Garden Update, March 3

Spring...isn't here yet, but it's close! And it FEELS like spring. And anyway, I'm behind on planting stuff.  Waaaay behind. It was time to get out there are get dirty.

I spent the morning working on the front yard; let me take you on a little tour.

First, here are the sad remains of my attempt at growing cauliflower.  It wasn't that my gardening was so inept so much as that my furry friends thought cauliflower leaves were delicious.  Even with cages over them to protect them, I never got a floret.

Oh so sad.

So I pulled out the sorry remains of the cauliflower corpses and turned over the dirt in hopes that when we grow stuff this year, we'll figure out a way to keep Harper from pulling everything out. A girl can dream.

Aren't they beautiful?

Meanwhile, on the long front stretch of the yard, this is (as they say in baseball) a rebuilding year. I'm hoping for dahlias, zinnias, cosmos, more alstroemerias, and a couple of plants to be named later. But oy. That's a lot of bare dirt that needs filling.

On the other side of the yard, the tulips and other bulby plants are doing their thing and looking pretty good!

And the magnolia looks fabulous!

Except, of course, for the ones that have been trampled by a person or persons unknown. (Harper would insist that she kept those nasty tramplers out of the yard by saying hihihihi.)

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the bulk of the bulbs make it to full flower.

On the other side of the fence, I weeded around the sweet peas and tried to train them up the fence. I also planted some Tigridia bulbs. I'd never heard of these, but found a bag of them at CostCo. They look good, and they should come into flower just as the sweet peas poop out. That's the plan anyway.

I'm happy to report that the hydrangeas survived my ruthless pruning in the fall. They are clearly already making plans to devout  devour the house yet again. (Devout, devour...whatever.)

Next: planting vegetable (and flower) seeds using my new Mini Greenhouse! That will require a further report, another time--once I've actually done it.

What's new in your garden?

Various & Sundry, March 2

So much good stuff this week! Let's get right to it with a pressing ethical question: When is it okay to kill a zombie? I'm glad they also note "zombie end-of-life issues":

The resolution is that for those who know they are infected, an honest discussion about how they wish to die before infection sets in is had. Mourning, goodbyes and choice of euthanasia are allowed as the situation permits (we are presuming an ideal here, not under constant assault by a shuffling hoard). In this instance, the amount of pain likely caused by transition makes "letting die" an immoral and impermissible decision, thus "active killing" becomes the moral action.

Well, you need to think about these things. I plan to add this in my living will.

Philander Chase prevailed in the first round of Lent Madness this week (as I knew he would), thanks in part to the promotional efforts of a Kenyon College blog called The Thrill, which is where I also found the very helpful How to Succeed as an English Major Without Really Trying.  Fabulous.

I loved, loved, loved this report about how Olivia de Haviland prepares for her role...as a lector at the American Cathedral in Paris. I would love to hear her read scripture.  Has anyone out there had the opportunity to hear her in person? Hmm?

Via Good Intentions are Not Enough, I found this article on the 7 worst international aid ideas.  I simply find these fascinating as an object lesson. I hope that if I hear about them enough, I'll understand the principles behind bad and good aid and avoid egregious missteps.

And finally, Anibundel (happy blogoversary!) posted Relentlessly Cheerful Star Wars, including Wookie the Chew, which you really must see.  Adorable.  Also geeky.

I missed the World Series!

The Little League World Series rematch, that is, between Uganda and Canada.  I only learned today that they played their rematch in Kampala in January.  So glad they were able to do that.  And a big standing O to Alameda native Jimmy Rollins who made the trip as well. Hometown represent!

For those who did not see this story when it happened last summer, the Al Jazeera report below gives you the outline.  Plus you get to see some baseball. (More photos from the NY Times, if you have access.)

The first of Kenyon's goodly race...

...was that great man Philander Chase.

And today he's up against Thomas Merton in the first round of Lent Madness.

I'm not saying how you should vote.  I'm just saying Thomas Merton doesn't have a theme song, does he?

Not By Bread Alone

The mother of a friend of mine is on the board of a food pantry in upstate New York.  She was approached by a local organization that offers grants to organizations--but with a catch: the grant had to go to a program specifically to support women.  Now, how do you do that with a food pantry?

My friend's mother had a brilliant idea: why not provide food pantry participants with nylons, skin care products, and the basic things women need to go to job interviews and present professionally?  And why not call it Not By Bread Alone?

I think that's simply fantastic!  One of the things I love about it is that it conveys (I hope it conveys) to the patrons of the food pantry that they are not seen as people just looking for a handout.  It says (I hope it says), "We don't think you're lazy."  When the food pantry provides for some of the things people need for work or for a job interview, it acknowledges some of the issues they might face beyond food.

But there's more to it than the pragmatic job-related issues.  There's also something about aesthetics that I find worth noting.  I vaguely remember a story Dorothy Day relates that, thanks to the wonder of Google and the Dorothy Day Library on the Web, I can quote accurately.

Another family moving in with us, on one of our Catholic Worker farms, felt that the beautifying which had made the farmhouse and its surroundings a charming spot was not consistent with a profession of poverty. They broke up the rustic benches and fence, built by one of the men from the Bowery who had stayed with us, and used them for firewood. The garden surrounding the statue of the Blessed Virgin, where we used to say the rosary, was trampled down and made into a woodyard filled with chips and scraps left from the axe which chopped the family wood. It was the same with the house: the curtains were taken down, the floor remained bare, there were no pictures--the place became a scene of stark poverty, and a visiting bishop was appalled at the "poverty." It had looked quite comfortable before, and one did not think of the crowded bedrooms or the outhouse down the hill, or the outdoor cistern and well where water had to be pumped and put on the wood stove in the kitchen to heat. Not all these hardships were evident.

Dorothy Day goes on to say in that same passage, "But the poor, it seems, have no right to beauty, to order. Poverty must be squalor, filth, ugliness, to be esteemed as poverty."

One thing I like about this project is that it does not insist that the poor must look properly poor in order to be worthy of aid.  That it is all right for people to want to look good and feel good, to dress well and impress people by how they present themselves.  That you can wear nylons and have beauty products, they are not things only for those who have "gotten their life together".  My pleasure in Not By Bread Alone is that it says, "Yes, you do have a right to beauty--your own first of all."

This is not about vanity; this is not about fashion.  This is about giving people the message, "You are a person of substance and worth in this world. We believe in you.  Go out and show them who you are."

I hope this project goes like gangbusters.

Update: I wrote a follow-up on the program here.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I haven't seen The Artist yet.  I also haven't seen The Descendents, or Hugo, or The Tree of Life, or War Horse, or The Help, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  So basically, I'm a loser when it comes to watching the nominees for best picture, though if you're paying attention you'll note that I saw Midnight in Paris and Moneyball (go A's!).

I did, however, see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and was blown away. I thought Gary Oldman's performance was incredible.  I kept thinking, "How is it he's able to convey what's going on inside when the camera is on the back of his head?"

It may have helped that not terribly long ago I heard the audiobook of TTSS (all umpteen hours of it) so I had an inkling going in what was happening--though I did not remember who the mole was.  It may have also helped that I'd never seen the TV version with Alec Guiness.

I thought they did a fabulous job adapting the book.  They shuffled things around in such a way that helped compress the plot without losing too much (though a couple characters, notably Ciaran Hinds' Roy Bland, got short shrift), and that still allowed the movie to seem leisurely, without too much information compressed in too short a time.  It also added one element to the personal life of one of the characters that I thought was revelatory both about that character and about that period in history. 

And can I just say: art direction!  Oh my goodness!  That whole 1970's Cold War Bureaucratic Bleak was amazing.  I don't know why that didn't get more love; I thought it was incredible.

A warning: there are some strong scenes of torture and violence.  It was not a bloodless and cerebral film by any means.

And now I'd better go and catch up on all the movies I've missed.

Sunday Funnies, Oscar edition

What it would look like if this year's Best Picture nominees had a hostile conversation on Facebook.

Full conversation here.