I remember always hearing about the three-day hump when trying something new. I have a feeling it’s gonna be next Wednesday by the time I can remotely succeed. I blame the weather. The freaking fantastic weather that came out to play most of this week (today was a hot exception because the wind was gone). I’d been getting supplies and checking over my bills and such, which took away a lot of writing time the other day. I got absolutely none done today, which annoyed me because I was counting on doing that.

I had to get my blood drawn today and decided it was a good day to do errands. I just didn’t anticipate they’d take the whole morning and a chunk of the afternoon. And  before I knew it, my two-day writing streak did not turn into a three-day.

Got that exact mug from cafepress.com. I’ll have to get a bigger one someday.

So, I went to drop off some mail, go to the bank, get blood drawn, go to Home Depot.

Yeah, that’s where I screwed up. In my defense, I DID need a couple of things there… but just a couple. Ended up getting a car-load of soil, flowers, fruit canes and trees as well in a couple of hours.

Well, I’d thought yesterday about working on that strip of lumpy nothing between my deck and my vegetable garden. I was going to need some good soil to help start the seeds growth (most of it’s gonna be topsoil because I have to fill in what’s becoming a sinkhole, anyway). And some weed barrier fabric to re-make a walkway I want beside the fence and to the rain barrel.

My thoughts regarding that space is to get those little plastic landscape barriers you put together yourself, make a nice rectangle, have plenty of good level dirt in there, and make it a wildflower space. I want a little natural garden for the pollinators to be able to go and do their thing, because then they’ll pollinate my veggie garden. As long as I don’t end up with bees on my porch, I’ll be fine. Maybe only to fertilize the ground and “turn over”, I’ll weed-eat it once or twice a year at most. Otherwise, it’s a piece near the house that I want to keep wild.

But it’s gonna take some work, and I have a few bags of Texas wildflower and pollinator-friendly seed mixes. I’m gonna scatter them pretty thickly in that space, but will need to protect it. And, I want to have something in there to help hold the dirt in place. Enter a LOT of flowers I bought. Some are cheap replacements, marigold plugs that are going to finish up the edge of my rose fence area. The rest are a bit bigger and more colorful and crazy. Even if they get overshadowed and crowded out by the pollinators when they get growing, that won’t bother me. I just want something that will perhaps deter the squirrels from going in and digging around for all those seeds. A bunch of flowers and barriers they don’t like may well help. It’ll take a while to get growing, but I’m also gonna put chicken wire fence that I took down around the area to at least make it a little tougher for the bushy-tailed pests.

The tough part was when I got home, the back of my car FULL of herbs, flowers, and soil… it was half past 1 and I was hot. I’d also gotten almost no sleep last night, so I had to go take a nap for a little while to at least make my eyes feel better and calm down an oncoming headache.

But when I took the dogs out around 3pm for their pee-time, it was definitely hot. I got the wheelbarrow and shovel and ended up putting about 8 loads of topsoil in that spot. Because of erosion of my initial pad and the need to build it up, some areas next to the house/deck have a pretty drastic slope, and the rest more gentle. I prefer some slope for better drainage, but the dirt and some weed-barrier fabric will help stabilize it a bit. The fun part will be creating drainage around the most obviously already low areas in that section. I’m actually planning on getting my sketchbook out (and some handy landscape guides I got ages ago) and the graph paper and seeing how I could have walkable areas and some drainage. My dad had some PVC pipes that helped out before, but moving the old house out ripped up those improvised lines. I don’t mess with PVC and can’t figure out where I’d start at this point, so I’m just gonna figure the best places to fill in low spots and utilize others for drainage.

Whatever helps me walk around without being ankle-deep in mud or a sudden puddle because the grass camouflaged it is a good idea.

Won’t be as complicated as I thought, and thankfully I won’t have to worry about back-flooding to the house–it’s much higher up than what I’m working on. I just want a nice place for the hummingbirds to go… and the rest.

So, that ended up being today, at least til about 4 when I went in and found my smaller plastic pots. I’d bought some extra herbs and figured it was a good time to plant some more, and get the seeds out and start new pots that I’d had in mind for some time.

Figured I was dirty enough from digging earlier, might as well keep going.

And it’s going to be great.

Right now, too tired. Time for sleep and to get ready bright and early for tomorrow’s work.

I’m just annoyed that it means I gotta re-vamp my writing schedule again.

I was hoping to have a routine of 9am-noon being my first writing block, but with all this yardwork and gardening i’m gonna have to do, I think I’d be better off saving writing for noon to 3pm, when I have to take the dogs out. That way, in the hottest part of my day, I’m inside writing while the dogs doze. Though I wish I had the discipline to just carve out three hours for an initial writing session at any point of the day.

That day has not come yet, though… maybe next week it’ll be a start.

I should be writing. I’ve been working on stuff to help me do it easier and get my imagination flowing. But I gotta remember that appointments happen, sometimes things go sour, whatever… make the damned time.

And yes, keep that coffee mug handy and remind myself of the work I want to do for a living. I’m guessing part of my own drained feeling all day wasn’t just from shopping in the heat and getting more plants, but also not having had a cup of coffee all day.

Oh yeah, and my raised bed plants might not be alive, so a small, needs-to-happen project this weekend is going to be replacing canes with new ones, checking that my peach trees are really dead, and replacing those with papaya trees I found (they’re only about 2 feet tall right now).

I just keep adding more to the plate. But I’m testing out the idea this weekend: gardening/outdoor work in the morning, writing in the afternoon, chores in the evening. We’ll see how that works, and it might be far better than what I’ve tried so far. I mean, I’ve tried to do some exercise on my elliptical before getting started on writing and that exercise has helped. I can only imagine what a few hours of yardwork and gardening will do for my brain and my imagination once I get inside for a writing session.

Hmm… worth exploring.