i thought i'd be done gardening by now

Back when I was first thinking about gardening and what I wanted to do with my flower-beds, I had the brilliant idea of concentrating on perennials.

It made perfect sense. Perennials come back every year. So I'd spend a year (maybe two -- three tops) planting. But then I'd be done. These perennials, by dint of their awesome perennialness, would keep coming back and the garden would soon be taking care of itself.

Well, I've learned a few things since then.

For starters, a garden full of perennials doesn't just take care of itself. I mean, it does, but not in the way that I want. Plants encroach on each other. Weeds work their way in. Boundaries disappear. Even if I don;t have to replant everything each year, there's plenty of work to do. Not that I'm good at doing it. There's plenty of work that my garden needs and isn't getting.

But even if perennials did take care of themselves, there are always new reasons emerging that I can't just kick back and let it do its thing.

Plans change

Blair and I keep coming up with new ideas about what we want to do. "We should keep this area as grass." "No, let's put daylilies there!" "We should put a path here." "Let's reroute the path!" There are always stones being moved as we redraw boundaries between lawn and flowerbed. And unforeseen circumstances change things as well. As an example, a friend stayed here last fall and decided to build a stairway into the front lawn. The part where we're always walking downhill from the front door to the driveway. Well, the stairway needs flowers around it. And so, this spring we've been filling in the area around the stairs with daylilies, hostas, some creeping flox. And we still have to put down a slate walkway from the top of those stairs, along the rerouted border of the flower bed, up to the front walk.

Embrace annuals

Yeah, I know I said that I focus on perennials. But there are some annuals that I like as well. Coleus is tops among those. But calladium and canna are nice too. So, despite my vow to stick to perennials, I find myself working with annuals as well.

All those daylilies

There are over 80,000 varieties of daylilies out there. I don't have all of them. Seriously, though, I keep saying that I'm done buying new daylilies. Then I get to a LIDS meeting and or plant sale, and there are all these great looking varieties. And then, when I buy new ones, I have to find places to put them. And buy markers and labels for them. And, no doubt, some of these markers will get dameged, so some of these daylilies will end up unlabelled, leaving me to replan and replant and...well, you get the picture.

So, yeah...years after I was sure I'd be done gardening, I'm still...gardening.

memorial day weekend part iii: close to home

After two days of Stack-Up events for the Memorial Day weekend, on the actual Memorial Day holiday itself, we went to the Jamaica Estates gatehouse for its annual rememberance event.

The gatehouse -- so called because it was originally a literal gatehouse guarding the entrance to Jamaica Estates, the structure is now (and has been since before my childhood) a memorial to the Jamaica Estates residents who gave their lives in World War II.

Ed Toriello, the President of the Jamaica Estates Association, opened with a touching, poignant speech about the dedication shown by our military personnel -- ready to give their lives for the good of their country. This speech was the best of Ed. After that, a dozen or so students from the Immaculate Conception School read biographis of the soldiers whose names are memorialized in the gatehouse.

It was a good reminder -- especially after yesterday's barbecue -- of what Memorial Day is all about.

memorial day weekend part ii: vfw

Our second engagement of the holiday weekend was Sunday's barbecue and pig roast at the Rocco Moretto VFW Post in Astoria.

As with the American Legion Hall (which we went to on Satutrday), the VFW Hall is a place we've worked with through Stack-Up and the Mission Continues. We were there for a Super Bowl party in February (spoiler alert: The Eagles won), and have since gone back to man a table at one of their Queens Craft Brigade events.

I had to sit out this event, since I was feeling a bit under the weather. But Ethan was there making contacts for Stack-Up.

memorial day weekend part i: american legion

It was a busy Memorial Day weekend.

On Saturday it was the reopening of American Legion Hall 18 in Weehawken, NJ. We'd first gotten involved with the Hall several months ago. Apparently the Hall had fallen into disrepair over years of neglect. They needed volunteers to help get it ready for reopening. The Newark Platoon of The Mission Continues helped round up volunteers to get it cleaned up and painted. We made a Stack Up event out of helping.

Since then, we've stayed in touch. We had planned one event with them for the month of the military child. That fell through because they had other commitments, but we are still working with Lucy Del Gaudio, the Vice Commander of the Hall, to have an event there this summer.

At any rate, the grand reopening was an emotional day for many of the area vets, with speeches by local politicians. To our surprise and delight they honored us, calling us up to receive a certificate of appreciation for the work we did for them.

Getting called up was quite the surprise. When we were invited to this event we were told that they were planning something nice. But we had no idea. It's funny how volunteering with one group brought us to another and then another. It's truly an example of the Hebrew expression:

בדרך שהולך מוליכין אותוץ

And it makes me really proud of Ethan, since all of our involvement -- with Stack-Up, with The Mission Continues, with the American Legion Hall -- is due to him.

cinema history class: autopsy

Session: Giallo Month II, Week 4
Movie: Autopsy (1975)
Directed by Armando Crispino
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Rome seems to be beset by a series of suicides, and a sexually hung-up forensic pathologist is having trouble processing it all. Of course, not everything is as it appears. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
Plotwise, this was pretty much your standard giallo. There are some killings. There's some blackmail. And there are many red herrings to keep you on your heels as you try to figure out what's going on and who the killer is. There were no masks on the killer to add mystery and excitement, but there were plenty of odd grotesque touches thrown into make up for it.

Sadly, though, the grotesque touches seemed disjointed from the rest of the movie, making it seem like an odd grafting job. The weird hallucinations at the beginning? They were completely unnecessary. The drinking of the bidet water? Gratuitous. And the suicides that start things off? Unless you're going to say they're needed to put all the fake suicides in context, they serve no real purpose.

Another thing that annoyed me was the way movie kept cutting to a stylishly effects-laden shot of solar flare activity. I guess that kind of makes sense, since the Italian title of the movies translates as "Sunspots." But that doesn't really make any sense.

But, while this movie had some weaknesses, it wasn't a total loss. The plot was kind of interesting, though it lacked a sense of tension. And the score, by Ennio Morricone was really good.

Ratings:
Me: 6.8
Christina: 6.8
Dave: 9.2-9.3
Ethan: 4
Joe: 9.5
Sean: 2 out of 4