22/100

I. Make Our Garden Grow

Apparently Voltaire thought that philosophy was impossible without having a garden in one's backyard. In that spirit, I have an envelope full of herb seeds in our fridge, and a big bag of soil under my chair. (This looks odd, since I'm sitting in a Wegman's dining room between a rehearsal and a concert in Syracuse). I've been saving egg cartons, and we have seeds for cilantro, dill, parsley, thyme, basil, mint, and some others. We bought a couple of seedlings from the public market last year, but only the basil survived it's first week under our care. If we COULD make an herb garden work, we'd save all sorts of money and convenience on the herbs we have to buy marked up at Wegmans for DNI recipes, and then DNI remakes once we get hooked on homemade tzatziki dressing, or minty ice cream, or whatever else we happen to have tried recently.

And now we need help--how do decidedly brown-thumbed people (and one Kindergartener, who is doing this as part of school) start and keep an herb garden going beyond the recommendations on the package. I know where we've made some past mistakes. We overcrowded a pot with seedlings last year from the public market. Our carrots didn't turn out because we didn't thin the shoots. What else can we do? Where should we plant? When should we plant? Any and all advice is helpful...

II. The Morning

James wanted to stay up late. And by stay up late he meant "get up early." We do this sometimes. If I'm not going to see him for a couple days in a row I'll wake him up before anyone else in the house, bring him downstairs in the dark, put on some coffee for me and some hot cocoa for him, and then we'll lay out blankets and pillows on the floor of the library and read together for an hour before anyone else is awake. We did it this morning. Last night he asked how many hours it was going to be until we "stayed up late." I told him it would be about ten hours, and he said that was too long. I promised him that it would go quickly if he could just fall asleep, but he thought I should probably come and get him in just one hour.

He doesn't need me to read to him anymore. I offered, and he told me I should read my own books. He was a little curious to watch me making a translation from Greek, but mostly stuck to the stack that he'd selected. Eventually he was nearly falling asleep himself and went back to his own room to "play" (really lie down on the floor) for a few minutes before it was "morning time." (That means whenever Owen and Mommy woke up.)

I went in to get Owen and the first thing he asked was "Daddy, you have a concert?" "I do, Owen. I'll be gone all day today." "Okay, come back soon!"

III. Recently Reading
Phantom of the Opera, which was considerably shorter than I remembered it. (Perhaps I was mixing it up with any one of the Dumas or Hugo novels?)

Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, which wasn't a particularly expository summary of Western Philosophy, but an excellent bird's eye of developments from Bacon to Dewey

Zola's Germinal. I've never read any Zola before. As a matter of fact, I hadn't read particularly much in the way of Balzac or Flaubert before this year either. One of the benefits of intensive French study is apparently finally being able to make enough sense of all the place names, currency units, and untranslated phrases to get an appropriate flavor of French fiction.