on sunflowers

hi. not dead. been meaning to write sooner.
i've been meaning to write sooner for about three months now tbh.
the problem is that every time i'm like "i have writing energy", i have to choose between either using the energy to post here just to say that i am in fact still truckin', or just doing the aforementioned truckin'. i tend to choose the latter.

the substance of the trucking is by and large in the form of writing. i'm writing (and coding) for three alternating projects right now, following the girlish whimsy of my pure heart.
i don't know which of them will finish first or at all, but it's probably one of them
can horses learn to live free again after they've been broken in?

so we've had a handful of things going on-- drama with my mother, suddenly gaining a roommate or two, continuing to try and be financially stable... one of the things that has been going on has been home improvements and learning a lot about the plants growing here.

as a refresher, i'm currently living in my childhood home. after my parents divorced, my father got this place and was in no state to take care of either me or the yard. in an attempt to not have to weedwack, he just doused the entire property in tub after tub of weedkiller each year. i remember the yard being literally nothing but barren, ugly dirt.

everyone who lived here only had awful memories of the place, and no one wanted to be here. the house sat empty for fifteen years before i finally decided that that was stupid, and we moved in. this is our first spring-summer in the house, and the yard is...
so full of everything?

we have pea-plants. there are multiple grapevines. potatoes started growing out of my compost. there's an apple and a cherry tree, neither of which were here in my childhood. it's wild and weedy, but there's so much variety and greenery and different flowers and--

anyway, sunflowers.

so some time ago i was keeping an eye on the free postings in our area and i saw somebody offering free sunflower seeds. i've never reallllly been a huge fan of sunflowers but i thought, they're free, and there's a barren angle of the yard they would like nice in. i'll pull up the old ugly fence, put in a new retaining wall, and plant them in time for growing season.

this gentleman was passing out free seeds, not just in my area, but apparently all over the country as a method of support for ukraine. he gives away the seeds and asks people to donate to a charity effort for them instead. his reasoning: things are rough for everyone right now, so maybe what we need is to sew a symbol of happiness and cheer throughout our communities.

the time to plant them here would have been early june... maybe late july. getting the old fence out took forever, and our neighbors ended up helping us out a lot. the new wall has been hard to build! between heat, mosquitos, and needing to lift a lot of bricks and dig and level the ground... it's taxing!

so i've been doing a little bit each day as i can spare the energy, but as of writing... i still have not finished the wall. i didn't get the ground replaced, and i didn't get the sunflower seeds planted.

but something funny happened. i was digging out the trench and there were some plants in the way. a friend in the community has been helping me identify plants, and i sent him this picture, asking, what is this? i don't want to kill it if i can help it.

and he tells me,
well, that's a sunflower.
and i ??????????????
there's a handful of them, and they're exactly where i wanted to prepare to plant the sunflowers, but i hadn't planted them yet
they just grew there !!!

the above was a few weeks ago. now look !!!

it was a sunflower !!! there's a bunch of them!!! right where i had been trying to dig to build the wall to lay the ground to plant sunflowers !!!! how??? they were not there when we moved in this time last year!!

it's like drawing what you asked for after being told to go fish, only. maybe more metaphorical. i had been feeling pretty bad that i hadn't finished the wall yet! all june i was like ah god i need to go work on the wall, i'm not going to finish in time, i need to go work on it--
and there's just sunflowers there in the first place!!!!!
so i believe in god now
well maybe not like that, but it has been nice to feel okay about conserving my energy and focusing more on other things again.

i mentioned before the prospect of a game based on a dnd campaign i've written. we are beginning the third iteration of that campaign in a few hours from my writing this post, and i had a lot of revisions and edits i wanted to make and get done beforehand.
i haven't finished them all yet, and i've been stressing about that. . .
but then, i do have what i need to go forward. i'm as ready as i need to be. it's not like i haven't done this before.

it's okay. the sunflowers are growing.

we'll talk more about the projects in the future. also coming up: reborn is entering a beta for the 19.6 version which is focused primarily on some cosmetic updates. for anyone interested in participating, we'll talk more about how to do that next time.

also, here's the the charity sunflowers for ukraine selected. just in case.

let's be gentle with ourselves. there's a lot to get through lately, and we might come out the other end better than we expect.