I feel like the last few weeks have passed in sort of a blur. It’s not that I’ve been all that excessively busy. Maybe it’s just the time of year, or the fact that with all the wind and roller-coaster temperature changes we’ve been having lately, my sinuses are all out of whack and so I’m spending a majority of my days in a decongestant-induced stupor.

The veggie garden, so far, seems to be thriving, especially the tomatoes. But then, that is no surprise because we are smack in the middle of prime tomato-growing region. The cherry tomatoes are doing far better than the regular ones and I’m not sure if that’s because that’s just how they are, or if it’s due to where we planted everything, but I keep telling myself that this whole gardening thing is just one long experiment, and each year we will learn important new lessons of what not to do.

We decided to put in potatoes this year, mainly because as we were purchasing all the vegetable starts last month there was a selection of starter potatoes and one of us said ‘oh, that might be fun’. I do not even remember what kind of potato it is that we planted; only that it had two eyes, so I cut it in half, like the lady behind the counter at the nursery told me to do, and we dug some holes and stuffed the pieces inside and covered them up and then stuck some random sticks into the dirt to mark them, and then spent the next few weeks anxiously peering at the ground and wondering which of the sprouts coming up might be potato. Eventually, two extremely leafy, sturdy stalks started coming through, and since they’re both in about the right spots, and they’re identical, and they don’t match any of the other weeds in the yard, I am making the assumption that they are potatoes. We may be in for a surprise a few months down the road, but in the meantime we are carefully watering them and hoping for the best.

We’d put in a sage plant last year, and apparently they thrive on neglect, because at this point it is doing its best to take over the entire raised bed. I have had to hack it back twice – the second time rather severely – if only to prevent it from trying to wipe out the little bell pepper plants. One of those has started flowering, so I am crossing my fingers that this year we might actually get something besides wilted plants.

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I recognize that if left to my own devices, I would become a hermit, because I am the sort of person who likes being in her own space, all by herself. But sometimes even someone with hermit-like tendencies has to push past it, and so there’s been all kinds of socializing going on these past few weeks. I’ve gone to a post-concert party with the rest of the Vox Musica gang. I’ve gone out to a lovely park to celebrate a friend’s baby’s first birthday. We’ve gone out to dinner – twice now – with some new-to-me friends; Richard knew one of them back in high school and they recently reconnected through Facebook and they happen to live in the area so we all met up for dinner and it turns out we all have a ton in common so hooray for instant new friends! We’re still trying to hook up for dinner with some other friends, but through no fault of anyone’s schedules keep getting changed, so there’s been a string of emails trying to figure out a date where everyone will actually be in town, at once – easier said than done.

I’m busily knitting, but most of it, these days, is knitting I can’t really talk about, or even if I can talk about it, I can’t show pictures. I’ve been doing a bunch of test knitting for a designer, and just volunteered to test knit a pair of adorable chickens for another designer. I’ve finished up a group project and recently took advantage of having friends with cute babies to do a photo shoot so I can write up the pattern and try submitting it for publication. And I’m working hard to get a gift done ASAP for a dear friend of the family. One of these years I think it might be nice to not have deadlines for everything I am knitting, but ha – I suspect that won’t happen for a while.