Welcome to Haze and Smoke

The past few weeks have been hot and hazy with air quality warnings asking people to limit travel. I’ve mostly stayed inside (though I finally mowed the lawn today) and set up my dad’s old air purifier to keep the air nice in the house.

In the middle of all of this, I thought my cat might have asthma. Asthma in cats isn’t rare, but it is tricky (and expensive) to treat. Thankfully, Wilhelmina does not have asthma; she has a sinus infection. The vet recommended getting a humidifier. I asked if that was really a given the time of year and where we live. The vet then suggested I keep Wilhelmina in the bathroom while I showered. 

She does not enjoy this treatment.

The haze started getting bad around the 4th of July. Fireworks were going off all week prior to the Independence Day celebrations which put tons of smoke into the air. There ended up being rolling thunderstorms on the 4th, which got some of the smoke out of the air. 

It still wasn’t easy to breathe. I nearly missed having an inhaler of my own.

This past weekend, Canadian wildfires has sent smoke into my area. It’s a bit mind boggling to think how far the smoke has to travel. The worst of the fires are in Ontario (between 600 to 1,000 miles away from my current location). I am no where near Ontario, yet a thick blanket of grey-white haze has settled over my area. 

It was eerie traveling on some of the backroads through Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania on Friday. If I hadn’t known it was midday in July, I’d have thought it was a morning in November. I could barely see the mountains as I drove up route 15. They were dark grey blobs rising up to meet a lighter grey sky. 

It could have been the start of a horror novel or old fairy tale.

Things began to clear up yesterday with the rain (and the threat of tornadoes close to where I was staying). I finally saw some blue sky, too.

However, some of my family was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the entire time it was just smoky haze. My aunts said it got so bad at times that they couldn’t see across Lake Independence (it’s a small lake near Big Bay, MI). Granted they were much closer to the fires, but nowhere near where they were actually burning - they’d have had to cross Lake Superior for that.

My sibling sent me this picture from Big Bay, MI.

This isn’t the first time smoke from Canadian wildfires have drifted over the northeast. A few years ago, I remember waking up to an orange sky. It looked like dawn had just broken over the horizon, except it was several hours after the sun had risen. Pictures from New York City had looked apocalyptic. 

More and more wildfires are likely to breakout in the coming years. In winter of 2025, Los Angeles had huge fires break out all over the surrounding areas directly killing at least 31 people and indirectly causing the deaths of over 400 (at least according to Wikipedia). Australia has also seen increasingly intense fire seasons that make international news every year.

Natural wildfires are going to happen. In fact some wildfires are healthy for certain environments. They clear out old dead brush and encourage new growth. 

However, wildfires have been getting more problematic due in part to climate change and human actions. Hotter summers with less rainfall leads to drier areas perfect for fires to spread quickly. And though wildfires can be caused by lightening strikes, the vast majority are caused by people.

Some of these fires are accidental. Someone might now out a camp fire properly or set off fireworks when they shouldn’t or have a gender reveal party that includes more pyrotechnics than necessary. Others are intentionally set.

I’ve seen a fire be started by someone. One 4th of July, probably over two decades ago, I was setting off sparklers for my neighbors (my parents usually had a party on the 4th at our house) and being extra careful as was my responsibility - though it was probably questionable that I had even been the one to set them off. We wrapped up not long after sunset and headed inside. About a half hour later, one of my neighbors came running up to our house (we lived at the top of a hill) asking if we had a fire extinguisher. While my mom went to go get ours, my dad and I went outside to see the fire. The trees in my neighborhood’s were set ablaze higher than the house.

My mom comes out with the fire extinguisher and someone (I will probably never remember who) said something along the lines of “that's not going to be much help.”

At least the fire department had already been called before the neighbor came up to our house. Bottle rockets were the cause of the fire. We’d seen a few going off nearby and one likely landed in the trees in my neighbor’s backyard. My dad had never allowed us to have bottle rockets or anything that shot up into the air for that matter because of the woods that surrounded our houses. If the wind had been a little worse or the trees a little drier, the whole neighborhood could have gone up.

Thankfully, the fire was quickly put out.

I’ve only ever seen the aftermath of one natural fire in New Jersey. My favorite hiking area had been struck by lightening and it was quickly contained. They closed the trains closest to the damaged area for a month or two (I don’t fully remember). When the trains reopened, I remember how much the whole area still smelled like camp fire and how much the trees had been charred. The fire had turned dead trees and plants to ash, but the ones that survived only had a few scorch marks. 

Both of these fires could have easily become huge problems under different circumstances, but firefighters were quick to prevent their spread. I was taught from an early age to be respectful of the wilderness and to pay attention to the risk of fires. Smoky the Bear taught me that only I could prevent forest fires.

So to end this post, remember to check the fire risk levels before lighting any fires outdoors. Please don’t set off fireworks without training or a license. And for the love of your future children, keep gender reveal parties to smaller announcements - a colorful cake is just fine…or a piñata. 

Wildfires are likely to continue to disrupt our lives. You can be prepared and have an evacuation plan, you can stay inside to avoid the smoke, and you can just not light a fire when the area is too dry. Heck, you can even become a firefighter - a couple of the kids I used to babysit are now firefighters (with kids…good gracious time has flown by).

Stay safe out there.

Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you like hearing from me.

Welcome to Faded Denim Pride

Happy Pride!

I haven't been super active this month celebrating. Work is unusually busy and personal writing has been hard to accomplish on my personal time. I did briefly go into DC last week, but I was there to celebrate the first day of summer at the Smithsonian. I haven't even watched "Angels in America" (mostly because I have no idea where my DVDs are - and no I won't rent or buy it online). I have been reading Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, which is an updated take on Carmilla  - one of the earliest examples of vampires and sex (particularly feminine sexuality) in the Western cannon.

However, there was one item I recalled that I wanted to look up for Pride.

Several months ago, I published a blog post featuring my Antarctica travel journal for 11 November, 2025. Within that entry, I included the following paragraphs: 

"We sat with W.A.R, Su, and SN at lunch. I again had a sandwich with salad. We talked a bit about LGBTQIA+ history. Su had gone to Virginia Tech and were part of the Denim Protest. The LGBT+ alliance and allies wore denim in solidarity for gay rights during a week in January 1979. At the time, the school and community retaliated against the students. Virginia Tech recently celebrated the 45th anniversary."

I recall thinking about how it might make an interesting blog post for Pride Month. Fast forward six months, and I am sitting down to write this post. I go to look up the Denim Day Protest and I get barely anything. The key words Denim Day are most often associated with an event in April that raises awareness on sexual assault. 

I tried a couple of different search options and even used AI (ugh!) to help aid my search. Not even a wiki page popped up. 

The one of the few webpages that I saw mention it was a post on the Virginia Tech Alumni Relations site. It confirms that between January 15-19th, 1979, a small number of Gay Student Alliance members wore all denim and that they "endured ridicule, taunting, verbal and physical assaults."

The post was from 2019 or the 40th anniversary of the original protest. 

I did a little more digging and was able to find a timeline of LGBTQ+ History at Virginia Tech which includes a little more information on the Denim Day Protest. The website has transcripts to interviews from people who participated and records of responses to the protest.

I'm disappointed that I hadn't written more of that conversation down. I remember that she went into great detail about what lead up to the protest and the community's and school's brutal response to the handful of students who were trying to live their lives. She had explained why they had chosen denim and what it meant to the community in the 1970s.

I didn't record any of it. I thought there'd be more information on the Internet. Wikipedia has an article on everything. Why wouldn't it have an article on this one protest?

At least there is an archive being created on the LGBTQ+ history at Virginia Tech. I can read what other people remember from 40 years ago that I wasn't able to capture from one conversation at the bottom of the world. 

But the limited information is still disheartening. 

Part of why there might not be as much information is that a lot of LGBTQ+ history from before the 1990s has been lost. Between differing ideas on what it meant to be LBGTQ+ through the centuries (see the ancient Greeks and Romans for some of the best examples), relatives burning queer family members' personal writings to prevent scandals, and the huge loss of a recent generation to the AIDs pandemic, LGBTQ+ history is a patchwork quilt eaten by moths. There are those who are working to dig into LGBTQ+ history and preserve it for future LBGTQ+ people (because despite what some may think, queer people have always existed and we will continue to exist without any regard to social propriety). 

However, LGBTQ+ history, like other vulnerable groups' histories, is always on the cusp of being suppressed. In 1933, The Institute of Sexology was targeted by the newly elected German government (three guesses as to who was their leader and the first two don't count). During it's just over 20 years in existence, the Institute collected and researched LGBTQ+ history. They recognized transgender and intersex individuals (though by an outdated terms) along with educating people on sexual and reproductive health.

Everything was destroyed on May 6th, 1933. The loss of research and history is still being felt.

And it's not just LBGTQ+ history being suppressed, even in the United States. Over the past year, our national parks and lands have had to remove references to slavery, violence and genocide against first nations people, and other topics deemed "not beneficial to American history" (whatever that means). Some of these places are fighting back (it's kind of hard not to mention slavery when discussing why Harper's Ferry is a National Park) and ensuring that history is preserved. 

But how much is still lost?

I wish I could provide you with a better summary of that conversation. I have vivid memories of bits and pieces of it, but memories (no matter how vivid) are fallible. I don't have that person's contact information to ask them for an interview and I'd feel a bit weird asking for a blog post. 

But if LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable groups' histories are to be preserved, it's up to the individuals to share that with the next generation. I'll hopefully never forget that conversation from 11 November, 2025 on a ship in Antarctica.  By writing this blog post, I am sharing that an event called the Denim Day Protest did happen at Virginia Tech in 1979 and the reaction to it. I am sharing current links to the sources I was able to find. I am sharing that I knew someone who was part of making history. 

Because history is happening every day. 

In our age of social media and near instant news sharing via the Internet, so much information is being preserved in the digital space. And though we like to think the Internet is forever (and in many ways it is for any embarrassing photos posted in high school or college and that poorly thought out tweet you vomited out while black out drunk at 3:00am), it isn't. The digital space is just as prone to destruction and loss as paper and stone are. Most of what is preserved on the Internet is from passionate individuals who are happy to (perhaps overshare) their interests. 

I seem to be one of those people. 

Anyway, I hope everyone who participated had a Happy Pride. I'm going to go finish my book.

Until next week. 

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please, like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y'all like hearing from me. 

Welcome Gratefulness on the Longest Day

 It’s officially summer.

Time for a rewatch?

The season kicks off with the longest day in the northern hemisphere and the shortest in the southern hemisphere. People who live in the far north got to see the midnight sun and in a few places, the sun won’t set for another month or so.

I admit that I’m not the biggest fan of summer. I prefer the start of planting season in mid-spring and the crispness of autumn. Living where I do, the heat is accompanied by extra strength humidity. Plus, I no longer get the summer breaks I did as a kid…because I work full time.

However, there are a few things I’m grateful for during the summer season.

1) Going to the beach - as a kid, I grew up going to the sandy beaches on Lake Superior and the Jersey Shore (DTS? My Jersey friends). Both could have very cold water depending on when in the summer season I went in, but both were a staple of summer fun. I am still able to occasionally go visit - though rarely in the same year.

2) Harvesting from my garden - this is the first year in many that I have more than a balcony garden (I still have one on my deck). Since buying a house with a small yard, I’ve been excited to grow fruits, (mostly) vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Right now my peas are about at their end, so I’ll plant more in late July, but my cherry tomatoes, green beans, and strawberries are just starting to ripen. Hopefully Wilhelmina can keep the birds at bay (not really since she’s an indoor only cat. I sadly did have one tomato plant snap in half, but it’s already regrowing and might have some fruit by August.

3) Festivals - DC and surrounding areas have a ton of outdoor festivals in the summer. While I am (highly) unlikely to do anything for the 250th, I have gone to a few other festivals this year. This weekend, in honor of the solstice, the Smithsonian’s were open until 11:00pm and had a ton of programs available. The Pride festivities were also this weekend. Usually, in late in July, is the Folk Life Festival (always a fun one to attend). Music festivals are also big in DC like Kerfuffle (though that one is in May).

4) Late night walks - I admit that having it stay really bright so late messes with my sense of time, but I do love a late night after dinner walk. There’s usually a cool breeze and fireflies to light the way. The nature trails behind my house are a great place to spot ducks, deer, foxes, and the very rare bobcat and bear.

5) Summer storms - nothing, and I mean nothing, beats a summer storms. My favorite are the ones late in the evening that are mostly electrical. They zap the heat right out of the air and bring a relaxing, if hard, rain. When I used to house sit in rural Virginia, I’d have a storm every night. It was a little spooky, but also comforting (it was very warm in that house). One of my favorite memories is watching my California cousins see a thunderstorm for the first time. Where they lived in CA, thunderstorms were rare. That summer night, we pulled down the beach chairs for them to sit in the garage and watch the lightening dance across the sky.

6) Grilling and BBQ - I hope World Cup attendees are having fun trying American food (and some countries don’t think we have a cuisine) because it’s grilling and BBQ season! I finally have a grill. My aunt gave it to me last year. I’m not very good at using it by myself, but I enjoy setting it up every now and then. I hope our visitors came plenty hungry. We promise plenty of ranch.

7) Camp and Bond Fires - while I do go camping in the spring and autumn as well, summer holds my fondest memories of camping. I was 8 when my parents sent me to overnight camp for the first time (and may not have changed my socks for a week). I had a blast and at the end of each night, we’d gather around the campfire for s’mores and songs. It’s a smell I’ll never get out of my mind. Neither does the memory of all the mosquito bites I ended up with.

8) Pools and Water Parks - sadly my new neighborhood doesn’t have an outdoor pool. I joined a rec center that has an indoor pool, but that isn’t one to relax by. However, there are a few county water parks and pools I can go to. I love lounging in a lazy river or floating in a wave pool.

9) Farmer’s Markets - it is peak farmer’s market season. This week I picked up peaches, strawberries, and corn. The stalls are overflowing with fresh produce. Yes, prices are a little high - which is why I only use cash and go twice a month.

10) Socializing - summer is when most people have outdoor gatherings or plan trips to meet up with friends and family. This summer, I’ll be traveling to visit friends and family in different states. And to kick off this season, I met up with friends to go mini golfing and a backyard BBQ. I’ve also signed up for some outdoor group activities on Meetup and through my library (though there’s a waitlist for those).

So there’s ten things I’m grateful for in the summer time. What are you grateful for this time of year? Do you have plans to hang out with friends? Or maybe you’ll be at a party celebrating the 250th anniversary of the USA or the World Cup. 

Stay safe out there. Wear sunscreen (coral reef safe) and bug spray (triple check for ticks). Always have at least two liters of water on hand. And have fun!

Until the next week. If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y’all like hearing from me.

Welcome to Staycation

 It's like a vacation, but you don't go anywhere. 

Between adopting a cat, the rising cost of travel, and family planning a visit, I decided to take the past week off to decompress and relax. Granted I still ended up cleaning a bunch and working on going through my deceased parent's stuff, but I still spent a few days doing absolutely nothing.

This was a good lunch!

It was nice to have a week to "do nothing" at home. I played with the cat, tackled a few projects I hadn't had time for, read a lot, and enjoyed taking day trips to different small towns within an hour or so from my house. 

Saturday and Sunday were the "quite days". I had an obligation Sunday night, so I stuck around the house and had my annual rewatch of Steven King's "Rose Red" (it takes place on Memorial Day weekend). My cat enjoyed the attention and I picked up a bunch of books from the library.

Monday was an "adventure day". Since it was Memorial Day, I wanted to do something to honor (or at least think about) those who gave their lives serving the country. I opted to visit Winchester, Virginia. 

I stopped first at the battlefield. It's not a part of the National Parks like Manassas and Gettysburg. It is instead managed by The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District. The visitor's center is right off 81 and there are several miles of trails to explore. They also have a strict rule that discourages treasure hunters trying to find Civil War relics. 

After visiting the visitor's center and walking around the battlefield to see some of the monuments, I decided to head into the historic district to find a place for lunch. In most of the smaller towns in Virginia, shops and restaurants tend to close on Mondays to give staff and residents a break from the more crowded and lucrative weekends. Though a lot of places along the outdoor walking area were closed, I was still able to find a few restaurants open and a few shops to visit (including a book store). I also popped into the museum in town, but didn't have enough time to look around properly. I hope to go back as the museum has a lot of Civil War graffiti that's been preserved. 

I managed to get home before the Memorial Day weekend traffic really kicked off (it helped that I was able to drive the backroads home). The cat was fed dinner on time.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were "chore days". Yes, I still was able to laze around a bit, but I also wanted to get the house ready for my family to visit and run a few errands. Wilhelmina had a follow up vet appointment to check her ears (all clear of infection - thank goodness) and I finally got my second set of car keys (it took about an hour and half for them to be programmed - whatever that entails). 

I also took the opportunity to try one of the Korean spas nearby. The closest (and most recommended) is Spa World, which I still haven't been to (though Groupon does have a sale). The other spa nearby is King Spa, which has an outdoor pool. They were having a weekday walk-in special that I took advantage of. 

I loved going to King Spa. However, there were new experiences for me - at least in the United States. Nudity is mandatory in parts of King Spa. The sexes are separated, though I'm not sure what their policy on gender identity is. I didn't mind this as I'd been to an onsen in Japan when I was 11. The nudity is only required in the shower and bath area. 

Bathing suites are required for use of the indoor and outdoor blade pools. The blade pools are amazing. Water pressure is used to message different parts of the body with areas to stand, sit, and lay down. There are also a few hot tubs. 

The other areas of the spa include the saunas. You have to wear the spa's uniforms to enter the saunas. King Spa has ten sauna rooms for you to choose from. I tried all, but the ice room since it was closed the day I went. I especially liked the Bul Han Jing Mak room. It was the hottest sauna at 390 degrees Fahrenheit and I couldn't stay in very long, but it was a great experience. 

Also at King Spa (and other similar Korean spas) are relaxing areas and a restaurant. I thought the restaurant was a little overpriced, but not bad. I was able to finish one of my library books while in the relaxing area. People bring books, knitting, and even laptops to the relaxing area - just leave them outside the saunas. 

Once my family arrived, things ramped up. We went to Middleburg, Manassas, and back to Winchester to see the small towns and do some shopping. We spent a lot of time in one of the toy stores in Middleburg selecting baby shower gifts for one of my cousins who is about to have their first child. 

On Saturday, we went to the Cox Farms BBQ. In the late Spring and Summer, Cox Farms is a great place to take small children. They have tons of play areas, opportunities to see the farm animals (they have goats, chickens, and a llama), and have good food. On Saturdays, they also have a band playing during the BBQ lunch.

As my staycation draws to a close, I'm happy with the mix of quite time and adventure. Sometimes it feels like I need a vacation from my vacation, but this experience didn't feel like that at all. There are a lot of small, but fun things to do within an hour or two of my area and it was nice to explore some of the places I had never been to before. 

10 out of 10 I would recommend a staycation. 

Especially since the money is tight right now. Yeesh...

If you enjoyed this blog post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you like hearing from me.

Until next week. 

Welcome to Adopting Your Pet

If you read my post from last week, you might have seen in the last paragraph that I announced that I had adopted a cat. This was both a spontaneous and non-spontaneous adoption. It was spontaneous in that I wasn't sure if I was ready to adopt and hadn't fully prepared myself to do so. Non-spontaneous in that I had started looking into having another cat enter my life since January. I had thought about fostering, becoming a pet sitter, or volunteering with a shelter.

She knows she's pretty.

I knew that I would eventually become attached to any fur baby that came into my life, so I figured adoption would be the best for all parties. 

If you've been reading my blog for a while now, you'd know that this isn't my first cat. My first cat, Karma Lynn, passed away last August. She had been living with my full time for five years - starting the summer COVID-19 was in full swing. Before that, she had been living with my mom and her dogs. 

Karma Lynn

Karma Lynn, came to stay with for a weekend in 2008 and never left. We didn't so much "pick her" as she was a tiny little baby who needed love and my family was so excited to provide it. It also helped that our dog, Gertrude (a German Shepard Border Collie mix), decided that she wanted to mother the teeny tiny abandoned kitten with a hurt paw. Gertrude sadly passed away in 2019.

Gertrude

Unlike Karma Lynn, Gertrude had been adopted after my parents did a bunch of research on Border Collies. Our first family dog, Lafayette, was a Cocker Spaniel English Setter mix. He had also been adopted at a rescue event at a local pet store. We had gotten him when he was two and well past the puppy stage. He had some quirks, but my parents loved how protective he was towards me and my sibling. Sadly he passed away very young (he had cancer at the age of six). My parents had agreed that we'd get a puppy after Lafayette and thought that a Border Collie would be a good bread for our family. 

Initially, we went to see a different Border Collie puppy. I don't remember the dog's name, though I do recall that the puppy was a boy. However, one of my parents spotted Gertrude and decided that she was perfect for our family. It probably helped that puppy Gertrude fell asleep in my dad's hand while we were bonding with her and it was beyond adorable.

Long story short, I was used to adopting pets. Karma (and to a lesser extent my mom's Husky Millie) was a product of the cat distribution system (also known as the CDS). This is when the universe decides that a person or family needs a cat and one shows up that becomes that person or family's cat.

I could have left it up to the CDS again. There are a number of cats who run around the neighborhood and it's unclear home many of them have permanent homes. However, I also have specific needs when it comes to cats. 

Specifically, I'm super allergic to short hair cats and mildly allergic to long haired cats. Naturally, if I wanted another cat, it would have to be long haired. 

I was also a bit attached to Karma Lynn's fur coat. She was what was known as having a prominent tortoiseshell coat. These cats are known as torties. Technically with the white splotch on Karma's chest, she was more of a mix between a calico and tortoiseshell - otherwise known as torticos. So I was keeping my eye out for a long haired tortie up for adoption. 

This is a rarer combination that some of you might realize. Tortoiseshell coats are already fairly uncommon, but combined with a long haired cat (which make up 10% of the cat population), I was looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack. 

That was until a family friend who had started a rescue mentioned that another rescue had recently gotten a long haired tortie in. The friend gave me the contact information for the rescue and I hesitated. 

Was I ready for a new cat? 

The trauma of losing Karma is still fresh. I know some people can get new pets fairly soon after a loss, but I wasn't sure if I was ready. 

The truth is, I missed having a cuddle buddy. I missed playing and laughing with a furry friend. I missed having a companion to look after (no I don't need a significant other, grown people should be able to take care of themselves). 

A few days later, I decided to ask about the rescued cat.

However, the long haired tortie wasn't the cat I ended up taking home. 

While I was at the rescue, I met the cat I was curious about. She was tiny and had been bullied by the bigger cats. She was cute and sweet, but we didn't fully connect and she was a lot young than I was hoping to adopt. The rescuer mentioned that she had two other long haired cats that I could meet. One was an eight year old boy, the other was a one or two year old girl.

The long haired boy was sweet and super cuddly. I wouldn't have minded him, but he seemed really happy with his rescuer. 

The girl, however, immediately ran up to me and demanded my full attention. Her foster name was Summer and she had a light brindle back with white legs and stomach. She wasn't a tortie, but she was very close to one. She started batting the other cats away from me - pretty much saying that I was her human. 

I had been chosen and Summer was coming home with me. 

I waited a week so that I could get my house in order and get through a stressful week at work. In that time, I thought up a name for my new feline companion. Summer was a nice name, but she looked like a regal lady and I wanted to give her a name worthy of her look. Before meeting her, I was toying with the name Pawlette as a fun pun. This cat was not a Pawlette. 

I then went through a few more regal sounding names like Cordelia, Aurora, and Artemisia. I even thought of names that might incorporate her foster name - like Lady Summerwind. 

Then I remembered my favorite character from one of my favorite books. Wilhelmina Harker, nee Murry, is an amazing character in Dracula the book. If there was a name for this cat it was Wilhelmina. Summer became her middle name. 

I brought her home last Saturday and it's been an adjustment. I'm lucky that I get to work from home whenever I want. So I spent the last week home with her - I also spent a small fortune on cat trees, food, treats, and other supplies. We did end up going to the vet in the middle of the week and I found out she has a double ear infection, but otherwise she seems very happy.

I wasn't expecting to adopt the cat that I did - especially once I found out she was just over a year old. However, I do think I made the right choice. I'm already happily changing my life (for the better) to meet Willa's needs (I'm calling her Willa instead of Mina for short). 

So please give a warm welcome to Wilhelmina Summer. She's already captured my heart.

Until next week. 

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you all like hearing from me.

Welcome to Building Up the Garden

For many years, I had small containers on my apartment balcony filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. They didn't always produce a lot - it didn't help that my balcony faced North and didn't get the intense six hours of sun most of the plants required - but I was still able to grow something.

Last year (around this time), I moved into my first house. Part of my excitement in having a house was creating a garden. I had once growing up. My parents always planted tons of kitchen herbs, tomatoes, and flowers. My dad always insisted on having tomatoes in the garden.

Part of my chores growing up was weeding the garden. By my late teens, I finally decided to add my own plants to take care of. I planted carrots, bush beans, and peppers. I don't know why I picked bush beans as I didn't like them (at the time), but they were so easy and fun to grow. I ended up giving them away to my coworkers at the cafe I worked at over the summer. The carrots always ended up looking hilarious - Virginia's soil is heavy with clay which isn't as forgiving as other soil compositions for straight carrots. The peppers and tomatoes were fine.

Since then, I've always had some kind of plant with me. My first indoor plant was a gifted Christmas cactus (that finally died on it's trip from New Jersey back to Virginia), followed by a rosemary plant - that died a lot sooner (rosemary doesn't do well in pots). Then I ended up with a King Tut papyrus and spider plant. These two are still going strong.

I started trying to seriously grow herbs and vegetables again when I moved back to Virginia and had a balcony (my places in New Jersey didn't have outdoor space) and Maryland's apartment was very shady. The results of a north facing balcony garden was mixed. I have a sage plant that's lasted almost six years now.

Last year, as a house warming, I was gifted several large planters I could have on my deck. As I wasn't prepared to start a garden in my yard (and there were already plants in the sectioned off areas that I didn't want to mess with), I chose to container garden on my deck. 

Results, again, were mixed.

My backyard is north facing with lots of trees - specifically a beautiful Japanese maple that takes up a good quarter of the yard. The sun it gets is okay on part of the deck, but not perfect. Also the weather was horrendous last year and I lost a good chunk of my plants to extreme weather conditions. 

However, I was able to get some peas, bush beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and herbs. So far the strawberries have returned this year (I have to fight the birds for them) and my thyme was able to overwinter without a problem. I did lose the parsley, though, and the jury is out on my rosemary and lavender in the front bed. 

This year, I added a raised bed outside my shed. I've planted a larger tomato plant, a banana pepper plant, and a "lunch box sweet" pepper plant. As companions, I added marigolds, cucumbers, and a row of carrots. 

So far the weather has been okay. We did have a late frost (after it being in the freaking 90s in early April). However, the plants I recently purchased at the Leesburg Plant and Flower Festival have been doing well. 

For those of you not in the Northern Virginia area (and for those who are, but aren't aware), Leesburg has an annual Plant and Flower Festival in mid-April. It takes up the main historic part of the town with tons of venders and activities. They even have a spot for where kids can do crafts. I like going because I can often find plants that are specifically cultivated for the Virginia climate and find some native plants. 

However, the native plant garden is a future AJ project. 

With Earth Day being on a Wednesday this year, the Leesburg Plant and Flower Festival was the weekend prior, while the Fairfax County Earth Day celebration was this past Saturday. I finally went to the Earth Day celebration as it was advertised on Meetup by my local chapter of the Sierra Club. They had a nice booth set up. 

Fairfax County seems to have fun with their Earth Day celebrations. There were tons of trucks and busses to touch - the usual fire engines and farm vehicles along with a city bus and garbage truck. The kids were having a blast climbing all over. They also had a rock wall, animals from the Fairfax County farm on Frying Pan Road, and lots of educational booths. I learned a few things about native insects and invasive clams and crayfish. 

There were also a lot of fun food trucks. 

Some of the booths were giving out seed "bombs" for people to plant at home. I picked up a milkweed plant after verifying that it was a native milkweed - non-natives will happily take over everything if given the change. I hope to plant it soon and see some monarch butterflies this year (if not future years). It'll be the start of my native garden.

Well now you've read an entire blog post where I gush about plants. I still have several indoor only plants and a few I keep indoors in the winter and outside during the summer, but some of that is changing.

See, some plants are toxic to our furry friends and I just adopted a cat. I'm currently moving these plants to places she isn't allowed and will either rehome them or find better places for them to stay away from her little claws. My house is also a lily free zone since they are especially dangerous to cats. I didn't have to worry about these plants with my last cat as she was completely uninterested in anything that was the color green (including catnip), but I'm taking no chances with my new kitty.

I'll give you an update on her in one of my future posts. 

Until next week. 

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you all like hearing from me.

Welcome Everything is Tuberculosis

The series of ridiculous events continued throughout March. Mercury was in retrograde for most of it, so maybe that's why I felt like a mess. The mix of  "confusion, delays, and disruptions in communication, travel, and decision-making" (see link from Farmer's Almanac above) wasn't helped by how busy I've been.

But now it's Easter! It's April! It's Spring!

So what do I want to write about? Tuberculosis. 

In mid-March, I finished John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis. The book itself isn't just the history of the disease, but a biography of a young man named Henry who has Tuberculosis (henceforth shorted to TB) in Sierra Leone. John met Henry on a trip to Sierra Leone while they were visiting a TB hospital. Initially thinking Henry was the child of one of the doctors or nurses, John soon learned that Henry had a unique strand of TB that couldn't be treated with first or second line standard treatments. Unless Henry was approved for a new, experimental drug, his survival chances were slim to none.

I likely learned about TB from the 1990s History Channel series "Haunted History". The show took viewers to different cities and locations around the United States, United Kingdom, and parts of the Caribbean to teach history through ghost stories. TB was often one of the causes of death that wasn't violent in the show.

Of course, I learned more about TB once my history classes started focusing on the Victorian period and my English classes had us study poetry. John Keats and the Brontë sisters were well known victims of the disease, but I had no idea that George Orwell or Dashiell Hammett had also died because of TB. They lived well into the mid-twentieth century.

It wasn't until I watched an episode of "Crossing Jordan" that I learned that TB was still around. I thought it had gone the way of Small Pox. I thought it was a disease of the past that could never show up in modern society. Most TB sanitariums were the setting of ghost hunting events, not places that still took in patients. 

A few years after seeing that episode, I'm getting ready to go to college. As part of the preparations I need to get a few extra vaccines and be tested for TB. It wasn't a medical test I was familiar with. The doctor basically gave me a shallow shot and told me that if a bubble formed on my skin in the next few days, to come back as quickly as possible. False positives could also occur if the injected area was irritated or rubbed too much. I spent the next few days hyper aware of this tiny patch of skin. 

I tested negative by the way. 

TB is also a lot older than I thought. John Green explains that it has existed as long as humans have. There are mummies that have been discovered with signs of TB infections. I thought TB was a newer disease, like AIDs. 

Lungs aren't the only organ TB can infect. It can jump to the kidneys, liver, bones, skin, among other location. And TB can lay dormant in a person for years before it becomes active, which is when it becomes deadly. 

Because people didn't understand how diseases like TB spread for a long time, superstitions and incorrect assumptions became the norm. During the Victorian era, many doctors thought it was a genetic disease because it often quickly killed off entire families. Upper classes seemed to assume that the lower classes couldn't be infected with TB and it was only a wealthy and creative person's disease. 

Obviously they were wrong. Anyone can get TB. It's spread from droplets expelled by a person when they cough or spit. 

TB even caused a vampire scare in New England in the late 1800s. Mercy Brown had been the first member of her family to die of TB. However, instead of accepting the TB diagnosis, her family began to suspect that she was actually a vampire, stealing the "life force" of her family. As more members of her family died, her father and other members of the community, decided to dig up her body. It didn't look like it had decomposed at all and there was blood in her heart. Clearly, that meant she was the one causing her family to fall ill and die. Her father removed her heart and liver, burned them, then turned the ashes into a tonic for Mercy's sick brother to drink. 

The brother died two months later...from TB.

I'm not going to tell you how the book ends. If you want to learn Henry's fate, you should pick up a copy to read for yourself. I got mine out from the library.

What I will tell you, is that Henry's TB progressed into a treatment resistant strain for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is because when he was first diagnosed as a little kid his first line treatment was continually interrupted. Sierra Leone's health care system was already over burdened before the civil war broke out in the early 2000s. Further complicating Henry's treatment was his low socioeconomic status and his father's distrust of medical advice. At one point, Henry's father even stopped him from taking his medication and took him to a faith healer instead. 

In addition to Henry's worsening illness, he also had to deal with the social stigma of having TB. In the century since TB provided a coveted look for poets and creatives to romanticize, it became stigmatized as a disease that only poor people suffer from. People didn't want to approach him or his mother (she also had TB, but responded to first line treatment).

It was the interruptions to Henry's treatment that caused the TB to mutate so that the disease could no longer be treated with the standard medications. It evolved, like many diseases do, until all known treatments were ineffective. 

One of the many reasons doctors tell you to take your anti-biotic medicine until the prescription is finished even if you feel better, is because of mutating diseases. There are now tons of diseases that used to be easy to treat, but now are resistant to standard care - many are bacterial. Viruses are also prone to these mutations. The reason we need flu shots every year is because of how quickly the flu vaccine mutates. 

Many diseases that were once thought to be "extinct" in the United States are suddenly coming back. My parents used to tell stories about measles and mumps, they knew at least one person who had gone deaf because of the common childhood disease. I never had the measles or mumps because I got a vaccine when I was really little. My parents didn't want me to suffer from a disease they knew could be deadly or, at the very least, have serious life changing side effects. 

On that note. Please check out Everything is Tuberculosis and listen to your doctors about what's best for your health and the community's health.

Oh and Happy Easter. I hope the bunny left some chocolate for you.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y'all like hearing from me.

Until next week.