Eating in the Garden

My tomatoes are not yet producing a lot of fruit, but the occasional treat is very welcome. Yesterday I picked one and on impulse I photographed it before I ate. I do like the Juliet variety. I may have to order another packet of seeds next year as I am almost out.

What The Heck is Wrong With Mishalak (Today)

This should not have turned into a major trauma. My father sent me a text message last night at 10:30pm local time. This is about 30 minutes after I had already turned in and gone to bed and my phone (bless it) is on silent mode while I sleep. This did mean I saw it first thing in the morning when I then proceeded to panic and go into “attempt to clean the house and avoid everyone mode” because the message was that a person was coming by to see my house today. This usually happens to me when people arrive unexpectedly or report that they will come by unexpectedly, because despite all evidence to the contrary I have this idea in my head of being a neat person.

Reading that over again I think I need to unpack that a little bit. I have been a messy person ever since I was a little tiny brat. Despite all the traumas I have inflicted upon myself from stepping on horribly painful things in the dark to losing valued items for year I cannot get myself to just find a place for everything and keep it there. My father is a quite tidy person and so was always after me about cleaning up my space when I was a child. Therefore the news that someone is coming into my space sends me into panic cleaning mode as if I am once again a small child wanting to conceal evidence of transgressions. That would be useful if panic cleaning mode actually resulted in getting much done other than making the problem worse by tackling every single pile that has built up for the last six months at once causing all the mess that was shoved into corners to suddenly be redistributed to every available horizontal surface in my futile attempt to maintain the illusion of being a neat person (and thus a success as human being).

I avoided my phone the whole day trying to avoid the problem while ineffectually cleaning and not eating (no time to eat, must clean!). None of that is sensible, but my excuse for avoiding my phone almost looks sensible when squinted at. It brought me bad news just as soon as I woke up. On the other hand if the bad news came in the middle of the night I would have been even more traumatized so I regard my phone as a sort of long suffering timid messenger working for an incompetent necromancer. Not that I would ever, ever do anything to my phone, but the poor thing is terrified of me. I ask it to tell me things and I scream. I ask it not to tell me things until later and I scream later. Imagine you had a job where you regularly had to interact with a personage who meddles in things man was not meant to know and is really bad at it. You would probably be worried about getting caught in the blast zone regardless of how much he liked you or not.

And there is yet another idea for a story I will never write. The adventures of the world's most inept dark wizard and his long suffering man(or woman) servant.