Sunday 04/16/2023
Watering the plants I finished my next to last quart bottle of VF-11. This is a crisis. VF-11 is a plant food. We have been putting a tablespoon of VF-11 in each watering can before watering our plants for decades. Plants have been thriving on this as their only input (other than soil obvs.) for decades.
Last time I went to order more (sometime in 2020), there was a problem, they were out of the gallons but filled my order with quart bottles. Now although the website is still up and looking good, none of the items you can “shop” for are in stock. Supposedly they are stocked at Lowes and Home Depot. Well, no; Lowes website has it but says it is “no longer carried”, and Home Depot has it but says it is out of stock. Among the retailers they list was Summerwinds nursery, and anyway I have been meaning to replace a couple of plants, so I went on down there. They had no VF-11 of course, and in fact, no liquid plant food at all, which surprised me. How can retailers miss the convenience of adding a little liquid to a watering can? As opposed to stuff you have to dig into the soil.
I bought a couple of bright geraniums which I will have to plant soon, anyway.
During the day I did a little more work on the model. It has taillights and parking lights now.
These parts are tiny. The yellow lenses in the parking lights are less than an eighth of an inch across, ditto the little red “bullet” taillight lenses. Naturally I dropped them. Three different times one of the little MFs leaped out of my fingers and of course didn’t stay on the desk. Down on my stomach with a flashlight looking for a weensy little fleck of chrome or red plastic.
Main activity today was to drive to Oakland for a house concert with my favorite local band, Dirty Cello.
I like house concerts. Where else do you get to sit practically in the musicians’ laps?
I bought one of their CDs, “Dirty Cello Smokes the Sixties”, with Rebecca’s versions of “Purple Haze” and “For What It’s Worth” and “Gimme Shelter” and so on. Naturally I stuck it in the car — yes my car is old enough they were still putting CD players in them — and drove back down the freeways and across the San Mateo bridge singing along with the oldies. It felt really good, just buzzing along in light traffic, looking at the water and the green hills and singing loudly. The car is almost as good as the shower for singing.
I think I need a road trip.
Codgerville 