That Road to Hell

This has been a difficult week. Everything I’ve attempted to do in the spirit of moving some things in a positive direction has come back to me in spades in the form of criticism and disapprobation. I’ve had to explain and defend myself left and right. Even an online community that I usually consider to be a good support system felt it necessary to tell me what I was doing wrong. The criticism is one thing; what bothers me more, though, are the swirling undercurrents in society that seem to be driving this behavior. Or maybe it’s the coming full moon. Either way, grace and kindness seem to be in short supply.

I’m going forward anyway. We’ve had to make some sudden adjustments to the garden tour plans. One of the tour participants had to pull out, so we are swapping in my friend Susan’s garden. I just finished laying out the garden tour booklet, which means a few last-minute adjustments, but that delay meant that we were able to sell a few business card ads for the booklet to help raise money. (See? It’s always possible to find the positive if you’re willing to look.) I also indulged myself for a few hours yesterday afternoon and worked on the Mountain Brook Homestead Foundation website. This kind of work is not something I would want to do professionally or full-time, but it’s a form of design and I enjoy it, although I enjoy it far more now than I did when I had to hand code everything. I also like being able to showcase what our community organization is doing. The website is close to being done and I am hoping to have it up by the end of the month. I think it looks great, although given my experiences this week, no doubt there will be people lined up to tell me how I could have done it better.

The husband was trying to finish up a job about an hour and a half south of here, so he was gone all day yesterday. He had given one of our employees permission to work on his vehicle in our shop. That kid and a buddy were here most of the day. I spent the morning out in the garden trying to wrangle my watering system into shape. The robins are gone, thankfully, so I was able to pull all the hoses out of storage, but then I had to organize them and lay them out. The basic system is in place, though. I’ll tweak as needed.

And I finished up one more knot top:

This is the Azalea Top by Sinclair Patterns. The fabric is some double-brushed poly picked up for $3 a yard from the Joanns clearance bin at one of the Spokane stores. I am ambivalent about this one. It looks okay on me, although it needs additional length. And I think I somehow managed to put the sleeves in backwards despite carefully transferring the marks from the pattern pieces. I must have turned them around. I’ll have to take those out and redo them. (I understand the rationale for shaped sleeve caps in wovens, but knit fabric is so forgiving that including it seems unnecessary to me.) The knot construction is also very, very fiddly. I don’t like this one enough to make more of it.

I was hemming this top on the coverstitch yesterday afternoon when I started to hear rumblings of thunder. We’ve had some serious storms this week. On Thursday night, a huge system came barreling up from the southwest and dropped golf ball-sized hail on parts of the valley. The damage was spotty, though, and missed us. (I didn’t know anything had happened until the husband got home from fire training and came to bed, as apparently I slept through it.) We weren’t so lucky with yesterday’s storm, though, and got a few minutes of nickel-sized hail. As soon as it was over, I went out to check on the garden. The only casualty appeared to be this parsnip:

RIP, parsnip. (I planted parsnips once and now they come up all over the garden.)

Those of us whose gardens will be featured on this tour have been comparing notes on what a challenging gardening season this has been. Despite what some people, like Michael Bloomberg, would have you think—"I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn"—growing food is not a foregone conclusion. It rains, it doesn’t rain, it snows, it hails, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, rabbits and ground squirrels think you planted a buffet just for them, grasshoppers snack on the tomatillos . . . I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I will be grateful for everything that comes out of the garden this year, even the zucchinis.

I realized yesterday that it’s been a full-court press since the plant sale in May. I went from the sale to traveling to getting ready for this garden tour, and I am ready for a break. Next week is going to be all about stuff I want to do. I’ll make my custom apron order, make a few more tops for myself, and play around with making that bodice block.