Every Friday I try to bring a smile from my home to yours. I’m currently still knee-deep in Abyss & Apex slush reading. I hope all is well with you!

Today is Book Quote Wednesday and my quote is from Writing the Entertaining Story.

Writing the Entertaining Story condenses everything I learned while running Abyss & Apex magazine for the past 15 years.

Coronavirus lockdown edition.

I’ll never forget that morning.

I came into a jobsite that was in utter chaos. One man had been injured overnight and all the chillers were down, which meant Bellevue Hospital would have no air conditioning… and it was going to be a rather hot April day. They were already making plans to move some critical patients that would overheat – like infants in the neonatal ward – to nearby NYU Hospital. And supposedly it was all our fault. Except it really was not our fault.

But how to prove it?

Read Confessions of a Female Safety Engineer to find out how my detective work saved us – and the hospital – from a world of pain.

We’ve had some vet bills this week.

Koushka, our older house cat, has been flinching as if in sudden pain since just after the beginning of the coronavirus stay-at-home guidelines. Brian and I were every worried: what if it was something like cancer? So we got him to the vet when they opened back up, although that meant he was carried inside in the hated cat carrier and I had to wait in the car.

I breathed a sign of relief to know that it was “just” arthritis, which we could continue to relieve with CBD cat treats and glucosamine in wet food, but there was another problem. His heart rate was 270, up from 250 a year ago. A cat’s heart rate should be 150, and they suspected a thyroid problem. He got a blood test and we got the results on Thursday. He’ll be on thyroid meds for the rest of his life, but he’s worth it because he’s a Good Boi.

Right now we are working on the proper dosage of his meds. They gave us a month’s worth of what is probably the correct dosage. When he’d been on them for 3 weeks they’ll do a blood test to see if it’s working. At that point we can get a three-month supply for very little money.

It’s that time again! Here’s another excerpt from Confessions. #bookqw

(Yes, I had trouble believing their attitude, too. But truth is stranger than fiction.) If you’d like to read more adventures here’s the link to it on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077VP5M94/

Writers and editors, who work seated most of the time, need to move to stay in shape. We also need fresh air and sunshine!

My chief form of exercise, and one that often pushes me to the limits of my endurance, is gardening. Over the last few weekends my husband and I took almost 100 evergreen, thorny cat briar vines out of our mulberry tree. This was after trimming 1/3 of the limbs to reach the bases of the vines, because with the tree they were casting so much shade on one of my beds that all I could grow there was mushrooms. The vines were very hard to dislodge: some of them took both of us pulling, together. Were we sore afterward!

We love the mulberry tree, though. We’re birders and birds always come to visit when the tree is fruiting. It’s planted on the south side of the house and shades it from the fierce subtropical sun in the summer, but loses its leaves and lets us put a cold frame on the south side of the house in the winter. Here’s the one we want to get built, although ours will be longer and more steeply tilted.

As for the rest of the garden, i scooted behind the grape trellis to clear that area of excess grape and honeysuckle vines, and to remove any other weeds. We used a shovel to get the huge root balls of the invasive (in this climate) spiderwort plants. Again, this was to allow more light into the area, in this case the raised bed near the driveway that is already providing us with salad greens.

We also tied up the big blackberry and were pleased that the 3 smaller blackberries are doing well. We transplanted strawberries from the old bed in the back yard and they’re doing fine. Parsley, basil, oregano, and thyme are very healthy, too.

The 2nd raised bad back from the street also has lots of things coming up! Beets, mostly for greens, daikon radishes, fava beans, and – in the back – lots of Jerusalem artichokes.

This last weekend we weeded and planted the entire south-side-of-the-house bed, the one that had excessive shade until we trimmed the mulberry and took down all the vines. It’s now full of onion sets and more lettuce. Not much to see there, yet.

And we are watching our fig tree carefully as the figs are almost ripe!

There’s more in the back yard: concord grapes along the fence, two dwarf apple trees, two dwarf pear trees, and two square foot garden beds of Egyptian walking onions. We still have to till the big raised bed in the back yard, and plant green beans, okra, and more. But that’s all for another post.