Tomorrow's cucumbers will eat us all

Tomorrow we go to Jungle Jim's! And the KitchenAid sale. And maybe to see Phoebe's baby, if she's up for it and isn't annoyed that I wrote at the last minute. It's going to be a lot of driving…with rising gas prices, possibly the closest we'll get to a road trip until we move.

Eric went to the doctor and talked about the problems he's having, and has a new prescription and some advice that sounds good to me, including, "Exercise more." So now we both have a reason to get out and walk in the evenings. And in nine days we'll be flying somewhere that will have lots of opportunity for exercise in the form of swimming.

The mothers asked for a list of what they should do at our house while we're gone. "Take in the mail," Eric said.

"Water the plants?" Edith said.

"Nah, I'll water before we go," I said, and I think shocked her. When they were gone I was instructed to water every other day. But I've only got four plants indoors, two desert plants and two shade plants, and the outdoors ones have mostly been trained not to expect me to water them. I admit the papyrus will need to be good and soaked.

I will need them to pick produce in the garden. Yesterday I got a good number of Taxi tomatoes and cherries and one Brandywine, plus four enormous cucumbers that I'd missed because I let them run free through the garden. "They're baseball bats!" Eric said. "They're enormous!" We dropped off most of my harvest with the mothers. We have a ridiculous number of cucumbers in the fridge already, so I'm going to try to be more creative with cucumber salads and such. I'm sure Edith knows to hunt for vegetables, but I'll ask her to be careful anyway, or I'll come home to find the cucumbers have taken over my garden and are holding the tomatoes hostage.

Speaking of plants, I have a polkadot plant on my desk at work with red and white and pink shoots. The white and pink haven't changed much since I bought it but the red has shot upward, doubling its height. I don't know if that means it's grown or if it needs more light than the others. I don't sit near a window, so I was figuring this to be a gamble anyway. Maybe I should bring in a hosta.

I have done pretty much nothing in the crafting and writing areas. I do have an appointment today to meet a friend at Joann to buy fabric so that I can teach her to make a tree skirt. Since I only ever made one before, and it was a quick-and-dirty affair, this might be overweening, but I'm pretty sure it will turn out fine. She says "I want to be you when I grow up," and that's quite the incentive to do things right. Which I guess means I need to stop writing this so I can finish one last work task so that I can sketch out designs and figure out how much fabric we'll actually need.