What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I'm still feeling like crap in advance of travel, as usual.

I order a dehydrator a while back and received it a few days ago. I've just been so blah that I hadn't opened it. However, I hate having a bunch of unopened boxes around, so today I got it set up. And then, the giant lemon that I was going to dry turned out to be rotten. Oh, well. I got another one from the tree and am drying it now. There isn't room to keep the dehydrator in the kitchen, but that's fine. There are spots upstairs.

We've been getting more rain, which is just fine, except that I am feeling gross, so it makes it harder to convince myself to walk. Today, I couldn't get myself to go, so instead I went out and used the scythe. I did yesterday too. Yesterday, I cleaned up the area outside our wall by the street, and today, I trimmed the grass in the yard again. It will die off over the summer, but until then, something needs to be done to keep it under control.

I just found the first caterpillar of the season on my cabbage, so I need to start checking regularly for them. Ugh.

The new Murderbot book is out, so I picked activities today that don't require a huge amount of focus, so that I can just binge listen to it. As a result, this is my most productive day in a long time. I did a ton of little chores that I had been putting off (like watering plants, cleaning the sink, changing the tablecloth on my desk), worked on some larger project (finishing sewing a pair of paints, digging the trench for the gravel under the wall of the raised bed), and did some things earlier than I normally do (like making soup for the next few days). I have a couple more things to do before I start my art time, which will definitely get me to the end of this book and may get me to the end of one of the other books that I'm listening to. Tomorrow, I'll have to get back to all the stuff that I need to do that requires my undivided attention. Oh, and Platform Decay (the book) is fantastic!

After a couple of (quite fun) days of early mornings, I'm really tired. That would be fine if tonight wasn't supposed to be a late night playing Dungeons and Dragons. I think it might be time for a nap.

While keeping the yard under control is constant work, I've got the entire yard usable, mostly. There are spots where I'm not pulling the weird groundcover plants, as they seem mostly inoffensive. I'll have to deal with the weeds and grass that are growing in the same area, but there are no sections of yard that I can't get to because of waist-high grass or out of control nettles. If I can keep this up, I might be able to get the ivy and jasmine under control someday. Thank goodness for the scythe.

My psychologist would like me to get a bit more exercise. She expressed it in the form of steps. I don't want to give up things that are exercise but don't generate steps, which makes sense. However, I keep forgetting to turn on the exercise counter for things like tai chi and gardening. An hour of tai chi is actually a lot of work, but it is too slow to show as lots of steps. Of course, one would think that the heart rate monitor would tell the band that I was exercising, but it seems to not do so well at that. It got readings from before and after, plus one reading from when I was actually working on gardening (which was much higher). However, now that I check the settings, it was on the "check every ten minutes except when exercising" setting, which is probably part of the problem. So, with a better setting, it might do what I want it to.

Well, after saying that I wanted one for quite a while, I finally ordered the components for a drip irrigation system. Hopefully, it will all work out. It was expensive, but not insanely so. Most importantly, I actually ordered it, so now I can stop fretting. It was fine to just say that I wanted one and do nothing when we couldn't travel, but now with the prospect of travelling and then coming home to find that our garden has wilted down to nothing, I finally had the drive to place the order. I'll need to expand it later, but being done for right now counts for a lot.

While my allergies aren't awesome, I had a lovely walk today. While I was out, our 14 bags of gravel were delivered. We now actually have the stuff needed to build the raised bed. Yay! I look forward to getting to work on it.

Wow! I'm tired. I was just fine, and now, foom! Tired. That's okay. I'm pretty sure I've had several rounds of this recently. There is a cloud of dust over us from the Sahara right now, so it is warm and the air quality isn't so good. That definitely makes things worse. In general, though, things are going along okay.

Dancing every morning seems to be helping with my sleep, interestingly enough. I've tried a variety of things to keep from waking up to use the bathroom during the night, and apparently, the answer is to dance around in the morning. I would think that 14 hours later wouldn't make much of a difference, but it does. Because I'm sleeping better, I need to sleep less, which is good too. So, I wake up about an hour earlier than I did before. All very nice. Today, I also discovered that morning dance party means that I need less warm up time when walking. It usually takes me a bit to get up to anything beyond a slow plod. However, today, I zipped right along. We'll see if this continues.

In related news, I've finished with my week of 1980s songs. I'm going to see if I have enough for a week of funk. I might not. Eventually, I'm going to need to start searching out more dance music, which might be for the best anyway, as I've been playing a lot of darkwave on the podcast. A bit more variety is always good. Here's what I've got for Sunday.

This intro and the song that goes with it