Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: Spring has sprung, or has it?

Saturday, April 29, 2023

Spring has sprung, or has it?

We have green stuff bursting out of the ground in the front and side gardens. I think there's even some green in the warmest corner of the back garden. The biggest plants are the 3 new roses that were delivered earlier this month. They are in pots that get shuffled out to the front patio on nice days, and back inside overnight. I've no idea where they're going to go, and when they arrived Linda didn't either.

I'm sometimes amused by the panicked look in her eyes as she contemplates newly arrived plants while it's still snowing. She wants to get the guck out of the garden beds, but doesn't want to disturb any little critters that might still be needing it for shelter. Neither does she want new and expensive plants to die in a late spring snowstorm.

It's the end of April as I write. The planned swim is off this morning, for several reasons, and a blog has been percolating. I'm still feeling last Sunday's swim, where I was the 10th person into the two fast lanes. (Normally three in a lane is the most that people are comfortable with.) I wasn't the slowest, but had to work pretty hard to stay in my place or gradually move up. It was a fun swim, with lots of waves, and keeping track of other people, but it was shoulder achey fast. So I'm writing, rather than swimming.

The late spring snowstorm won't arrive this week. It's looking lovely, so I'll probably carry on with the pressure washing. I was out yesterday doing the front of the house, mainly the windows. Amazing how much guck was on them! Usually in the back I like to rake the worst of the leaves first, but there's still an ice drift in the most sheltered places. Getting the backyard ready for summer life is always a bit of a guess and by golly sort of thing.

The rule of thumb is that it's not safe to plant before the May long weekend. We have occasionally had snow after that, but not often and not much. Before that, however there's been some pretty major dumps. Once in the early 2000's, we woke up to about a foot and a half of snow. I didn't even try to go to work. In both directions, about 100 m away, I could see two buses that spent most of the day stuck, unable to get out of the bus stop.

Still, the early plants seem to know what they're doing, and it doesn't get particularly cold. The peonies have just poked the first shoots up, and there's a few blooms already on other small plants.

One of the afore mentioned roses.

I'm trying to be better about finding flow, and focussing on whatever I'm doing. This after reading Stolen Focus and blogging about it the other day. The book talks about different kinds of attention, and one of them doesn't look like you're paying attention. Some call it mind wandering. Some call it daydreaming, especially teachers in class, which mine often did. I think of it as letting your brain idle in neutral, running but not working on anything in particular. This seems to spark creativity, as it relates seemingly random things together. I've always tried to set aside some time to just sit, not read or listen to music or converse. Sometimes I envision a nice stream of water running over me, washing away the stresses and concerns of the day.

I was doing that a bit yesterday, taking a break from trying to figure out some of the event timing in the novel. Then it came to me, and I fired up the timeline software to document it, then started adding in other little tweaks I'd been thinking of, and shuffling events around a bit.

This is the problem with pantsers, as writers like me are called. We write by the seat of our pants, and we sometimes write ourselves into a corner. I've been wrestling with one chunk of it for a while. There's some scenes in it that I really like, but as I wrote other bits, the hook and grounding for the overall scene went away. Oops. I think I'm back on track.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)