Hello friends!

It’s been sad and busy here these last weeks. In early September James’s mom went into hospital and shortly after that into hospice. She passed away in the middle of the month. James flew out to New Mexico to be with his dad and elder brother and sister for a few days.

During that time my mom went into the hospital for something that didn’t seem all that serious, but turned into something serious and she died October 3rd, a day after my sister and I decided to move her to hospice. My dad died five years ago and so it’s just me and my sister who lives in Los Angeles. She had been in San Diego at the hospital for a little over two weeks, with a short break for her to return to LA for cataract surgery. I flew out to San Diego on the 3rd and spent a week cleaning and sorting through papers.

My parents lived in the house for over 50 years and have a huge accumulation of stuff. My mom also died without a will. My sister has rheumatoid arthritis and physical limitations, so it was a hard, exhausting week physically and emotionally. There is still much house cleaning that needs to be done before we can even think of hiring someone to clear things out and possibly have an estate sale. Pulling papers from drawers and closets and cabinets and piled on table tops, I managed to gather what I hope is all of the documentation we need for the probate attorney.

Of course in the process of all of this, I found a treasure trove of photos and elementary school art projects, report cards, and letters home from university. My sister and I giggled as we compared our 2nd grade report cards and the teacher comments. My sister is two years younger than I am and had many of the same teachers I did. She complained through the years that I made things really hard for her because teachers expected her to be just like me. Not fair to her at all, and of course nothing I had control over. We both got similar grades, but are very different people. I got comments like, “needs to speak up more,” and she got comments like, “needs to not talk so much.” Heh.

My mom had a rescue cat that we were thankfully able to have the rescue place take back for re-homing. She’s also been caring for a bunch of feral cats living on her patio and my sister has been working with the rescue place to trap them and make sure they are all spayed and neutered. We are donating a bunch of food my mom had bought for the cats to them as well as towels and blankets. And a bunch of my mom’s friends have made donations in lieu of flowers.

Probate takes about a year in California. The attorney will be dealing with the court, but my sister and I in the meantime have lots of calls and meetings to figure out how to manage paying utility bills and property taxes and all that.

Here is a public service announcement: Write a will! It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, you don’t even need a lawyer to write one for you. You can write one by hand on a piece of scrap paper and as long as you have two witnesses, you are good. Better yet, if you have children, hire an estate attorney to create a trust for your assets which will save your loved ones time, money, and headaches sorting everything out.

The Garden

The weather has been weeks of warmer than “normal.” We still have not had frost, though Friday night/Saturday morning it came close. In anticipation of possible frost, I picked all the tomatoes Friday evening. So many green tomatoes. Some of them have been sitting out there for a couple weeks and not even beginning to blush. In spite of the warmth, the daylight hours are waning and they just weren’t getting ripe. So now we are trying to ripen them on the windowsill. If they persist in their greenness, we will be making some green tomato salsa.

I covered the jalapenos and cayenne peppers, which still have fruit on them, figuring those had a better chance of ripening outdoors than the tomatoes did. The temperatures are warming up again as the week goes along with no additional chance of frost in the forecast at the moment. We’ll see what happens.

I’ve been waiting to plant garlic and decided to plant it today, fearing that if I waited any longer the weather would take a fast turn to the cold side and I will have missed the planting window. I put a thick layer of leaf mulch over them. Hopefully that will be enough to keep them from sprouting, and if they do, the mulch will at least protect them from winter damage.

I’ve been growing rosemary, lemon grass and ginger in pots on the deck all summer and they have all been doing well. Today I did some trimming of the lemon grass to prepare for bringing it indoors for the winter. I snipped off all the dead blades and tips. I noticed the leaves are “sticky” but didn’t connect to “serrated” until I saw a big blob of red on one of the blades. What in tarnation? Then I looked at my hands and saw I was bleeding from a whole bunch of tiny cuts. Oops. It’s like I have paper cuts all over the backs of both my hands. I won’t be making that mistake again!

We picked the green striped cushaw squash a couple of weeks ago. We ended up with four squashes. The big one that grew on top of the wire arch and bowed it down weighed in at 9 pounds/4 kg. Not bad, though I was expecting it would be a little heavier. The other three range in weight from 3 pounds/1.4 kg to 6 pounds/2.7 kg. We plan on roasting the smaller one in the next week or so. I will let you know how it tastes!

Bookish Stuff

In my rush to fly out to San Diego I didn’t completely think through what sort of reading material to take with me, I just grabbed the book I was in the middle of and would have to return to the public library a couple days after coming home, and the book I planned to start reading next.

The book from the library was Seven, Or How to Play a Game Without Rules by Joanna Kavenna. I enjoyed the it very much. It has a sort of quirkiness to it and a style that reminded me of Yoko Towada. I finished it on the plane, not in flight, but because there were issues with gates at the San Diego airport when I landed and my plane sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting for a gate to open.

The next up book I took with me was The Rouse by China Mieville. I am a Mieville fan and have read a number of his books, so bought this in hardcover because I would never be able to finish it in three weeks if I borrowed it from the library. It is 1200 pages. Yup, I brought along a 1200 page hardcover. Part of me was worried I wouldn’t have enough to read. But it turned out I didn’t have any time to read the entire week. I also had my laptop along with me. Carrying a laptop and a 1200 page book in a tote bag around the airport along with my backpack of clothes because I didn’t check a bag, is not a light load! I got a good workout to say the least.

I started reading the book on the plane back to Minneapolis and just like every Mieville book, it is nothing like any of his others. It was good to have something chunky and engaging to read because, once again, the San Diego airport had issues. My plane taxied to take off and then we got a message to delay takeoff because the wind had changed directions. So we sat on the tarmac for half an hour before we got the go ahead. Once airborne, the flight was rather bumpy, and, sitting on the aisle, I had to stand up and balance with my chunkster while the guy in the middle seat got up to use the restroom. I’m proud to say I managed not to injure anyone with my book!

And in a bit of exciting news, I am now a volunteer copyeditor for Ancillary Review of Books. They are a nonprofit online speculative fiction magazine. They put out a call for editors and copyeditors in early September. I sent in my information and was selected. Just had my onboarding meeting the other day. Now I need to read their style guide and other documents and then I can jump in. I am only required to do one article a month, but of course if I am able to do more they will not complain. I am looking forward to the whole experience since I have never done anything like this before.

In Conclusion

So there you have it. I have a lot on my plate, but I hope to make my way back to regular posting or a semblance thereof. It might not be next weekend because it is my 35th wedding anniversary. Golly, how did that happen? James and I have plans to celebrate with a museum visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. We have two different sets of friends who have invited us for get togethers, one on Friday night and the other for brunch on Saturday. It’s a lot to cram into a weekend along with all the housekeeping things that need to be taken care off too. But barring the unforeseen, there shouldn’t be a big gap between posts like these last weeks.

I hope you all are doing well and enjoying some fine fall (or spring depending on your hemisphere) weather!