where i've been

I've been riding my bicycle--my new bicycle! It is a bicycle with gears; I've been riding a single gear for over a year and distances and hills proved to be a little strenuous with her, but she is still my baby. my new gear bike is a Trek Portland (last year's model. The store I bought her from had a frame my size and had marked it down nearly $500; I could not pass. I call her burnt cause of her color.



I've put 314 miles on burnt in less than three weeks and most of those miles are from commuting to and from work and tooling around both the towns that I spend most of my time in--Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor.

I've also have been tending to raising up some plants in the back bedroom. I have a shitload of tomatoes ready to go, some cucumbers, a small variety of chilis and habaneros, parsley, bachelor buttons, and zinnias. Plus a tray of plants I bought from my favorite non-profit Growing Hope that I am just now ready to put in the ground (we've had a real spring; one with cool, cool nights and brisk sunshiny days). This tray includes fennel, cilantro, chamomile, and basil and some dinosaur kale and another kale from my friend A who runs Growing Hope.

Plus I have lots and lots of lettuce seeds (though one of my packages was just straight up empty when I opened it) and green beans and peas and beets (which I am getting in to the ground too late, but oh well).

Besides tending to my veggie gardens, I've also been trying to boost up our various perennial gardens (we have one in front that is shady, a small one along side of the north side of our house that gets minimal sun, one in the very back that needs more pea gravel for the paths and some massive weeding and mulching, and another on the south side of the house that leaves something to be desired.

But yesterday, I went to my sister's house (this house was the house my mother grew up in, and so it has all of my grandmother's gardening work etched into the yard). My sister is not a gardener; in fact, her yard--formerly my grammy's amazing garden--has gone to weed. So, my sister is converting this potentially gorgeous yard back to sod:(. But, I drove downriver yesterday and met my ma and grammy there and went to town digging up my grammy's treasured perennials. I claimed two bleeding hearts, four ferns, one woodrose, a slew of hollyhocks, some checkered lillys, an astilbe, a hearty geranium, a naked lady, a large hyacinth, and some ground cover that has dainty pink flowers on it. I dug em all up and brought them home and planted them all in the ground and now my body is sore.

Speaking of all of this planting. We tried three times last week to make kk pregnant. I have lost faith in this DIY process, but I am trying to stay positive for her even though for some reason i think the sperm is just not sticking.

We've got a good, good woman on our side, now. She is a midwife who does IUIs and sperm washing and all that stuff. We were going to try that all this time around, but kk ovulated earlier than we thought she would, so all of the timing for the jiz, the wash, the kid sitting, and the IUI process was askew. But, K finally has a script to get her progesterone tested and she will work this out next week.

so, here's to waiting yet again and getting my hopes up even though that feels ridiculous; planting things in the grounds; and riding bicycles often!