Rested

After a very busy week, E and I went out to dinner last night and I fell asleep before 10 PM. I just woke, after ten and half hours of sleep and I feel rested for the first time in quite a while. (Granted, my fatigue is nothing compared to Lucky_Girl's.)

I'm looking forward to a weekend at home where we do chores around the house, I get to fit in two good runs, and we finish the last winter garden box. We have no social plans and after a week where I went out to lunch on 4 days and we had guests one night, I'm more than excited about the tranquility. I'm glad I saw all of the people I saw this week. I feel very up to date on many of the colleagues I rarely see. But I'm also exhausted. I've always been an introvert who faked extroversion, but I'm finding that as I age, I'm becoming more of an introvert because the extroversion is more exhausting. Perhaps it's because I spend at least half of my typical work day either on the phone talking to people or in meetings talking to people?

One thing I'm really excited about for this weekend (other than finishing the last winter garden box) is putting in some more time with my new book, The California Master Gardener Handbook -- it's a compendium of all the home gardening info that the University of California Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources saw fit to print -- all 702 pages of it. Last night I read all of the entries for the winter vegetables we have planted so far, and a little on the few we're going to plant in the last box (Yay Gourmet Garlic, artichokes, and more onions!). I definitely need to read the sections again, but I was happy to find that so far we haven't done anything too terrible.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished my first gardening book: Square Foot Gardening. It's accessible, and since I literally knew nothing about gardening, I learned quite a bit and used the reference sections heavily. But some of the information is in direct contrast with the commonly held wisdom (not to mention the instructions on the seedling inserts and seed packages). And, I suspect the spacing he recommends often is not enough. For example, Tomato plants just need more than just 1 square foot of space. Period. Also, he suggests one-size-fits all watering techniques, which, with our warm summers, I found we needed to completely ignore if we didn't want our plants to die.

However, I think his goal was to make gardening seem easy (which it is if you don't mind the failure inherent in experimentation) to get more people to try it with simple techniques that eliminate complexity and optimization in favor of simplicity and more modest success -- since I wish more people talked about their gardens at lunch instead of television, if this was his purpose, it's a noble goal!