Then it was time to go to work, but I thought I'd go in late so I could spend some time with my daughter. I picked the baby up and cuddled her and took her over to Anita's to show her off. She was a beautiful baby. Her big blue eyes kept rolling around, searching... "She's definitely a daddy's girl," I told the others who were there. "I haven't actually been able to hold her since I got home from the hospital." The others chuckled, assuming I was exaggerating, but I wasn't - Matt insisted on doing all the baby-carrying, and the baby just pandered to him.
A whiff told me that she needed to be changed, and I realized how much I'd grown used to Matt caring for the baby - it hadn't even occurred to me to bring along the bag with diaper-changing equipment. Anita laughed and gave me a diaper to use, and then mixed a vitamin D powder up with some milk to put in a bottle for her. (I felt like a terrible mother - I hadn't even known you were supposed to add vitamin D powder to milk.)
While I was feeding the baby, I realized that it was already after noon, and I should call work and tell them I just wasn't going to make it in today, so I handed the baby to someone to hold, and picked up the phone... and realized I had no idea what the number was for my office. I guessed a couple of times, wrongly, and then remembered I had it in my Zaurus... And then I remembered that my mom had borrowed the Zaurus.
And that dream is why I'm still tired this morning.
We did a lot of work on the yard this weekend. Friday, after verifying that my part of the project did what I'd wanted it to do by that preliminary deadline, I went home early, and decided that I'd start breaking the ground where we were going to plant some plants and put down a mulch bed.
A blister formed on my thumb in the first five minutes of wielding the shovel, but I'd only barely started, so I decided there was no point in giving up so early. I thought I'd keep going until I'd turned over the dirt (clay) - and I'd let Matt break it up and add peat moss to it when he got home. I remembered the gardening gloves I'd bought, put them on, and kept going.
Forty-five minutes later, I'd turned over all the dirt and broken up most of the bigger chunks of clay. It looked terrible, like some dirt monster had puked in a triangle around our tree. So I thought, it wouldn't take much longer or be much more effort to go ahead and turn in the peat moss. I lugged out the half-bale we had left and dumped shovels-full of peat all over the triangle.
That barely took five minutes, and the CD I'd popped in Matt's boom box was still going, so I started to turn the peat under, breaking up some more clay as I went. I finished that at about the same time the CD ran out, so I sat down on the porch and drank several cups of water and looked proudly at what I'd accomplished.
Then I looked at the plants destined for the mulch bed, which were sitting on the porch. I was going to have to plant them anyway, I reasoned, since Matt had made it clear that this was all my "vision" - so I lugged myself up and carried the pots down into the yard, then went into the garage for my gardening tools.
I had four big pots of sturdy decorative grass ("mondo grass" for the curious), and my original intent had been to cut each pot into several chunks and spread the chunks out over the bed, so they'd spread to cover it. I gave that up when even with a knife, I couldn't cut through the tight-woven root network in the first pot. Quickly re-evaluating my plan, I dug shallow depressions in the dirt and dumped the roots and their attendant dirt in. Roots that thick will probably spread the plant without my help anyway.
The three pots of strawberry parfait dianthus (light green plants with beautiful pink-and-fuschia flowers) went one to each corner of the triangle I'd dug. I discovered one of the plants was disintegrating - I think it had been under-watered during the week it had spent on the porch - but the rest of it looked relatively healthy, so I'm hoping it will recover now that it's in the ground and getting watered regularly.
With nothing else to do until Dad brought over the mulch, I packed up my tools and put them in the garage (and boy do I need a set of shelves for gardening crap), turned on the sprinkler, took off my muddy shoes, and collapsed on the couch. A few minutes later I heaved myself back up to get a band-aid for my blisters (which to my astonishment hadn't burst after I put the gloves on). The whole thing had taken me about an hour and a half, including time spent leaning on the shovel and wheezing.
Matt harumphed at me anyway when he got home a bit later.
Saturday, my dad and brother came over in the morning with a truckload of mulch. I'd told Dad that there was no way Matt and I could use more than half a truckload - and even that would be a lot - but he'd gotten an entire truckload anyway. (It was still cheaper than buying mulch in bales, since Dad's truckload was only about $10.)
John was there only to visit with me and Matt, so he mostly just stood around chatting while Dad and Matt shovelled mulch into the wheelbarrow and hauled it over to the designated beds and dumped it, and I scooped it around the bases of the plants and raked it smooth.
I'd been worried about the mulch covering and killing my grape hyacinths, which are all still fairly low to the ground, but Matt came up with the idea of taking the pots left over from the mondo grass and dianthus and putting them upside-down over the flowers while they shovelled the mulch. We werent' sure how to protect the daffodils - which were taller than the pots - until I thought that maybe the pot the tree had come in would be tall enough.
Mulching the new triangular bed and the area around the bushes only took about an hour and a third of the mulch. (There are pictures in the photo album, go look!) When it was over, we took Dad and John out to Second Street for lunch, and then went home to relax and prepare for my AD&D game.
Due to some pretty ugly storms on the Southside, Greg called to cancel, but K.T., Mike, and Matt did all right after I'd scaled down the forces they'd be facing a bit. I'd been worried that the plot I'd cooked up wouldn't have enough for K.T. to do, but she managed to make herself very useful, actually. And as usual, the players surprised me, though once I thought about it, I realized it shouldn't have.
The plot involved helping a dwarven woodsman rescue his children from the clutches of an orcish tribe - the orcs had taken them to be slaves. This tribe actually had a fair number of slaves, and when the three crazy dwarves started actually winning the orcish women, children, and slaves who hadn't been chained to the wall - the broken ones who'd been serving at the feast - ran for it. They took a hidden passageway to escape, and at that point I'd assumed the characters would free the captives chained to the wall, loot the place, and go.
They left the woodsman watching over the freed captives and pursued - not to kill the remaining orcs, but to free the rest of the slaves. As I said, I should have expected that, but it hadn't been part of my original plot. I had to very quickly invent something, because it was clear that they had no intention of stopping until they'd tracked them down.
When I told Matt later that everything after the dwarf's children had been freed had been made up on the spur of the moment, he was surprised, so I guess I carried it off pretty well.
All in all, I had a pretty good weekend, even if my back is still sore today. I'm still mildly obsessed with gardening, but I have plenty of directions to take it. If nothing else, my tulip sprouts are starting to look wilted and brown - I think I put too many of them in a single pot - so I may attempt to transplant some of them to a new pot and hope that helps. And there's still the neverending battle to make grass grow on our clay.
Sometime this week, Matt and I will take my brother out for dinner, and Saturday K.T. is hosting a St. Patrick's Day party. (It's a day late, but Kevin and the people he works with that they want to invite are working Friday night.) She's asked everyone coming to bring something that's either green or Irish (potato skins, for example) to the party, so I need to come up with something for that, and make it.
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