That was a first.  Loucious bit me!  I found out the hard way he has a trigger spot on his head, so when I kissed him goodnight, his instincts kicked in, and he took a big bite out of my neck.  Not a gentle love nip, either; more like a vampire puncturing deep, drawing blood.  I was startled and dazed; then in pain.  There was torn skin and a swollen bruise.  I did what first aid I could, and barely slept.

In the morning, I looked like “the other guy”, as in, “you should see the other guy!”  Of course Loucious probably had no idea, and greeted me profusely as usual.  It wasn’t his fault.  I just learned that dogs, like people, have unconscious triggers to be aware of.  Even your best friend.

It was gorgeous and warm out, after the deluge.  L and I went outside and looked/sniffed around.  Then L, who turns out to be a “diggy doggy”, helped me hand-cultivate and rake the veg garden some more.  The leaf cover is now lovely homegrown “leafgro”.  A bit more turning over and hoeing, and it should be good for seeding, plus adding to other beds.

Feeling a little injured and weak, I left once Avdi got home.  After a shower, I slept for hours.  Then I started writing, not even noticing that blood was pouring out of me!  At least it didn’t get on my laptop!  This will probably leave a scar, earned in the line of dog duty.  I thought about posting a photo, but it’s too gross and gory.

Crocuses have begun!  Daffodils are about to explode!  I needed to trim Y’s leggy flowers (to put energy back into the plants), so here are bachelor’s buttons.  The fireworks begin!  This is my time!  Even a were-dog can’t stop me.

It was around 80º yesterday, so Loucious and I took advantage of it in the garden, frisbee in tow.  The constant rain has really greened up the place.

First I lightly hand-cultivated and raked the veg garden, redistributing the leaf mulch more evenly.  I’ll continue to do that until it’s time to direct-sow.

Then I hoed an edge around the shed beds, farther into the lawn, and put up a low wire border to keep L from sitting on the plants.  He enjoyed helping me dig, or more accurately, seeing if he could dig his way under the border!  Good to know.

I don’t like to disrupt the dormant beneficial critters this early on, so I try to be as non-destructive as possible, just doing tasks that are more time-sensitive.

I did all this in between Shabbat preps.  As it turned out, Avdi had to work late and miss dinner, and E was at a rehearsal, so it was just K and Y and me.  But we still had a good time at the table for a while.

Avdi eventually arrived, in a sad state of exhaustion and overload, not talking.  I feel really bad for him.  I’m trying to pick up as many extra household tasks as I can to somewhat lighten the load, but it’s just a drop in the bucket.  It would really take a team of reliable people (in addition to what he already has) to handle this much serious business, so he could just focus on work to support it all.  Never mind time to rest and regroup.

Assuming of course trump doesn’t start WWIII and nuke us all to hell.  Hard to live when you’re dead!

After all the rain, and mild temps, you can feel the spring tension in the air, as green fingers shoot up through the leafy mulch everywhere.  In fact, I saw the first crocus bloom yesterday!  Everything is on the verge of exploding into colors.  The native ephemerals aren’t even up yet.

This is my very favorite time of the year, the cusp of spring.  It’s like a great drumroll of anticipation.  Every tiny new bud is a revelation.  I’m not exaggerating.  I don’t want to miss a moment that may never come again.  You blink and you miss it.

Loucious has a different opinion of the wet, muddy yard.  He looks uneasy and put out at the inconvenience of getting his feet wet.  If it’s too cold, he dashes for the indoors.  Of course, if you add a frisbee to the mix, he suddenly forgets all that and goes skidding through the mud and puddles in ecstasy.

Y’s downstairs flowers are bursting into sprays of blue and white.  He keeps asking me if it’s time to plant them yet, and I have to tell him not quite, we have to be patient.  Patience isn’t in an impulsive kid’s vocabulary.  Or in mine, this time of year.

Elsewhere, our criminally insane overlords are dropping bombs on innocent people to distract us from the real business they are too incompetent or selfish to accomplish.  We’re teetering on another cusp, this one hanging on the whims of one demented psychopath.  I read books that came out when I was little that describe the world after a nuclear apocalypse, regressing back to the dark ages, and it sounds like the direction of current events.

You see why I obsess over the earth’s yearly rebirth.  There’s no guarantee we’ll live to see another one.  There, is that cheery and reassuringly routine enough?  I wouldn’t want to scare anyone off!

I wasn’t going to write at all, but I just noticed the forecast for tomorrow–80°!?!  This is not natural, even for MO, I think?!  You (my 2.5 readership still with me) will be relieved to get back to “normal” garden and doggy photos, I’m sure.  Stay tuned for all the excitement.

So y’all don’t like it when I get personal, eh?  Can’t take it, heh?  Too cringe?  OK, good to know.  So I can say anything I want, uncensored, and no one will notice?  Works for me.  It’s kinda private, after all.

It’s been pouring, lightening and thundering, on and off for days.  The yard is a pond.  Loucious is like, forget that!  Might get his paws wet, the horror!  Whereas I’m in waterworld heaven, watching things come up.  There, y’all feel safer now?

Unspeakable, the multiplying genocides and atrocities being unleashed upon the world, upon children, by deranged demented pervs who should be put before a firing squad or worse.  Would you like to hear one of my rants?  Don’t panic, I’m too disgusted to bother.

I hope all the vile christian racist pigs go to their hell and fry.  Too much?  Too bad.

JK, it’s cool.

This will be an experimental post, delving into a very personal area I rarely share.  It’s been suggested I keep a dream journal, just for my own private purposes, but I’m going to go out on a precarious limb and see where it takes me.  Follow along if you dare!  Don’t worry, I’ve censored out any graphic material, and I won’t do this very often.

I have two realities.  A waking one and a sleeping one.  The latter is becoming more real than the former.  In it, my ghosts and demons are duking it out to reconcile my sordid past.

Here’s the weird thing: I can prompt my subconscious mind to focus on a specific unresolved issue from my past, and my dreams will process that theme all night.  If I wake up and go back to sleep, it transitions into a next episode or version.  It’s surreal and lucid at the same time.  It’s with me for days.

It’s not just a fantasy playing out; the “archetypes” (as I call them) that keep showing up represent significant, troubling people in my life who refuse to recede into the past, and my lack of closure.  Some of these people are dead in real life, some are still alive, but they all continue to obsess or oppress or haunt me.

The backdrops typically depict my childhood home and conflicts with my family.  There are complex labyrinths and often unmanageable chaos, a feeling of lostness or unsettledness.  In most dreams, I know I’m secretly older, but I appear younger, like an imposter, like I actually feel.  My interactions are with mostly young peers, and are all over the spectrum.  The attachments formed are very intense yet ephemeral.

But certain authentic archetypes constantly reappear in confusing, fluctuating roles with me.  I’m always torn between resigning myself to a false security, or putting the past behind me.  In a new twist last night, I found the courage to stand my ground and resist submission to an old nemesis.  In this version, I was even able to take the young son archetype and other innocents with me.  We were all scared, but they trusted me.  My longtime adversary was revealed for what he was and outmaneuvered once and for all.

I’m still haunted in and outside of my dreams by one friend who died without my knowing, because I had distanced myself from that old life.  There’s nothing different I could or would have done, but every so often it hits me again, how final it is.  I rarely cry, but whenever this one unlikely ghost comes around, I find myself unexpectedly brokenhearted.  I dream obsessively about somehow reconnecting and making things right, an impossibility.  It turns out, most of that family died, one after another, until maybe one sibling is left that I know of.  It makes me so sad, to think of people I knew just disappearing forever, with no real legacy.

Some days I feel like I’m fading into this other parallel world, and wonder if anyone will notice I’m gone.

If any of this resonates with you, then I have company in my labyrinthian wasteland.  If it’s too weird, then we’ll get back to doggy, gardeny stuff shortly, I assure you.

Well, here goes.

While I slept, E took over the world!  Let me rephrase.

For some reason, I required sleep from yesterday afternoon through late morning today, so I missed the family meeting, in which it looks like E assumed responsibility for not only taking charge of the meeting and business items, but also many of the essential ongoing tasks.  It’s not surprising, but it’s very impressive.  If he doesn’t overload, which he has a tendency to do, he has real motivation and leadership skills.

I’m a little envious, because I never had those drives or confidence.  But E is growing up in a very different world and situation, where everyone has to pitch in to keep the family afloat.  It’s not easy to be a kid in this generation, but it compels them to learn necessary adulting skills to contribute to the survival of the group.  There’s nothing like reality to bring out the resourcefulness in gifted kids.  It also induces me to try harder to hold up my part of the bargain.

Before I left yesterday, E had already reaffixed and lashed down the pool cover, better than it was.  I need to add, if E didn’t take on all this, we would still love him just the same.  It’s not transactional.  He doesn’t have to prove himself to be loved and respected.  Just so that’s clear.

It’s been cold and raining, which is good for the garden.  The hellebores are finally blooming, and I forced this one daffodil to open up.  Other bulb flowers will be going crazy this year, possibly due to some of my improvements.  I know, not native, but pretty!!  I’m going to have to fence in some of the beds to keep Loucious from sitting down and squashing them.  To him it’s all one big paradise for him.  Can’t blame him.  Look at that innocent face!

Remember that photos experiment?  It lasted all of one day.  I had to uninstall and quit the whole Google drive for mac desktop and syncing; it was an abject failure, and was also adding twice as much data to my storage.  And the photos were twice as hard to download/upload and locate,  and the edits sucked, so it defeated the whole purpose of switching over to G photos only and restoring storage space.  (I got rid of iCloud and just use G-cloud now, so a lot of data have nowhere to be stored except by deleting old mac files and newer G files on my mac and external drive.)  ‘Cuz I’m a tech dummy.

So now I’m back to my old school way of downloading Google Photos to Apple Photos, editing them, and uploading to WordPress, then deleting superfluous duplicates whenever.  At least I know that drill, and the edited mac photos come out better.  I mean, c’mon, I’m 74 and figuring this much out on my own!  No tech support available (they’re all busy doing important tech stuff).  (I also unsubscribed to Apple Care support; too expensive.)  Plus I’m used to the mac user interface–it’s what I first learned, and other op systems would make no sense to me.  Even just learning my way around each new OS upgrade is enough challenge for me.   So this MacBook Air had better outlive me!

Short story long, ignore the preceding.  I spent the night as usual; in fact, knowing I probably wouldn’t sleep anyway, I brought my laptop to bed and figured out all the above, so it was fine and worthwhile.  Now I’ve crossed the final frontier of doing my laptop stuff at Avdi’s; indeed, I’m writing this post at his table.  I even watched one of my series in bed here.  Loucious got over his fear of embarrassing himself by falling off the bed, and joined me for a while, so that was fun.  It’s only a matter of time until I’m fully assimilated into the Bed.  Borg.  (Eventually I even slept a little, until an owl right outside the window loudly woke me up!  It sure beats the electronic cuckoo, though.)

It suddenly went from (false) spring to winter again overnight; they’re even predicting snow, or slush, or who knows what.  But hey, it’s March 1st!  Official Equinox is in 20 days!  We lived through Feb!  There’s hope!

If you need sleep, just read my Blahg.

Loucious and I took advantage of the 70s temps today to get lots done, that being endless frisbee and some garden work.  That dog is obsessed with frisbee.

I took down the non-functioning moon-and-stars lights from the front arch, and strung them up on the fence corner as you enter the back yard.  I didn’t think they would revive, but lo and behold they worked, and looked beautiful at night.

Then I went ahead with the big project of carefully raking the whole woodsy area back to the fence.  This was mainly to clean up L’s “facilities” and train him to “go” only in the designated areas farthest back.  He was not impressed, but he’ll get it soon, with some incentives.  I had to go ahead with the job early, before more plants come up.  I don’t think I murdered too many dormant critters.  I also edged the whole front of it farther out into the grass.  It looks really parklike now.

I also did the usual erev preps–challah, a greek-like veg and chick-pea salad, an exotic fruit salad, and rice with peas and corn.  Y tried most of it, which is how I gauge if it’s good.  Loucious couldn’t wait to sample and approve the challah.  The kids were in fine frenzied form tonight, uproariously so.  I’m just glad they are allowed to let all their big, loud emotions out in an accepting, safe environment.  Poor exhausted Avdi just slunk into the farthest away room.

I’m doing a photo experiment using Google photos instead of Apple Photos, editing them with the G. app and uploading them to WordPress.  The quality isn’t as good, and I haven’t gotten the process streamlined yet, but I’ll figure it out, so just bear with me.

Loucious and I spent the afternoon in the garden.  It was almost 60º.

First I carefully cultivated the larger of the raised beds, and planted peas up against the fence, two different mesclun mixes, and a new-to-me trial spinach.

Then I connected up the sections of light strings I had removed from the tree to the ones on the veg fence, to see if I could get them to hook up (electrically).  (Spoiler: it worked!!)

Finally, I hand-hoed one side of the veg garden.  OMG the soil was black and gorgeous!  My evil plan is working.

Right now I’m writing at A’s on my laptop, listening to an unusual exchange in the kitchen between K and E, a rare occurrence.  I don’t know whether to laugh hysterically or be at a loss for words.  I’m just impressed they’re interacting.