Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain!

[desperance]

I do feel kind of droughty; I've hardly written a thing since I got here. All my writing is unsettled, mostly unfinished. Today I first-drafted a short SF piece which I might aim at Nature, but not till it's better than it is. Groping for a half-completed thought: as I said, everything's unfinished, even the stuff that winds up at the end.

The garden too is droughty, but that's because it's been gorgeous out there: 80 degrees and pure clear sunshine all the day. All the weekend, indeed. Yesterday we went to a garden open-day, where I mostly thought "I wish this was my garden," in between garnering advice from the gardener; and in the evening to The Hunger Games. I haven't read the books, but I did appreciate coming out of a blockbuster thinking that it was really rather good, as against the other thing.

And tonight's dinner was lamb tagine with apricots, made in my favourite new cast-iron pot (thank you, Aliette!), with lemon couscous and our own cilantro & mint, and harissa (thank you, Berry!) on the side. With a fabulous bottle of wine (thank you, Matt and Crystal!), which isn't finished yet, astonishingly, so now we're going to slump on the sofa and write more thank-you cards. One last push, and it'll be over by Christmas...

Comments

[movingfinger]

The Sunset Magazine offices in Palo Alto have a test garden, which is open to the public; maybe you should see what they're doing. The magazine's actually pretty good, though the articles are by no means deep. Good for concepts and pointers to new plants, though. Leaf through it in the supermarket or look at a year's worth in the public library.