Change of Plans [NOT 11/6/21]

11/6/21 brightersideoflife 22

Hi, friends!

Tonight’s NOT is brought to you by me having plans that are completely diverted. Garden plans, but plans nonetheless.

My tomatoes have a nasty aphid infestation starting up. I went to use my neem spray stuff Wednesday night and ran out. So I stopped by the store on the way home to get another bottle of bug spray stuff. I got home and decided to water.

I need to use the bug killer spray as close to night as possible because I don’t want to accidentally impact bees. But it’s also hot as fuck today so my plants needed water. Figured I’d water early and spray later.

Welp, first of all it’s 97 degrees outside so I think it’s going to be too hot to spray when it gets to dusk (bottle says spray when below 90 degrees).

Second of all, while watering I spotted a ladybug and I don’t want to accidentally kill a lil buddy that will eat aphids. So I just turned up the water pressure and sprayed the hell out of all the aphids I could see (my ladybug friend was hanging out nearby).

Normally I wouldn’t water anything but the ground because I don’t want too much water on the leaves, but fuck it. The heat index is 105 degrees, it will evaporate quickly.

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22 Comments

  2. I didn’t have a change of plans per se but rather three welcoming developments. I mentioned before how my physical therapist closed my case because I needed no further help nor guidance. The visiting occupational therapist did the same thing on Monday and just this afternoon the visiting nurse did the same. I loved all my visiting medical professionals and I will miss them, but I am officially in the home stretch until the next calamity strikes. And no, this is not the insurance company cutting me off, although I’m sure this will come as welcome news to them, too; this is three independent opinions rendered by three independent care providers!

  3. I am pleased to announce the safe arrival of my grandson!  He is adorable… I got to visit a couple of hours after he was born 🙂 got to hold him for awhile while his mama got a chance to shower and his daddy went home to feed the kitties. That brand new baby smell… it’s a drug, I swear. I hated to let him go! We get to visit again tomorrow  and I can’t wait 🙂 

  4. Hmmm…I was planning to do a pest control post for Dirty Business in a couple of weeks, but perhaps I’ll move it up to next week.

    At almost no time do the plans I make actually come through because there’s always some thing or other which changes things.  So, instead, I operate on the principle of “expect nothing and you shall receive it in abundance.”

    • This year I skipped the zucchini attempts because last year it was a buggy, dismal failure that also managed to attract a bunch of stinkbugs that I had to deal with on the nearby peppers. My parents thought I was nuts flicking them into a jar of soapy water but it seemed the most effective strategy and only took a few days of efforts. 

      I am ready with the neem aphid spray and the diatomaceous earth to protect my peppers and tomatoes from the nasty stink bugs!  

  5. this is the first night in about 2 weeks where the temperature dropped enough for me to sleep
    course…that also means its dropped enough for me to be comfily awake…and as such its 2 am and here i am….finally in my fucking comfort zone…cant sleep now
    should do tho…..anyways…looks like tomorow the temps are gonna be around 60….so thats my window to get shit done before we go straight back to round 80
    which wouldnt be to bad if humidity around here wasnt about 130% on a dry day
    anyways…i have a brand new strimmer…and im going to murder the rest of me lawn with it….then ill spend the rest of my day chasing neighbourhood kids with said strimmer..just coz its cool enough for me to have that kind of energy
    also…cook something warm and full of veggies
    ive been living off a sandwich or a cup a soup a day for a week now (for breakfast..when the heatball hasnt woken up yet)

  6. Not to beat a dead horse but I just went over to Jezebel. Just pitiful to watch. They revived the Friday Night feature “Pissing Contest” for a while but then the only “writer” capable of writing a two-sentence intro to a topic left and it went away again (this was months ago.) Hope springeth eternal so I visit on Friday nights and as the first season of SNL used to say about Franco, “Still dead.” 

     

    Since 11:40 this morning they have posted 10 stories. They have 14 comments COMBINED, and unlike whatever they think their new Deadspin is they haven’t actually disabled comments, they don’t need to, everyone’s left. 

     

    This, in a very silly and superficial way, is what it must be like to watch a good friend self-destruct and you are powerless to help them. 

    • Oof. I’ve definitely stopped visiting Kinja sites (yes, even The Root, which I think is their crown jewel) since they nuked the user blogs. 
      It looks like Maria is freelancing, mostly at NPR, and good for her. As a side note, I listen to many of the Crooked Media podcasts, including Hysteria with Erin Ryan (Morning Gloria). An episode or two ago, she mentioned her time at Jezebel (not by name) and how much online harassment and abuse the writers took. They were set to post something on the site every 15 mins, so there was never time for quality control and basic things like editing (noticeably so, as many of the commenters would write), and her pay was something like $45k, but that was after negotiating. Most likely, the bulk of the bloggers made less. Anyhow, it doesn’t seem like it could possibly be a better workplace now. 

        • I still frequent The Root but almost never comment or even read the comments. It’s kind of upsetting because of my e-crush on Maiysha that more than half the posts are entertainment related. All Connor does is sports posts. Johnson has moved on to MSNBC. Damon has left VSB! Harriot writes less posts but quality is a thing and Crockett jr is still funny AF but never gets to let loose much anymore. Belton moved over to Huffington Post (good for her, not The Root).

          And the comment section is mostly know-it-all white people from the Splinter comment section and racist/sexist wannabe trolls whose English is worse than mine.

          It’s heartbreaking.

          • …pretty sure myo means ClashTalk…one of the more…acerbic…of the sub-blogs that got nuked…in fact it got murdered somewhat before the rest…probably because the folks that liked to hang out there weren’t shy about the scorn they felt the mainpage sites deserved…well…that & the thin skins of some of the writers & much of the management side of things in kinjatown?

            • Oh, of course! I was on ClashTalk for a hot minute before they shut it down. Some of those commenters were “acerbic” indeed, especially with their withering scorn for a couple of the Splinter writers. There was the guy who had the Native American beat and whom CT often mentioned was not actually a member of a recognized tribe. And who could forget Child Blogger Libby Watson, the 20-something Brit who used to write about American politics with all the insight I would bring to a discussion of Italy’s Lega or Lega Nord political party (not much, but at least I’ve heard of them.) 

               

              It must have been they who singlehandedly convinced kinja management to cast all the commenters into the grays(I was one of them)  just days before jointly skipping off to the New Republic, a crippling blow to Splinter from which it never recovered. Then came the Toxic Mold Partners hedge fund whose oafish officers wasted no time in killing Splinter off for good.

               

              Those were the days.

              • …there were times when I felt guilty about how the threat to nuke all the sub-blogs popped up while the SplinterRIP kinja account was getting more attention than I could possibly have predicted when I made the thing

                …but when I remembered what happened to ClashTalk it was harder not to see it as a thing they were looking for an excuse to do for a long time…so on balance I like to think that account…& all the commenters who came along for that ride…if anything might have been something that bought them a temporary reprieve…or I guess a temporary stay of execution

                …still miss being able to find that crowd in one place…but more than a few of the old subs were a bigger draw than the sites themselves to the people that new where to find them & I can’t really think about what happened to them without getting pissed off all over again by the way that got done & all that was implied thereby

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