Luke O. @loppear@social.coop

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"Pedal Powered Lawn Mower" hasn't been the most fruitful of rabbit holes I've been down this week.

In reasons I'm always cautious walking back into the #swamp: just saw two big (1m, and chunky) water #snakes. Common water snakes (non-venomnous) or cottonmouths? I don't need to bother them enough to find out. So fast dancing across the water away from me.

Spider with a whole lot of baby spiders on its back - when it first moved, I thought it was a small toad! Guess it's a dark fishing spider, here in US GA, but paging @nev

A perfectly wonderful weekend away in Asheville, with friends old and new and happy muddy kids, great weather between rain coinciding with naps. Ended serendipitously with a crowd from Asheville Movement Collective dancing in the sunny field next to our playground sendoff; started at Firestorm Co-op Bookstore, an inspiring blend of anarchist mission/material and curated broadly-minded bookstore. Wild invasive capitalist growth too, for sure, find some human-soil connection wherever you are.

Thumbs up to good people.

I rearranged my bookshelves and I have 3 shelves of books I haven't read yet, and despite awareness of this for many years, I keep putting more #books on hold at my library than I can read. I am at least as excited by the books on my shelf, but they have no due date interrupting me. Maybe if my partner donated any I hadn't read after a year? But she'd never go for that, we're enabling each other in our unread book addictions...

What's our #ethics policy on not killing poisonous snake hatchlings (that'd be illegal in this state anyways, but tis the season) and spiders (looking at you black widow in the mailbox), but just transporting them a mile down the road to the roadside field covered in primary election signs? #askingforafriend

#gardening update early May in central Georgia trying Perilla as a summer heat tolerant green (mostly inspired by a recipe that's quesdillas with the tortilla replaced with battered perilla leaves?), these were slow to start (early Feb indoors) but starting to get big now. We've also got 5 varieties of basil out now - a Greek, Genovese, Thai, Holy, and Mrihani, we'll see!

#gardening update early May in central Georgia. I probably planted these pumpkins (rouge vif d'etampes) early in March, flowers appeared this week and it is going to take over that end of the garden. I've always tried pumpkins in the less-deer-proofed field and had no luck, so go head and take over!

#gardening update early May in central Georgia. Tomatoes started indoors between Jan and Feb, planted outdoors Mar 20 (a little dicey, an April 1 frost is common but didn't hit this year), set fruit in the last two weeks and now getting halfway to big... (these in front are Cherokee Purple from seed I saved from some my mom grew last year)

A surprising invigorating week of running into other folks who are either new to the area and #homeschooling or are deciding to homeschool this year, and I'm like hey us too, and then I realize I do not have the next set of responses and prompts down at all to connect and evoke a common set of principles or motivations. (This may in fact be because we don't have common ground in our isolationist stances, idk, but has been both secular and x'ian families.) #facilitation is ruuuusty.

Late reminder that WWOZ is streaming NOLA Jazz Fest 2022 selections this weekend and next, live Ellis Marsalis tribute on now is superb.

Oh! Folks' "digital gardens" trace back to Bernstein's Hypertext Garden Paths and Caulfield's The Garden and The Stream (on themes of organization and personal maintenance - took me a while to find the #indieweb page on Commonplace Books as a further origin)

Surprised me, where the inspiration has always been Mister Sellars Garden in Tad Williams' Otherland, with those overtones of bots and bugs and beetles and pollination and vines and layering propagation.

Last year's swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) returned, so we put a bunch of seeds from them and others (Asclepias syriaca) from a stop in the U.P. in the fridge for a month, and planted them in flats a week ago, and despite having started a lot of seeds this year, seeing these germinate over the last 2 days has been really gratifying. Perhaps partly because we saw one #monarch caterpillar at the very end of the season, after there were no leaves left to feed on. Dozens of plants soon, dude!

Lavender is also in full bumblebee-pleasing bloom, and for the first year I am attempting to harvest a few bunches. Will probably hack these bushes back a ways attempting to propagate them. Or justified by attempted propagation. Anyways, buzzing beauty.

Looking at this native azalea we got from the arboretum plant sale 3 years ago that decided to show us its #florespondence for the first time this week.

In the mode of jwz's 19A0s "the eh-tees" timeline divergence theory, I would like to christen the 202Xs timeline dissolution experience "the twixt".

Sitting here flossing my teeth and factory resetting electronics, and I've got a whole lot more flossing left to do.