Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

cattitude and I went to the garden store this morning, and came back with a garden fork, to break up the soil so we can get the weeds out, two pots of basil (one each of two different varieties), and another six-pack of lettuce.

Then he went off to the library to work, and I did not much for the next few hours other than make myself lunch. The forecast had been for sunny and quite warm, and then it was in the low to mid 50s (F, call it 11 or 12 C) and gray until mid-afternoon, which left me feeling grumpy.

He got home mid-afternoon, and the sun came out and the weather got warmer, so after he had tea we went downstairs to garden. I planted the basil in a planter in the backyard (where I'd grown basil last year); this time I broke the soil up and mixed in a bunch of the potting soil we bought last month. Cattitude started using the garden fork to deal with weeds, and after a bit I helped him pull weeds out.

Then the four-year-old from across the street waved hello, said she wanted to come over, and offered to help. We accepted the offer, and 42itous went to get their garden fork, and also helped. They dug in our garden, and we all talked, until they had to go home for dinner.

While digging, the adults discussed the seeds we have each bought; I may accept 42itous's offer of cucumber seeds, and I offered her some clover seed because we have more than we can use. (The smallest amount of clover seed anyone would sell me was a quarter pound, and I wanted two different varieties; half a pound of clover seed is a lot for the amount of land we're working with.) She offered us other things, but the only one I would have been interested in right now, lettuce, I already have. (I'm planting already started lettuces because the seeds I've started indoors don't seem ready to plant out, but I may try direct sowing lettuce seeds once we're done with the garden fork/weeding stage and have some idea of where we're putting what.)

By the time 42itous and her daughter had to go home, we'd turned over and weeded about half the soil, and 42itous had uncovered an interesting piece of slate underneath it. We don't need it for anything, and it may get in the way of planting; I told her she's welcome to it if the landlords don't mind, so she sent them a text.

I put the lettuce in the ground, and then we came upstairs and took our muddy jeans off, and Cattitude did a load of laundry, just those jeans and the shirt I'd been gardening in.

(There are a lot of those purple-and-white violets in and next to the driveway right now.)

Something odd and annoying just happened. One of my neighbors decided to yell at the man who delivered our Indian food, apparently for having the temerity to be there at all.

The deliveryman rang our downstairs doorbell, and I pressed the buzzer to open the lobby door. A minute or two later, the apartment doorbell rang. I opened the door to hear my neighbor saying, loudly, "This building has no security" to the deliveryman. So I said "I let him in" (as in, there is security, he rang the bell and we buzzed him in). My neighbor's response was "I'm not talking about you," which suggests he also didn't listen to me. He then closed his door, and the delivery guy said that they'd been in the elevator together, and my neighbor had seemed angry. I apologized, and tipped him a bit extra, because he shouldn't have to put up with that sort of thing.

ETA: This neighbor is the one who will not get in the elevator with cattitude, rather walking down the stairs if he is waiting for the elevator and Cattitude, or both of us, also go to wait for it. Cattitude says he also sends the elevator to random floors. Avoiding Cattitude might connect: maybe he's uncomfortable being in an elevator with other men, or men taller than he is. If so, maybe the shouting was a reaction to the delivery man getting in after him, and on the way up. But the button-pressing is a different sort of oddity, and understanding—or guessing at—reasons for odd behavior doesn't help deal with it. I'm still left with a neighbor who complained aggressively that someone was buzzed into the building and came upstairs in an entirely ordinary fashion (a lot of people get food delivered, either cooked meals or groceries).

Also, I went to the gym this evening, after two weeks in a row of doing only the Thursday session with Emilie, so I'm pleased even though it wasn't as long as some workouts.

( details, mostly numerical )

Our downstairs neighbors periodically play music loud enough to be heard, thump-thump-thump through our floor. (This is a pre-War building, meaning thick walls and floors.) In the past, when I've gone downstairs and asked him to turn it down, he has (after turning the music down when he heard the doorbell, so he'd be able to talk to the person at the door) left it turned low.

Today, someone else answered the door, after I leaned on the bell repeatedly. She did not look happy, but the music was turned down. A couple of minutes later, the man came upstairs and rang my bell. He complained about my complaining--his basic point apparently is that it's acceptable to play extremely loud music on a holiday afternoon--and said we sometimes "thump around" after 11 and they never complain. (Of course, if they never complain, how am I to know there's a problem?) He also asserted that nobody else has complained, which as cattitude pointed out may be because nobody else is right above them, and accused me of having said I was speaking for the entire building. I told him I had never done so, and unfortunately did not think in time to say "that must have been someone else."

And then he went downstairs and turned the stereo back up. I had a headache before this started (colds will do that), but suspect that he is legally in the right in that the noise in here doesn't reach levels relevant to a legal complaint, and there's no law saying "don't be a schmuck." Also, adrian_turtle has noted that we don't actually want to get into a "who can be more obnoxious" contest. But I am not happy, and I am certainly not about to make efforts to be quieter for someone who didn't think "please don't stomp around at night, we're trying to sleep" was worth asking for itself and who is playing music to make a point of "So there!"

Addendum: it has stopped. I mentioned my hypothesis that the guy downstairs was trying to impress his female friend/companion/visitor, and Adrian said that the woman was likely to be smarter than for that to work. She mentioned the standard advice that if someone you're dating is nice to you but rude to waitresses, they're not someone to stay with. I hope this woman thinks that way, rather than "he did what I asked" or "he's not backing down."

We have a primary election today. I have spent the last couple of weeks hanging up on phone calls that want to play me recordings from politicians saying either "vote for me" or "vote for my friend," because if I don't hang up I might decide I had to vote against the callers for interrupting me. And two weeks is time enough to decide to vote against every single candidate.

Instead, cattitude and I walked the couple of blocks to our polling place. We stopped outside long enough for me to ask our former assemblyman, Brian, why he's pushing this particular candidate for the state committee [1]; he'd called Cattitude about it a couple of nights ago, and me last night, but I wasn't up to taking the phone call. It seemed more or less plausible, so I voted for her. (Brian used to live in our building, now lives next door, and pays Cattitude for computer help now and then.) After talking to Brian, we walked into the building, and I said hello to Len, an old acquaintance who is now one of the election workers. He was sitting next to the voting booth; I gather from the conversation that he and his partner Alexei are still together, and he mentioned that another acquaintance, Sally, has left the neighborhood.

I voted (Eliot Spitzer, Mark Green, Brian's recommendations for civil court and state committee, and one randomly selected person for delegate to the judicial convention [voters are asked to choose five, but it works to choose one, or none]), waited for Cattitude (we use the same machine, because we live in the same place), and then we walked around the neighborhood before he went to the subway and I did my morning stretches and then came home.

Another gorgeous September morning, another primary election; nothing went wrong this time, unlike five years and a day ago, when I'd called in sick because I was being laid off so why push myself to go in when feeling unwell, but it was hard not to think back, with the weather so similar.

Even if I thought it would make a difference, I don't think I could bring myself not to vote, but maybe next primary I'll vote in the evening.

[1] Almost nobody cares about the state [2] committee, or knows what it is: it's internal Democratic Party stuff. I was boggled by getting a nicely printed flyer about that race in the mail.

[2] Yes, I misremembered this as county committee; corrected becaue I just opened a letter with no return address, and found it was a slightly belated "reelect me to the state committee" from this woman.