I 'twas blithering in the slimey swales....

(My apologies to Lewis Carroll.)  Besides the slimey swales that are my garden and grounds, my job has been rather like working in Dantes Inferno.  (Lots of literary references this post - gratis.)

Due to all kinds of factors, my job has turned into a perfect storm of stress.  I am lucky if I sleep past 3 in the AM - and awake to my mind roiling with worries about missed filings and other drivel that doesn't matter a whit in the Big Picture.  After a particularly stressfullsome day, I came home last night and contemplated my options.  Red or white?  Seriously, I was past the glass-of-wine-will-heal-all-things stage.  So I did what I always have done.  I did something mind-numbing.  I stained a rickety plant stand (one of those 11-shelves-of-crappy-USA-made-so-called-workmanship-slatted things).  Within five minutes of starting, I had reached that Zen stage where my fevered brain slows down and starts a nice, gentle hum.

The original illustration - way
better than mine.  I wanted to be Alice.
I thought she was a grand girl - look at
that stance!

I used to do something similar, but more creative, back when I was a college freshman and stressed to the tippy-top of maxium-ness, I brought a 3x5-foot piece of rice paper back to the dorm and spent seven hours drawing my version of the Jabberwocky on it - filling the sheet from top-to-bottom, side-to-side, with tiny, spidery lines.  Worked like a charm.  My roommate took it (without my permission) and entered it in the art department student show.  I won an award but - BUT - they kept my drawing.  I flailed ineffectively against the system - this was before I realized I had rights - and briefly staged a one-woman sit-in.  While I drew favorable attention from the campus radicals, the art department staff were not impressed.  Pfft.

Yes, yes.  I've had quite a colorful life.  You'll have to wait to read the book.  It will be published posthumously, to protect...me. 

I am hoping to get some pix of the garden (such as it is) this weekend, and to completely erase from my mind any evidence that I have such a job.  It usually works right up until Sunday night, when the darkness begins creeping back in - bwahahaha.