author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today was one of those fresh summer days that wants to come in through every window. I opened up the patio door and the office window, which have screens. I opened up the front door, which, oddly, doesn't; it has something I want to call a screen door, but it has no actual screens in it. It has three glass panels. I figured out how to slide one of them up, but, again, there's no screen. One must choose between air in or bugs out. One cannot have both, at least not until I install a screen or just replace the door.

Replacing the "screen" door would probably be fine. Its latch is broken, too, such that it's difficult to get it to latch shut from the inside and entirely impossible from the outside.

Nevermind! The fresh summer day came in by the patio door and the office window, and extra light came in by the not-really-a-screen-door, and I found the energy to get some household chores done. Laundry, dishes, taking out the recyclables. Topping off the bird feeder. Attempting to rescue spinach seedlings that got dug up in the night, probably by that jerk the squirrel. (Seriously, I need to just bring all the plants in overnight. This is ridiculous.)

I even took a rag and some lemon oil and my spinning wheel outside, and I made a first pass at cleaning off the storage unit grime. All the dust came off, but there are stubborn stains on the treadles, probably from years of having that little bottle of spinning wheel oil hanging upside and dripping onto them. Still, some progress was made. At least the poor thing is no longer gross to handle.

What I'd really like to do is invite fiber-geek friends over and have a little spin-in on that front patio. Now that the summer heat has reached us, it's no longer a dim and freezing cold dungeon. But it's not so full of sun as to be wearying, either. And I've got happy little shade-tolerant plants hanging out there, the decade-old spaths and the new baskets of impatiens and begonias. It would be lovely to sit out there and sip tea and spin yarn (literally) and also spin yarns (figuratively).

Alas, I didn't get to any spinning today. Nor the piano. Mostly I spent the afternoon fighting with Patreon's new input interface while turning "Because You Weren't There" into the May 2015 Fictionette Freebie. The new interface is, in theory, a great improvement over the old. Not only can you input rich text via HTML now, but you can also upload new attachments to, and change out the image of, an existing creation. (You couldn't do that before. I KNOW.) However, there's a bug such that depending on the click path you use to get to the edit interface, the "save" button might not actually save your changes. That is, if you click through to a single post view, and then click Edit, you're fine. But if you click the Edit button attached to the post where it appears as an item in your posts stream, it will be a no-go.

But the post I wanted to edit--the plain-text excerpt of the Fictionette--I had created through the Activity Stream interface rather than through the Creations interface. Which isn't a distinction that ought to matter, since the new interface files both of them under "Creator Posts" as opposed to "All Posts" (that is, posts you posted, or messages your Patrons posted to you). But it matters this much: Posts created under the Activity Stream rubric appear to no longer have an Edit button within the single post view. I can only get in to edit them via the button on the item in the posts stream. Which click path, as I said, leads to a non-functional Save Post button.

Also, have I mentioned that since the interface update, some Patron-only posts got set to Accessible By Everyone? And probably vice versa? Pardon me while I go double-check the status of every single item in my archive since September 2014. Whee.

Finally, after beating my head against that brick wall for far too long, I struck a compromise. I gave up on trying to edit the post, and just created a whole damn new one, with the full text in HMTL and the links to the PDF and MP3 and also the announcement that it was now free for all to download regardless of your pledge tier or Patron status. And I emailed Patreon's support staff with the bug report, which hopefully isn't too rambling for them to understand. The above two paragraphs should give an idea of whether I succeeded; the email was more rambling than that, I fear. Then, at last, I turned my attention to Other Matters.

Which, it being now an hour until I had to leave for roller derby practice, meant things like getting into my derby clothes, cooking myself dinner, packing up my skate gear, and things like that.

Here's hoping tomorrow's work day doesn't get whittled away by technological frustrations like today's did. And that I get all the things done. And still get time to spin yarn and practice piano and maybe play a little on Puzzle Pirates too. And read blogs. And go for a long walk around Sale Lake. And...

Optimism! It's what's for midnight snackies!

Because it's about a mural depicting a shipwreck. It's called "Shipwreck in Progress." It's also about family relations, and maybe doomsday.

And now I have almost two whole weeks to prepare the next Friday Fictionette because May 2015 is a month with five Fridays in it, and I get fifth Fridays off. Nyah!

So I've changed my mind about my hummingbird visitor. Now I think it's most likely a male black-chinned hummingbird who looked red-throated only because I was seeing its neck feathers through the optical illusion of its wing-blur. In any case, it's been back countless times and seems to like what I've got on offer, but it still tries to drink out of the songbird feeder from time to time.

I tried to doctor up the songbird feeder with chili powder, because I've just about had it with the squirrel that it's attracted. It was cute at first, but when it's sitting in the planter and eating the leaves off the just-sprouted sunflower seedlings, it's just not funny anymore. The planter was already propped up on top of a bucket, but that sucker actually scrabbled up the sliding glass door to get into it. I have no idea how, but the noise its claws made on the steel frame of the door woke me up in time to watch it visiting the "salad bar." Now the planter has been moved further away from the wall, and what seedlings remain have been transplanted indoors to give them a chance to grow a few more leaves.

Today was the first sunny day I'd seen in what feels like weeks. It was sunny from morning right up until early afternoon, when we got a hailstorm. But before that I got to open up windows and doors and just let that warm air in, carrying with it all the songs of the birds and the occasional mew of the neighbor's adorable and affectionate black cat.

At one point I heard bagpipes, and I went out to hear them better. It's Memorial Day, and we live within view of a large funeral lawn with many a war veteran's tomb. It was pleasant, if solemn, to stand in the sun with my mug of tea and listen to the pipes playing "Amazing Grace," occasionally interrupted by the sound of the fighter planes doing their flyovers.

I did my Morning Pages late, and I did them on the back patio. In addition to sun and songbirds, there was the smell of a propane grill. Down on the lawn across the fence, some neighbors in the next condominium campus were having a picnic. When the big guy in the football shirt said, "Who wants more brats?" I very nearly called out, "Me!" They smelled that good.

And that's about all I've got. Lazy holiday Monday, a new Fictionette, and a bunch of bird-and-squirrel TV. I hope your Monday has been as pleasant. Cheers!

Wonder of wonders, a Friday Fictionette that is on time. With accompanying audio, Wattpad excerpt, and everything. Who's impressed with me? I'm impressed with me. Especially since I stayed in bed until an embarrassingly PM hour, all achy from last night's endurance scrimmage and also tempted into devouring a book from cover to cover before venturing forth for a shower and a late start to my writing day.

(The book was Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go. It hooked me good and hard, despite moments when I wanted to yell at the author for arbitrarily prolonging everyone's state of ignorance about Important Matters. "It is time to tell you everything," says knowledgeable character, who will promptly be Interrupted By Reasons Or Bad Guys. Otherwise, I loved it. Now I need to hunt up the sequel, The Ask and the Answer.)

In any case. This week's Fictionette is "The Hole in the Middle of the Block," which is sort of a haunted house story, sort of a best friends story, and maybe possibly sort of unintentional Doctor Who fanfic. The cover art photography is mine. I went for a walk around our new neighborhood and eventually found a good stunt double for the house in the story. Also, there's a lovely little nature walk around the teeny tiny private lake just north of us.

That was the first time since the day we closed on the house (April 7, to remind you how long ago that was) that I found time to just walk around the neighborhood and let my feet get to know the place. I need to make time for that more often.

I also found time today to plant seeds! I've got lettuce things and spinach and squash things and cucumber and watermelon and tomato and pepper and corn and beans and parsley and dill and chives all in the soil now. Which is not to say they'll all necessarily come up, mind you. My balcony container gardening style is haphazard and hopeful. I just fill all available space with all the seeds, then I thin what comes up, if anything comes up and needs thinning, if I can bear to thin them. I'm a terrible softy when it comes to thinning.

Attached is a picture of epic alpaca adorableness, which will be explained shortly.

Despite the season being more or less over, today turned out to be a farm Monday after all. The volunteer coordinator (hi, Steph!) texted me that she could use some help processing herbs, so I said sure. That's how I ended up with hands full of mugwort and clothes covered in purple basil powder.

Herb processing happens up at the top of the barn, where things are nice and dry. (They are not, however, warm, at least not without electrical help. I took my tea breaks based on when I lost sensation in my fingertips.) There is a large supply of screens of varying gauge, plenty of tarps, plenty of bins and buckets, and enough dried herbs to make you sneeze multiple times.

My first task wasn't the sneezy one. The dried mugwort leaves were for the most part still whole. All I had to do was sift through them and remove any flower buds and large stems.

No, the sneezy task was to do with the basil, which had been crushed into very small pieces--a coarse powder, if you will. My task was to get the dirt and dust off of it. This sounds like one of Baba Yaga's ultimatums to Vasilisa the Beautiful, doesn't it? "Separate these poppy seeds from these grains of soil by the time I get home, or I'll eat you up, bones and all!" Although you can do a fairly decent job of it with a low-powered electric fan, which will blow the dust farther off than it will the poppy seeds. We ended up doing variations of that trick with the basil bits: first I'd toss handfuls of it into the air above a tarp-covered table so that the dust would billow off of it (at which point I tried not to breathe), then I'd rapidly sift the pile with my fingers in hopes that the pieces of basil leaf would settle above the dirt. When we got to the last bit, we did end up using a fan, but it required a lot of subtlety because basil bits fly just as far as dust does if you're not careful.

Anyway, I sneezed and coughed a lot--I really need to remember to wear one of those dust filter masks, and then save some for next time I'm sanding down a closet door. And I smelled ridiculously like basil by the time I got home.

While I was up there, I took advantage of the great view out the barn loft's west door. That's where you can see the farm's four-legged critters. There's a whole herd of sheep and lamb, as well as two alpaca. The alpaca are Bruno (the brown one) and Tiger (the blond one). Whenever they look up at me, which is whenever they notice I'm looking at them, they have this fantastic sardonic look on their faces, like they're idly wondering when I'll stop staring at them and go do something useful with myself. (It's gotta be the haircut gives that impression.) That expression remains fixed on their faces even when they're doing something silly, which raises the silliness index to absolute ridiculousness.

So here is a picture of Bruno doing something silly just as sardonically as possible. He likes to lie down in the water trough, which requires complex maneuvering and also patience. First he kneels with his forelegs, then he pauses to make sure the rest of him is going to sit, and then he finally lets his rear end settle. Then the floating electric water heater (that red disk on an extension cord) taps him on the butt, startling him into leaping to his feet once more. He stands there for a little while, dripping--and an alpaca drips a lot of water, since his very soft coat is also very absorbant; it sounded like someone running a faucet. While he's standing there, the following thought seems to cross his mind: "Why am I standing here when I could be lying down in the water? How foolish! I shall rectify this situation forthwith."

At which point the cycle starts over again. I watched it cycle at least three times through before I thought to get out my camera.

If you have been having a crappy Monday, I hope that this picture of Bruno trying to have a bath brings you joy.

Today's post is difficult to write. It's heavy, emotionally, for me. It'll be too easy for me to come across as defensive. And there's also a sticky matter of confidentiality, in that the conversation that moves me to write happened in a private space. But the opinions and thoughts it inspired are my own and I would like to express them. I can only hope I have succeeded at doing the latter without violating the former.

It's a mess, is what it is. I hope you'll bear with me.

Monday, a dismaying event happened on the national scale. A grand jury announced its decision that a white police officer who killed an unarmed black boy need not go to trial, and that the killer's demonstrable racial prejudice was somehow a mitigating factor and not evidence that the a police officer was unfit for his job and not to be trusted with a gun. The grand jury made this announcement at 7:00 PM Mountain Time, 8:00 Central. The announcement and its implications have dominated national and online discourse since then.

Here are other things that happened Monday:

• I had my last regularly scheduled farm day for 2014.
• The Saints played the Ravens to a disappointing loss.
• I did some more work on the Refurbish the Closet Doors porject
• I blogged about the farm work and the closet doors.

Now, I have a TwitterFeed account set up such that anytime I blog, that blog post gets announced on Twitter. Which means that in the middle of a Twitterstorm about injustice in Ferguson, I not only blogged about something that had nothing to do with that outrage at all, but I committed a self-promotional tweet telling people to go check out that blog post.

Which is something I would not have thought twice about--except that in the course of the aforementioned private conversation, I became informed that such a tweet makes a person look self-absorbed, tone-deaf, offensively oblivious. It would have been even more offensive, apparently, if I'd live tweeted my reactions to the football game (as I sometimes do), or promoted my Patreon campaign (as happens on those Fridays when a fictionette goes up). But my one self-promoting tweet was bad enough. As a responsible citizen of the internet, and especially as a writer with a Twitter account, I should have gauged the online climate before allowing such an inconsequential tweet to go through. Given what an important conversation was going on, I suppose I should have turned off automatic Twitter announcements of my blog posts for the night. Or, better still, not blogged at all unless it was about Ferguson.

Except... well, no.

There's a difference between disrupting a focused conversation on someone else's blog (like, say, the comment thread at the above-linked Slacktivist post) and, well, using Twitter for what Twitter is for. It's a grave misunderstanding of any social media to think that there is only one conversation going on at any time, to which you either contribute appropriately or shut up. Twitter is a microblogging platform on which millions of people have hundreds of thousands of separate conversations at any one time. And different people are listening to different pieces of that conversational storm depending on whom they follow. It's not unlike a huge version of a party where you can talk to your friend about whatever, and other people can overhear you or not as they choose. You can still abuse the venue by interrupting someone else's conversation--for example, at-checking someone inappropriately with your book-promo tweet--but simply talking to someone else about something else while in that room is not an abuse of the venue.

So I blogged Monday because I hold myself to a Monday-through-Friday blogging schedule, and I'm damn proud of myself when I succeed at keeping to that schedule. I post a Friday Fictionette every first through fourth friday because that's the committment I've made to potential Patrons. And someday I hope to be able to tweet that my first published book has become available in bookstores. If something globally awful happens on a day when I'd be blogging, fictionetting, or book-promoing, I'll probably still blog, fictionette, and/or book-promo, though I may choose not to. I may or may not have anything useful to say about the globally awful thing; that too is entirely up to me. One thing I know for sure: My tiny "off-topic" tweet is not going to make the globally awful thing objectively worse.

There is room on the internet, much as there is room in a single mind, for many things at once: raging at injustice, conversing quietly about the changing season, complaining about how long it takes to sand a paint-stripped door, and wondering when the national sportscasters will get tired of their love affair with Jimmy Butterfingers Graham and turn some of their attention to, say, players who are actually catching the ball tonight (or running it for 70+ yards holy fuck Joseph Morgan you are my hero).

That football game it would have been tone-deaf of me to tweet about Monday? A significant subset of both teams' players were a hell of a lot more personally affected by the Ferguson outcome than I. Some of them have sons who could have been Michael Brown. Some of them could have been Michael Brown. I don't know if they got to hear the grand jury's announcement when it happened, or if they were shielded from the news until the game was over. In either case, they had to know the announcement was coming. They probably predicted the way it was going to turn out, while hoping it would turn out otherwise.

And they still played that game, because Monday Night Football happens on Monday night. They participated in post-game interviews and they talked with their coaches and teammates about what tonight's game means for next week.

Normal life doesn't stop for tragedy. Sometimes we wish it would--sometimes it seems downright malicious that the world should keep spinning and gravity keep tugging as though anything could possibly be the same again. And sometimes we're grateful that normal life just keeps driving on regardless, because a veneer of normality can make the difference between coping and spiraling into a black hole of despair.

What you need right now, at this particular moment in American history, is a story that doesn’t stoke your feelings of rage, depression and moral exhaustion. And I am here to give it to you.

--Mary Elizabeth Williams, "The Ferguson library gives a lesson in community"

Monday we learned, or had our suspicions confirmed, that we have a lot more work to do as a society than we might have hoped, that the road toward justice is a lot longer than it has any right to be in 2014. And yet we still have to cook the next meal, earn the next paycheck, write the next story. We may not have to tweet about the latest football game or converse with friends via at-replies, but small pleasures and human interactions can make the hard work easier to bear. It certainly can't hurt.

And metaphorically wearing sackcloth doesn't materially aid the cause of justice any more than finishing your lima beans did a damn thing for the children starving in Ethiopia.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: There are things going on in my life. I'm going to talk about them. I may use Twitter to do it. I'm not going to preemptively gag myself on subjects that aren't objectively as important as the latest breaking national news. The conversations I choose to have aren't subject to anyone else's sense of propriety. That I choose to have one conversation doesn't mean I'm incapable of caring about other issues. The game of Prove That You Care is rigged, and the only way to win is not to play.

You don't have to be in those conversations with me. You may judge me harshly for having those conversations at all. But you can't reasonably expect me to always make the same choices you would about which conversations to have and when. If the choices we make differ enough to make you unhappy with mine, by all means disconnect from me on social media. We'll probably both be happier that way. But I think maybe composing nastygrams about How Dare You Tweet Banalities While Ferguson Is Burning isn't a positive contribution to any situation.

What might be a positive contribution? Well, if you're so inclined, you can donate to the Ferguson Library, because they need it and because they are awesome. Change.org has a petition demanding that Michael Brown's killer be prosecuted in the Missouri Supreme Court; the petition has nearly reached 150,000 signatures tonight. And this HuffPo article has more suggestions for activism in addition to these.

That's (some of) what's on my mind tonight, so that's what I'm choosing to blog/tweet/FB about.

That's how this works.

Farm Mondays have more or less come to an end for 2014. The default has flipped: From here on out, the assumption is that unless I hear otherwise, there will not be a Monday crew.

Today was the last Monday where it was the other way around, and even so, I was asked to arrive an hour later than the usual. And even still, there was some early downtime involving hot tea and a very needy orange marmalade tabby cat. As a result, the shift seemed to pass very quickly.

The shift comprised three basic tasks:

Preparing dried lavender for sale/use. Rebecca's Herbal Apothecary & Supply turns out, unsurprisingly, to be super interested in locally sourcing some of their herbs. So that's who's getting the dried lavender blossom that I got to help process today. In this case, "processing" meant separating, as much as possible, the blossoms from the stems. The first step was easy: we took bunches of dried lavender and rolled them between our fingers over a couple of buckets. The next step was a little more complicated: We experimented with different gauge screens, and different methods of pushing plant material through said screens, to result in a maximum of blossom and a minimum of stem passing through. In the end we filled a gallon-sized Ziplok bag fairly snugly.

We came away from that task smelling heavenly, which was really nice considering our next task took us in close proximity to another team who were processing pepper seeds. The peppers were in a really advanced stage of fermentation. Trust me on this one.

Preparing the field for the plow. This meant examining the west terraced crop beds for wooden stakes, very large rocks, sandbags, and, in one case, someone's mason jar full of coffee. Anything the plow would have trouble with, or that we didn't want getting plowed under, needed to be removed. Jackets and coats started coming off around now despite the incoming coldfront, because carrying sandbags in full sunlight tends to raise one's core temperature.

And finally...

Picking peppers in the greenhouse. Several varieties, some of which had clearly been featured on the rodent four-star buffet. Even while we were picking the fruit that remained, we could hear mice squeaking as they ran by at top speed underneath the ground cloth.

And then it was one o'clock and time for me to go. I made a stop in Niwot to put gas in the car and pick up a few groceries (including some delicious udon noodles from Sachi Sushi), and my aspirations to get right to sanding the closet door undergoing refurbishing lasted right up until I got home (and devoured the udon).

But I've gotten quite a bit of the sanding done since waking up from my nap, so that's cool.

Anyway, with the farm going into off-season on-call mode, that frees Mondays up to be just another writing work day. Certainly that's true of next Monday, when I'll be in Avon, Colorado, having my sort-of-annual solo writing retreat/vacation from normal life. Works will progress! Also, yummy food will get cooked, karaoke will be sung, and a certain amount of video games will be played. But mainly writing will happen.

And the current closet doors had just better be done by then, that's all I have to say about that.

Remember last week? Remember "Get the peppers out of the field before the cold snap?" Turns out, that was just practice for the real thing. Today was "Harvest ALL of the greens before the snow falls and temperatures drop to single digits Fahrenheit."

So one crew was in the field, harvesting tot soi and bok choi, lettuce and kale, chard and escarole and frisee, and the other crew washed each incoming basket of greens and packed them away in boxes for storage in the cooler. I was in the latter crew. It meant standing outside with my hands constantly in cold water. I was in short sleeves at first, because the morning was quite warm. By lunchtime I was wearing a borrowed hoodie, I couldn't feel my toes, and I could barely work my fingers. And the water was actually warmer than the air outside. So was the walk-in cooler, when I went in to raid the "seconds" basket for some take-home greens to turn into gumbo z'herbes.

But it was a morning well spent. And I felt pretty good, freezing weather aside. I didn't expect to. I honestly thought I'd have to stay home sick today. Saturday night, I began developing cold symptoms; Sunday, I was blowing my nose constantly. But either it was a 24-hour cold or the pseudoephedrine I started taking successfully masked all symptoms, because I felt fine today. Better than fine: I got up at 6:30 AM without a grumble and ready to do EVERYTHING.

The "Let's Get Everything Done!" mood settled in late last night. It's a great feeling! It makes everything seem possible! Nevermind that it's just the drugs talking--take advantage of it while you've got it, that's what I say. So instead of spending the evening curled up in bed around the achy, tired parts of me that a three-hour roller derby practice had worked out, I applied three coats of polycrylic to the front side of the closet door I was working on, and I wrote. Then this morning I swept all the sawdust off the balcony before the snow could turn it to muck.

Just look at that picture. Check it out. In the backdrop, three bi-folds painted in the "curdled cream" color we're trying to get away from. On the left, the paint-stripped and mostly-sanded half of the bi-fold, still displaying the dark stain from sometime before the door got painted. On the right, the finished product, stained in Minwax "Gunstock" red-brown, coated with water-based polycrylic, and ready to install.

Conclusion: There is life after paint-stripping!

So maybe my good mood wasn't entirely attributable to pseudoephedrine and caffeine. Maybe it was the warm sense of accomplishment. Yeah, let's go with that.

We gathered at the east end of McCauley Family Farm, in the field known as "The Heart," and we considered the peppers in light of the coming frost.

The peppers grew on knee-high bushes that filled almost ten rows in The Heart. They made the bushes look decorated with strings of orange festival lights. Several rows of bushes were covered against cooler weather, a strategy that had unfortunately created the perfect warm and food-filled haven for mice. Under several plants, a litter of orange shreds and scattered seeds showed where the rodents had done the most damage. Still, more than enough crop remained to be threatened by the sharper drop in temperature predicted for the night. The peppers had to be picked post-haste (pickling optional).

The solution? Pick the whole darn bush.

So that's what we did from 8:30 until round about noon. We worked our way down the rows, pulling up bushes, shaking off mud, and piling the plants up with their roots all pointing the same way for ease of gathering them up later and putting them in the truck. (I think the plan was to bring the whole yield, bush and pepper and clinging bindweed vines and all, to the processing plant that McCauley Family Farm recently acquired in Boulder. I'm not sure. The fate of the pepper plants was still under discussion when I left.)

The work was relatively easy and certainly uncomplicated. But it was hard enough on the hands to require gloves, and, like most field work, hard on the back and thighs due to repetitive stooping and pulling. I came home feeling used up, triumphantly and virtuously exhausted.

In almost four hours of work, I think we pulled half of the pepper plants that needed pulling. Maybe two thirds. There were a lot of peppers.

By the way, after working with peppers, even with gloves on, it's best not to scratch anything tender on the way home. Obviously don't rub your eyes. Of course you wouldn't pick your nose. But don't even stick a finger in your ear, OK? Basically, don't touch your face.

As is the custom after most volunteer shifts, they sent me home with an armful of food, which contributed to the following Dinner #1:

• 2 potatoes (smallish, yellow)
• 1 turnip
• 1 celery root
• 1 sunchoke (or Jerusalem artichoke, or sunroot tuber)
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 or 3 tbsp heavy whipping cream
• Some quantity of chives and green onions, chopped

Cut root vegetables into large chunks. Leave skin on wherever possible. Boil them until they are mashably tender: about 25 minutes. Drain. Put them in a steel pot with butter, cream, and the allium greens. Mash thoroughly. Eat every bite. Lick the bowl.

I said "Dinner #1" because today was a roller derby day (Phase 1: I was one of the two trainers, while John was one of the ten students). Dinner #1 comes before practice, so I don't go to practice hungry; Dinner #2 is for after practice when I turn into a ravenous beast.

Dinner #2 was red beans and rice with sausage. Farm veg went into that dish, too. In fact, the entire Holy Trinity of vegetables that went in there--celery, onions, and sweet green peppers--came from the farm. I think the garlic did too. The sausage came from a different farm, one owned and worked by a fellow skater. The parsley came from my patio garden as its last hurrah.

Yay farm meals!

Today's farm work was odoriferous! That's a fancy word that means smelly. Not unpleasantly smelly, but noticeable, certainly.

The bulk of it was spent harvesting onions and shallots. Mostly I was on pitchfork duty. My team went ahead to loosen up the soil so that the next team could pull up the onions more easily. Then there was a team that came with clippers and snipped off most of the greens and the roots, leaving just the bulb to be packed away into cartons.

There were four rows of this process going on, which meant that while I was pitchforking the next row of onions I was stepping on the piled up, cast off greens of the previous row. Which we had to clean up when we were done.

The entire world got to smelling like onions, y'all.

We had a little time after this was done before lunch would be ready, so I wound up in the barn loft packing dried mint away into paper bags. That was a very pleasant smelling job. I didn't mind one bit leaving the farm smelling like mint, peppermint, orange mint and pineapple mint. I did mind the bits of dried mint twig that wound up inside my shirt, socks, and pants.

Then I went home. As I let myself in, my nose delivered a pleasant reminder that me that I'd started a crock pot full of red beans going that morning. I chopped up a bunch of onions, celery, and peppers--all from the farm--and tossed them in along with some parsley from the porch and some thyme still good in the refrigerator, and then I tucked myself into bed for a nap.

And that was my odoriferous Monday.

My hope is that we'll finish painting the shower room tomorrow, or I'll be able to figure out how to use the tub without ruining our careful masking tape job. It would be nice to reduce my personal odoriferousness down to a manageable level.

As though to make up for last week, this morning's farm work went a little long. It featured seeds, seeds, and more seeds, seeds of tomato and pepper varieties, seeds to be wet processed for drying, winnowing, and sowing next season.

It began when the farmer, Rich, gave me a broom and said, "Why don't you give each of these seed buckets a good morning stir?" Thus I got my fifteen minutes being a classic Halloween witch, stirring a disgusting cauldron with my (sadly nonmagical) broomstick.

The tomatoes that were harvested a few weeks ago, and the peppers from the week before that, had been collected into buckets according to variety, covered with water, and left, essentially, to rot. Or ferment, I suppose, if you want to be all precise. All I know is that there was a layer of moldy yuck on the surface of each bucket, and as I vigorously stirred them, they released a smell that was part appetizing fruit and partly the sweet stench of decay.

I am constantly grateful for my iron-clad stomach. Not only can I eat darn near anything I want, and in vast quantities, and shortly before a two-hour roller derby practice without getting nauseated during our endurance session, but I also tend not to get queasy at the sight, smell, or thought of various forms of yuck. I'm sure some flaw or other went to pay for that particular merit. I'm guessing several points in gluttony?

But here's the cool thing. Viable seeds sink while immature seeds, fruit pulp, stems and mold all float. This means you can go from a bucket of pink frothy yuck to a window screen full of clean seeds drying in the greenhouse by means of no higher tech than gravity. You add water, you carefully pour off the floating stuff, you repeat until there's no more floating stuff and the seeds are clean. It's kind of amazing.

Eventually those seeds will be dry, and they will be further winnowed by means of an electric fan. You gently sprinkle the seeds from a height, and the fan will blow away the lighter, immature seeds, leaving only the heavier, viable seeds to land in your collection bucket. Simple physics rules the day once more.

After the bucket stirring, I was on pepper seed duty all morning long. I was stationed at the wide-screen prep step of the assembly line. That is, before the fermented mess entered the pour cycle described above, it was poured atop a screen where we smooshed it around with our hands, getting the seeds to fall through and the larger pulp chunks and stems to remain behind. We didn't wear gloves or anything, which might have been a mistake in the case of the huge barrel of Hot Portugals. By lunch time, my hands were well and truly irritated. I won't say they were burning--it wasn't that bad--but they were gently simmering, to be sure. They were also very orange.

Takeaways? First, gravity is kind of awesome. Second, latex gloves are potentially awesome too.

And, despite a long bath, I still smell like hot peppers.