I need help. The reason I need help is because I am a known plant killer and I’m completely obtuse when it comes to gardening. I know about enough that I used to help plant the seeds way back when my grandmother had a mammoth vegetable garden, and I know how to weed. That’s about the extent of it for me.

Every year I say that I want to make good use of our balcony and then the next thing I know is it’s mid-summer and it’s too late and another year has gone by. I am determined to do something this year but I have no gardening books and most of the gardening websites I’ve looked at are a little overwhelming for someone as clueless as myself. Thus, I turn to you, because surely out of all of you people who read me, someone must know something about this and can explain it in very simple terms, preferably with no more than two syllables per word.

We live on the 4th (and top) floor of our building. Our balcony faces West and it starts getting sun around 11:30 am or noon. From there it gets non-stop sun until sunset. Because we’re on the top floor we don’t even have a tiny bit of shade from another balcony overhead, which is a shame, because that also makes it difficult to sit out there unless it’s early morning or evening. We get a fair amount of wind as well if there’s any breeze because of being high up. Also, I don’t know if this matters much, but we overlook a busy street which means we get a lot of dust. Our windows always look dirty because of that. I have no idea how that will affect plants, so I just thought I would throw it out there.

So basically, here’s what I need: What types of plants would do well when the conditions include a lot of relentless sun, occasionally strong winds, and plenty of dust kicked up from cars zipping by four stories below? Also, and this may be the most important – they should also be forgiving of someone who wants to be enthused about gardening but who probably isn’t and who therefore may occasionally neglect to water them.

I’d really like to plant some tomatoes. From what I understand, I think I can put one plant (or maybe two?) into a large pot. Can tomatoes work well with the conditions I’ve mentioned? How about chrysanthemums? I seem to remember them being fairly sturdy and simple to care for when my parents used to plant them, and they come in lots of nice colors.

Okay. Go forth and advise my novice self with your gardening savvy. With a little prodding I may actually be able to do more than accidentally grow grass after dumping some spilled birdseed into a dirt-filled pot. I desperately want something growing out there this summer and I am determined to avoid having to resort to getting dollar store plastic flowers just because I put it off too long again.

Hayley has been wanting to fly a kite for a long time so the other day George picked up a small one at the dollar store just to test it out. Then, much to Hayley’s disappointment, it poured rain for two straight days after that. On the other hand, I told George he should have gotten her a kite ages ago because putting her to bed was incredibly easy since she was determined to go to sleep: “The faster I go to sleep the faster I can go out with my kite!” It was more exciting than Santa and the Easter Bunny put together.

Today it was sunny and dry so George took her out in the late morning. Breanna and I ended up getting our coats on and heading out to join them and it was a lot of fun. I hadn’t flown a kite since I was about ten years old or so. When Breanna and I got there, George had taught Hayley the basics; there was enough wind that he just had to hold it over his head, let the wind catch a little, and then he would throw it straight up so that Hayley could fly it. She did really well!

The only thing she had trouble with was jerking the string downward sharply enough to pull the kite back up when it would start diving back towards the ground but she managed to keep it up there quite a bit.

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Today I had to take Breanna to the dentist and George’s dad picked us up to take us downtown. In the car, while Breanna slept, he and I inevitably ended up talking about the horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech yesterday (I watched ten minutes of the coverage on CNN and then turned it off because I couldn’t take it anymore). After discussing what could have caused the shooter to do what he did, I mentioned how your perspectives on issues can change over the course of time.

I grew up with guns. Not automatics, not 9 mm guns, but rifles. At my grandmother’s house, we had several different types of rifles and we occasionally went shooting them at our friend’s farm, using targets. We even shot them at the annual turkey shoot on occasion (not shooting AT turkeys, shooting paper targets to WIN a turkey). I was taught to respect them, that they weren’t toys, and I never feared that anyone would use them maliciously. As a result, I grew up thinking that while they could be bad in certain hands, they were okay.

Years later, I don’t feel the same way anymore. I would never have a gun in this home. Never, not in a million years. I would love to be able to go to a gun club and fire someone else’s gun and I would enjoy it, but I will never own one. I grew up to discover that I believe the gun laws are not tight enough, not even up here in Canada where our gun registry is a bit of a joke and even that might fall apart with our current government. I am completely in favor of the various advocacy groups who are trying to appeal to governments for tighter gun laws.

I see things like the shooting here last year at Dawson College, and now at VT, and I wonder why these young kids are getting guns so easily. And then I look at my kids and know they’ll be at school some day too soon, and I worry about who will be sitting behind them in math class, and will that person have a gun at home in a box under the bed. I know you can’t live your life in constant fear and I know that restricted access to guns is not the perfect band aid to the problem but if young civilians weren’t able to get their hands on semi-automatic guns, that would certainly be a starting point.

I hated high school, but for all the crap that went on in those hallways and behind your back, no one shot anyone else. There was one year where a guy one grade ahead of me had bullied a student and eventually ended up in the hospital because his target broke into his house and stabbed him multiple times but that was back in a time when it was shocking to hear about things like that happening. Now it’s still shocking and horrible, but we don’t react the same way – now we react with a response of “not again” because it’s happened so many times in recent years.

I don’t know what the solution is but I do know that I can’t stand up and say guns are okay like I did when I was 16 years old and years away from seeing the same school violence loop over and over again on the nightly news.

On Thursday it snowed, so on Friday Hayley and I went outside and did this:

(She wanted to know if I could leave my scarf there to keep his neck warm. I said he could learn to knit his own damn Gryffindor scarf.)

On Saturday we got up and left home before 10 am to go to the library’s story time and she was disappointed that her snowman was going to melt because the grass was showing again.

And today it rained all day. Which was fine, that’s what Spring is about, April showers for the May flowers blablabla. And then tonight it suddenly turned to snow, thanks to that giant system ripping its way up the East coast, and at 9 :15 pm out my front window it looked like this:

It’s 12:15 am now, three hours later and the snow is three times as deep and heavy out there. It’s coming down so heavily that you would swear it’s mid-winter. Supposedly the winds are going to gust up to 80km/hr tonight which will pretty much make any driving hell and they’re advising people to call the airlines because flights are being grounded all over the place. Blargh.

I would say I’m moving south but they’re all getting crazy weather too. Somewhere in Florida they had a tornado today.

Dear Al Gore,
Please send help. Thanks.
Your fan,
Sherry who is fed up of this stupid weather, global warming sucks, yay green.

This is just bloody depressing. For conversion purposes, 25-35 cm is the equivalent of 10-15 inches.

[Insert a string of profanities of your choice here]

I think that true mom confessions is one of the best sites out there right now.

Remember how Carlton on Fresh Prince couldn’t dance to save his life? I just found out the actor actually could and he was the kid dancing and dressed like Michael Jackson in that Pepsi commercial. Oh, the good old days when Michael Jackson was still cool and not a total joke.

For future reference: .The Blog | Green Options

When the Parent Bloggers Network was looking for people to review a book called Let’s Get Ready For Kindergarten! I immediately replied with a yes. Hayley is so excited about going to school in the fall and is disappointed that September is still so far away, so I thought it would be fun for her and useful as well to see what sorts of things she can do to prepare for Kindergarten.

The Let’s Get Ready for Kindergarten book (and its follow-up about first grade) was created by Stacey Kannenberg, a mother who was disappointed to find out that although the curriculum for Kindergarten has changed a lot (remember when it was half days full of singing and playing with toys? It’s more in-depth now) there were very few resources available for parents who wanted to help their child gear up for the leap into school.

It turns out that Hayley is more than ready for Kindergarten. The book covers things like colors, shapes, numbers, seasons, opposites, things that are alike, the alphabet, and so on. There’s also a place for them to learn their full name, phone number, and address. Hayley’s known all those things except her address for quite some time now. However, she generally only counts up to about 20 or so, and so the fact that the book goes up to a hundred has inspired her to practice those, since she never had much interest. It also teaches them how to count by fives.

Also, although she knows most of the stuff covered in the book, she likes flipping through it and affirming that to herself. I guess she’s going to be a nerd like me, excited about school supplies and “textbooks”. It also made me feel a little better about the inevitable start to her school career, because I know I’m not just tossing her blindly into something where she’ll be lost and bewildered.

Now if only Stacey Kannenberg could write a book for the parents, perhaps titled, “Let’s Get Ready to Put Our Kids On the School Bus Without Crying That Our Little Ones Are Growing Up”, I’ll be all set for Kindergarten too!

I seriously want to make the tote bag from Write, Mama. Write’s dish towel tote tutorial. I wish I had a sewing machine because it would be a LOT faster!