I just posted this on Fedi:
It’s not just my time — the thing that I’m really selling to my employer is my attention span. I do my job, and my chores around the home, and that’s it. No juice left for “side projects” or hobbies right now. (I’m optimistic that it will get a bit easier when my youngest is out of daycare and in regular school, but that’s few years off.)
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve opened up a text editor to write something that I wanted to post here — some thought that I just feel like I absolutely need to get out into the world — and I completely lost steam after a paragraph or two. Or the times that I filled a document with my opinions and though, “you know, I ought to research this before writing about it”, and then abandoning the whole thing because I managed to make it homework. I guess I’m glad to have spared the world some of my half-baked opinions, at least.
Yesterday was Earth Day, a Saturday, and I happened to scrounge a couple hours to work on my… well I’m not sure what to call it. I definitely don’t have a “lawn”, but I wouldn’t presume to call it a “garden” either — not yet anyway. Calling it a “yard” obscures the fact that half of it is a hill that’s nearly too steep to stand on. But I have a house now, and it’s on a tiny lot of land, and I’m currently in the process of getting to know the volunteer plants that have exploded from the sandy (and rocky) soil over our uncharacteristically wet winter. I don’t plan to undertake any major gardening until I’ve had a few seasons to see how everything responds to different temperature and moisture conditions.
Now that I have things growing in places that were literally bare ground when I moved here, I’m being careful not to kill anything off entirely. But I do have to cut some things back to keep them from taking over everything. It’s pretty amazing how effective plants are at transforming their environment to suit themselves — I can easily compare the moisture retention of the ground around my home to my neighbor’s, and it’s like we live in totally different climates. As a long-time apartment dweller (and life-long renter) I have so much to learn about gardening and plant-care, but I’m glad to be getting started.