I’m trying to clean up my email. I have 1415 items in my inbox and 585 items in my Sent Items. I don’t like to throw away email because I view it as a record of my life. I throw away the spam and the useless stuff, but I keep the personal correspondence.

I’m trying to clean up my house. My toys are not properly boxed. They are getting bent and broken as they lay in a heap in the closet. My personal memorabalia is also slowly getting destroyed from not being properly stored. And I’m living in a mess.

And I want to be a Jedi knight! No, Master Yoda, I’m not too old to start the training! I think 33-years-old is actually the optimum age. Oh wait, that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, not in this reality.

Oh what a discouraging mess. How do organized people manage to stay organized? I think they are just pretending. You can’t be organized in this life. There are too many things going on. They are just presenting a front.

So I tried to update my garden webpage last night, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t find the names of the bugs I had taken pictures of, and the bugs looked grosser in pictures than they are in real life. I think they’re cute when they’re tiny but when they are huge in a picture, they’re not so cute anymore. For example, the European paper wasps are really pretty with their black and yellow stripes, but they just looked ugly in the pictures. How am I supposed to convince people that bugs are fun when the pictures tell a different story?

We’ll see what I can do…

So what do you do when you can’t sleep because you’re worried about money and bills and life and how the hell am I supposed to plan anything and the Pipkins want us to move to San Antonio but Mom wants us to move to Kentucky but Glenn wants us to stay here and if we move out of Austin we break our lease and pay a horrible amount of money but I can’t find a job in Austin and Matt really wants to try to make the deal with the Italians work but we won’t get any money from the Italians for 2 months at the earliest…… today has not been a good day. In fact, the last week has not been a good week. I feel like I’m on auto-Angel because real Angel who has to deal with emotions has become overwhelmed and has retired to the back room of my mind for a little while. She’s locked herself in and refuses to come out. So I flip on the auto-Angel switch. Finish Cindy’s assignment. Do the dishes. Water the plants. Send out resumes. Automaton.

I’m very tense.

And I can’t sleep.

So I made my Life in the Garden webpage! Of course I did! Isn’t that what everyone does when they’re overwhelmed, tense, nervous, and can’t sleep? It’s what every nerd does. Half the webpages out there are the result of nervous insomnia.

The page is in its infancy so it’s very basic. It will evolve with time. I’m not quite sure what I want to do with it or where I want to take it, but this is a good beginning. It’s at:
http://www.wizardmoon.com/garden/

Now maybe a game of Spider Solitaire and then to bed…

Today is going to be a day of gardening. I have to repot a few of my plants, and everybody needs feeding. And I think I’m going to plant a few seeds! I have lovely chinese lantern seeds and avocado seeds. I just read online that avocados take 8 to 10 years to bear fruit! Oh well. I’ll get my first avocado fruit when I’m 44. 🙂

I’m also going to start my online gardening journal today. I’ve been wanting to do it for awhile. I really love my little “I’m in a rent house so all my stuff is in pots” container garden, so I’m going to start an online journal about it.

Now off to Home Depot….

So I sent three resumes to companies in San Antonio yesterday, and I talked to Mom about perhaps moving to Kentucky or the Virginias and being closer to her. However, and here’s the big However: when I discussed this all with Matt that evening, he didn’t want to move.

News to me.

He was all for moving about a week ago. I’m tired of the Texas summers (although San Antonio is even hotter than Austin) and I haven’t been able to find a job in Austin.

He made some very good points last night though. He said that I would probably quit in a year or so to have children. True. And that we need to be near a major metropolitan area so he would have employment. True.

And then we discussed his contract work that he’s doing right now with the Italians. Even though it’s very unstable, it’s lucrative and he really enjoys it. He wants to ride it out and see what happens.

But how am I supposed to plan with everything being so topsy-turvy? Financial planning, baby planning, house planning… all this is much harder when we don’t know where we’re going to settle or if the next paycheck will be coming.

…. oops and it’s suddenly time to leave for Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones!! Bye.

Okay, one last quick entry, and then I really have to get to work.

I was surfing sites about azalea bonsai, and I ran across an online store that said an azalea bonsai would make a wonderful “living” gift. Lie!!! You shouldn’t give plants as gifts anymore than you should give pets as gifts. They require watering, feeding, repotting, pest control, nurturing. They are just like pets. Plants take time and can be a huge pain in the hiney.

I used to give plants as gifts myself but now I know the truth. I am a budding gardener (he he he, a little pun) and I realize now how much work they are. I enjoy my little garden, but I would never give a plant as a gift now. They almost invariably die.

Just a little word of advice. 🙂

I forgot to mention I bought a baby Azalea tree. The ones that were about 2 feet high were $32, so I got the 1-foot-high $7 version. The 2-feet-high ones were adorable and I thought they would make a wonderful bonsai. So I’m going to try to make an azalea bonsai. Wish me luck because bonsai are incredibly hard to tend! I’ve managed to kill two juniper bonsai in the last four years. I got another juniper bush but I haven’t cut it into a bonsai yet and now I have this azalea. I also collected cypress tree seeds, but I don’t know if they’re any good. They’re in the refrigerator right now. I love cypress trees and I thought they would make beautiful bonsai.

But anyways, we’ll see. The azalea is really cute. 🙂

So I’ve been busy busy busy busy busy. I’ve been running around like a chicken, squawking and flapping my wings, as I try to get a million things done. I’m intimidated, overwhelmed, happy that I’m busy, bummed because I’m too busy.

One of the things I’m doing is watching my dad’s dogs, and while pleasantly thinking about things during one of the drives out to San Marcos (where my dad’s dogs are), I realized that it will never change. I always thought that I would eventually “catch up.” I would have all the chores done and then I could set a normal pace of maintenance. And it dawned on me in the flash of a second, like when you suddenly realize what’s causing a bug in a program, that that will never happen. The very nature of life is that one thing will come after another and I will never “catch up.” That, in reality, there is no such thing as “catching up,” it’s all just “living.”

Well, that’s a new bit of information. I haven’t quite figured out how to work it into my schedule. But I do know now why the Germans are always so grumpy. As a population, they haven’t figured this out yet. They’re still trying to catch up, always feeling like they aren’t working hard enough, and only if they work harder, then everything will fall into place.

Oooooh, you can’t make generalizations about a population like that! you say. Well, my ancestors are German and we still have a strong German heritage in our family, even down to our physical appearances. And everyone knows that it’s okay to make fun of your own race. 😉 Or do you not watch Def Comedy Jam?

So I planted five catnip seeds, two germinated, and only one made it. So the little catnip plant, with only four or five leaves, was finally ready to go out into the front yard with all the big plants and get real sun and wind, not just grow lights and a fan.

Well, for a couple of nights, some kitty in the neighborhood kept knocking over the catnip (and the plants around it), and by the third morning, it was gone!! All that was left was the pot full of soil and the little stick stuck in the soil that read “Catnip.” The plant had been broken off at its roots and some kitty quite happily took off with it. So now I know what will happen if I put catnip outside for the kitties of the neighborhood. They will say “Mmmm, thank you!” and take it away. Perhaps I need a larger catnip plant that the cats can’t take away with so easily.