How different is my life from one and two years ago. Two years ago I had my girlfriends over for a super-feminine Kentucky Derby party. I covered the house and my own self in roses. I made all sorts of traditional Derby recipes. We drank super strong mint juleps. It was a glorious day in the Original Park. I thought that it was how I wanted to spend my whole spring, having fancy dinner parties on the deck. A year later, the very last party I threw at that house was on another Kentucky Derby day. It was the last big hurrah before we packed up and sold the house. (And on the day of the Belmont Stakes, we loaded up the truck, but we waited until after the race to take down the TV.) This year was much less fancy. I stayed home, covered in a blanket, feeling entirely unable to do much of anything, and I watched the last hour of race coverage in my basement. Not even one mint julep to be found, even though I have plenty of bourbon in the liquor cabinet and fresh mint coming back in the herb garden. It wasn't nearly as much fun, but it was all I was up for this year.
I did a ton of planting during the week, and today was the test of how hardy all the new flowers are. I knew it was supposed to rain, but the hail took me by surprise. A friend of mine a few towns south of here inadvertently tipped me off that hail was coming, from her Facebook pictures, but that only meant I was ready with a cell phone camera when it arrived. No time to cover anything or empty space in the garage so I could hide my car. Best I can tell, it all stayed small, like pea gravel, and none of my new flowers seems to have died. Considering how many things went in the ground all this week, that's pretty amazing.
The weather was just crummy enough, particularly the windy part, to keep me from getting in the hot tub today. That's just as well, as I think my unmeasured attempts to balance the chemistry only served to make a toxic soup. I went through four or five test strips, and not once did the pH register on the chart listed on the bottle. It's possible that I have a large vat of vinegar out there, that smells like too much chlorine. I keep thinking maybe I should have paid better attention to high school chemistry class, but that class was taught by my arch-enemy (least liked teacher ever), so I doubt that would have changed things. There's a steep learning curve here, and probably serious implications to soaking in dangerously unbalanced water. At least I think it is unbalanced. Maybe I'm the unbalanced one.
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