Daily Photo: Week Four (Patreon)

Monday, January 22

Just'a girl, trompin' along in her yellow chicken boots in her winter garden at dusk.

Tuesday, January 23

Lemony Snicket (my lemon tree) has a moderately bad infestation of scale. This happens regularly, and normally I stay on top of cleaning her leaves when those sticky blobs appear, but the this time I just... didn't. For weeks. And now all her leaves are coated in residue which will attract mold or something and some of the insects themselves are big enough to see. So, enough is a enough, I thought, and I drug her into the better light so I could scrub down her leaves and branches. I didn't get them all- there's so many!- but I made a good dent and I'm inspired to finish because she has her first tiny white flower buds forming for the first time in a long, long time.

Wednesday, January 24

For all the waterproof layers I put on over my shoes, my pants, my coat, you'd think I'd stay somewhat dry from the rain, but no, no I do not. I came home absolutely soaked.

Thursday, January 25

Laptop Zoom call kitchen exercise! The cans of soup by my leg are my dumbbells for arm exercises.

Friday, January 26

This is Tig's Peeky Hole. It was a jagged, partially-removed board that we noticed Flapjack used as a shortcut in and out of our backyard, and also just a spot to sit and watch the passersby. Matt sawed off the jagged bit so it left a clean slot for him to pass through- and it turns out he wasn't the only one. The Peeky Hole was in wide use for all the various fauna of the neighborhood, from cats to squirrels to raccoons to the coyotes who wound up killing him. When we were ready to bring home a new cat, we put her on a leash and put chicken wire over the Peeky Hole. She loves it (the hole, not the leash). She'll sit there for as long as I'll tolerate, shivering in the cold or the rain while she keeps watch over that side street and all the creatures who use it. I'll give her leash a gentle tugtug to warn her that I'm ready to move on and she'll hunker herself down closer to the ground, willing herself to weigh more so I can't tear her away. Sometimes I come out in the morning and the chicken wire has been wrenched away, practically folded in half from an animal (coyote?) plowing full-tilt into it during the night. I bend it back into shape and replace it onto the nails in the fence that hold it up over the Peeky Hole.

Saturday, January 27

Me 'n' Tig. Tig 'n' me. Coupl'a pals. Pals in the garden! Garden Pals.

(Tig's on the ground, to the left of my foot, head behind the bottom stair)

Sunday, January 28

Lucy Bellwood called me up and was like "Hey, let's work out" so I set up my laptop and we both played the same exercise video at the same time and worked out for an hour, her in California, me in Oregon. It's something we started doing during the pandemic but as the world has opened up again we've kinda fallen off from our online co-workout schedule, since we're not, you know, literally locked in our houses all day any more. Anyway. I like my friends. I like working out with them even though we're a million miles away from each other. I like regular workouts that include kegel exercises, because those are important muscles too and it's not exclusively a sex thing 😤

(...........................aaand release)

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I went ham on sharing bonus pictures into the image gallery on this post, btw, so if you're reading this in your email you should actually click through to see the rest of the photos.

Oh! Oh my god. I just realized this was the last day of the month?? It's now February as I post this??? Fuck, oh shit, I feel like I should have some reflection on the whole month here. What lessons did I learn? What experiences really stuck with me? What challenges were challenging? How have a grown over the first month of the year 2024?

Well, my kegel muscles are probably a little bit stronger. At least I've got that goin' for me.

Check back next January to see if I do this* again!

*(A month of Daily Photos, not kegel exercises)

-February Erika