A Little Spring Colour

This week: Come for the flower photos and the links to the livestream recordings, stay for the "doctor, doctor" jokes that I just edited in!

Our magnolia tree is in bloom right now, and I'm making a special effort to relish it, because last year it feels like the blooms came and went in a flash. It always surprises me how early they flower, and as soon as I get used to seeing them around, they're gone.

It's a "Royal Star" magnolia if I remember correctly. I picked it up in 2019, for $10 from a City of Vancouver tree sale. It was a little tiny thing then, has survived a transplanting with aplomb, and is currently a big, healthy snowball among the green of our back garden.

The photos above are actually from three years ago, but my phone reminded me about them, and in the spirit of the season I thought I would share them.

I am no gardener, but I have come to like it. If something goes wrong in the garden, I don't sweat it. If a plant fails to grow or thrive, maybe I failed to provide the right conditions, or maybe natural circumstances simply didn't unfold in its favour. Either way, I shrug, move on, try something different, or try the same, again, but more carefully.

Maybe I like that the stakes are low. Maybe I like that it's forgiving, and that the rules can be fuzzy. Maybe it's because gardening is so tactile and tangible, unlike the tech issues that give me a wholly unreasonable amount of anxiety. Maybe I like that I'm not trying to rely on self-interested strangers, like the tech support at Patreon who suggested that if their text editor was laggy for me, I should update my web browser, which means updating my OS, despite the fact that the internet is littered with web-based text editors that work perfectly fine on my system.

Baffling.

If you need me, I'll be outside transplanting skimmias. They'll get more shade in their new spot, so they'll be happier once they recover from the transplanting process. And for whatever reason, even if they all die, it won't gnaw away at my stomach the way tech nonsense does.

[ ^ Tulips, also from our garden, also from 2021. ]

I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue

While flatting, I've been listening to a near-continual diet of the BBC radio comedy show I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. Among many wordplay and pun-based highlights, may I direct your attention to this one particular game they play (link should go to the right bit), wherein Colin Sell (the show's pianist) plays a snippet of a familiar song and the panelists try to guess what familiar bit of humour is being alluded-to by the song.

The late Jeremy Hardy drops in two spectacular jokes, which I have transcribed below. The first:

Okay, so there's a funeral parlor, and a wife goes in the morning before her husband's funeral, she goes down to see her husband for the last time and he's all nicely laid out in the coffin, and the funeral director says, "what do you think, madam?"

And she says, "oh no, oh gosh, you've put him in a blue suit!"

"Is that a problem?"

"Well, he hated blue, and we've given all his other suits away to charity, I don't know what to do."

And the funeral director says, "leave it with me, the funeral is in the morning, I'll try and sort it out."

And she pops back in before the funeral in the morning and says, "were you able to sort it out?"

And he says, "well, bizarrely — you're not going to believe this — another lady came in to see HER husband, and HE was in a GREY suit, and she said, 'oh no, my husband loved BLUE suits,' so all we had to do was swap the heads!"

And the second:

A man goes to the doctor, and the doctor says, "I'm afraid I've got very bad news. Your condition is terminal."

And the man says, "oh no, how long have I got?"

The doctor says, "ten…"

The man says, "what, months? Weeks?"

"…nine… eight… seven…"

What a treasure, both the show and Jeremy Hardy.

Live Streams!

I did those live streams I promised! If you want to watch them back,
here is the first, and
here is the second!

I'm not sure when I'll get another chance to stream — this week is mostly Kiddo Time for me, as is the next, and I have taxes to do, too. And it turns out that streaming takes more time and effort than I hoped, almost like it's its own job.

When I got accepted to art school, I shared my enthusiasm with my high school art teacher. He discouraged me from trying to work a job-job at the same time. School was a job, he told me. "And you don't half-ass two jobs," he said. "Whole-ass one job."

Now, between PDAP and Our Kiddo, I feel like I'm already whole-assing two jobs, and I suspect live streaming might actually be a third job, and I just don't have that much ass to go around.

So we'll have to see how it goes. I'm keeping all my hardware and I'm going to try again when it makes sense. I'd love to stream some inking process!

For now, though, it's time to…

Colour!

Flatting is done!

Time focus on finishing some pages!

Just as soon as I move some skimmias.

- - - - -

Until next week,
I remain,
tactile and tangible,

TC