to take my laptop to the pool. I just have to bite the bullet and do it. I’ve resisted until now because the very thought of having my most expensive piece of electronics near a large body of water gives me hives. What if it fell in? What if someone splashed me? What if a gang of teenage hoodlums stole it from me and rode off into the distance on their pack of skateboards?!!! So many worries!
But the sad truth is I need to make time to blog. (Come back to life, poor blog! I still love you!!) and I need to work on my illustrations for my book. I need to do a lot of things after I get off work from my part time job at the invitation studio and it’s just not happening at home. So here I am at the pool, type, type, typing.
It’s a dangerous job but I gotta do it. Hopefully you’ll hear from me, poolside, more often.
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My Very Small Patio Garden
Remember when Bug and I used to live in the Sticks and we had a GIANT tomato garden that we harvested buckets and buckets of tomatoes from? Oh, those were the days. I miss them. I loved that backyard. Too bad it came with neighbors that liked to cuss and swear and scare the crap out of me on a regular basis. I do not miss them at all. But I do miss the garden, and Holly. We still get to see Holly when we visit my mom but I miss having her around. She was such a love.
My neighbor downstairs has an old yellow lab and even though he pees and poops in their small courtyard and the rank smell of it wafts up to my upstairs windows, I don’t mind too terribly much because the old dog is lovable and he reminds me of Holly. He’s really old and he has big benign tumors growing out of his chest and sides. Every time we go up and down the stairs he hobbles over and gives us a big throaty low bark between the steps. Not a scary bark. Just a deep Hello, how you doin’, Wanna pet me? kind of bark. We do pet him and he pants and lays down.
But he’s not Holly. And my little patio garden, even though I love it, is not my big-back-yard sticks garden. Them’s the breaks.
However! I love my patio garden! It’s perfect for sitting on and drinking coffee. I have my two chairs and several pots and my little pink spool left over from Bug’s Fushia stage. It’s all very pleasant.
A few months ago when Bug and I were walking around our apartment complex we found a baby tomato plant pulled up by it’s roots and just laying on the ground. I think someone must have thought it was a weed and pulled it and then forgot to throw it away. Of course we know the smell and look of tomato plants so we snatched it up and planted it in a pot on our patio.
I haven’t gotten around to buying any new soil for my pots (it’s all old leftover from the sticks) or buying any fertilizer so the garden could be thriving a little more but it’s poking along. Then when one of my neighbors saw that I had an interest in tomatoes, she bought me a big Hearty Girl tomato plant and I planted that one too. So now I have TWO tomato plants. Not bad for a tiny little patio garden. They are growing bigger and bigger everyday. One advantage of having such a small garden is that I see them when I come in and out of my house so I don’t forget to water them AND there are no weeds. At least not yet anyway.
Also, I get to look at it from my kitchen window when I do dishes. Not too shabby! (The cats like it too.)
