My quest to start sending more stories out has reaped it’s first victory. My short story “Eye of the Beholder” will appear later this year at Zooscape Zine. I’m so glad this story turned out to be a good fit for them because I’ve been reading over there a bunch lately, and love the animal and fantastical vibe of it all. Go check it out, and don’t worry, I will definitely be reminding you when my story goes live there later in the year.
This is my first reprint sale, and I posted back in January on Submitting Again that I had just had a light dawn that my older stories were available for the reprint market, and I was going to give it a shot. After getting a few stories out there, I had hoped that I would stress about hearing back for each one a little less. Like the stress would dilute somehow. That isn’t how it turned out, but I do have to say that a single acceptance does help take the sting out of other past rejections and gave me renewed vigor to write new words too.
The number one lesson I have learned the past couple of months in my garden is to label my seed trays. I figured I was only planting a few different things, and I’d be able to tell what they were when they sprouted, so it was fine.
Narrator: It was not
I now have several nice little seedlings that I can’t identify. And I have bigger plants from earlier, like those pictured above, that I STILL can’t identify. I planted both broccoli and cauliflower. When I google what the plants should look like, they look pretty much the same. So I guess until these start to flower, I won’t know which I have. Maybe I have both? that would be cool, but I doubt it. The plants all look identical and I’d expect at least a little variation if they were different.
For a month or so I thought I had several mint plants coming along nicely from seed. Now that they’re a little bigger, I think I have no mint plants, and in fact I have several sage seedlings. They smell much more like sage than mint to me anyway. That’s great. I’ve never been able to keep my sage alive when I bought a plant from the home improvement store, so that’s why I thought these were mint. I read that mint is super easy to grow. Perhaps sage just likes it better outside than in my kitchen window? Either way, I now need to try again to get some mint started.
What I am 90% sure is a sage seedling
I did luck out that both my spinach and kale came up and they look nothing alike, so I know which is which. So maybe I can get away with no labels as long as it’s a plant I know I can identify and I have grown it before. Everything else – I must learn to label.
Spinach and kale
For Christmas, my daughter got me a set of herbal tea seeds, and – you guessed it – I planted a bunch without labeling them. Most are still super tiny and I’m (perhaps mistakenly) optimistic I will eventually be able to identify them when they get some more leaves in. However, the one below is nice and big now and I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t look like the photo on any of my seed packets. It is closest to the lemon balm, so I’m going with that for now, but the leaves look rounder on my plant than the seed pack picture. If anyone is good at identifying plants, I wouldn’t mind your guesses in the comment section.
Maybe lemon balm, but who really knows? Mint? Marjoram? Ack.
Perhaps I am very carefully tending a weed for all I know.
I’ve liked the concept of temperature blankets and scarves ever since I first heard about them. The idea is you crochet (or knit I guess) one row for each day of the year to a color guide showing the change in temperature. What I didn’t care for was the straight red, orange, yellow. . . to blue color scheme. Not that I don’t like those colors, but I didn’t think I’d like a huge blanket in those colors. Or at least, I didn’t love the ones I saw.
Then sometime in December last year I saw one where they had decided they too would like a temperature blanket, but one that would match their room. So they used, I think it was a lot of reds, burgundy, tan and some greys. It was very pretty. So I decided I’d make one and use my favorite colors instead of the traditional choices.
This is January. Greys are the coldest, you can see the warmer week there of greens and that strangely weirdly warm day in pink. Yesterday warmed up again into that green row at the top. When we get into the warmer months it will move into the pinks and browns with maybe some yellow if we get the super hot days. I was prepared to go into maybe a purple if we ever got colder than the dark grey zone I made, but it doesn’t look like we’ll probably go there.
So far I am happy with these colors. I worried I’d get bored with something I needed to keep up with every day. So far I’m still having fun with it, but there are day’s I’m too tired, so I do two rows the next day or three the day after that. But I’m generally keeping up without it feeling like a chore so far. We’ll see how that feels in the heat of summer to work on a big heavy crochet blanket.
I’m using the moss stitch because I read it was a good choice to keep it from getting too long. 365 rows is a lot. January measures at about 7 inches so the finished length would be around 84 inches witch sound like a good size to me, although I’ll probably add a boarder at the end so the edges look cleaner. What color the boarder will be is a big question. . .for another day.
Karabu Creations 