A blue (jean) day

I do remember to water the garden in the morning. Half an hour later the sun’s gone and it’s raining. Bloody typical.

Other than that, not much garden-related news.

I did, on my trip to drop bottles and cans off at GIRO (Gabriola Island Recycling Organisation, for those in the UK who are wondering if you have to provide bottles and cans to get the dole here), have a look in the recycled building materials area to see if there are any likely planks for the building for raised beds. No such luck.

It also occurs to me while I’m there, that I might find a pair of jeans in the clothes section I can use for gardening, rather than completely wrecking the cords I have been wearing up until now. Success on that front, though somewhat depressing. I remember, looking through the jeans that, like shoes, Canadian clothes sizes are different than they are in the UK. Unlike shoes, which are two sizes smaller. I’m a 6½ shoe size in England (if you can ever find them – what the hell happened to half size shoes?) and an 8½ here, clothes are a size bigger. The shoe differential is okay. Being an 8½ doesn’t make me feel as if I have huge feet. What’s already not okay is that I’ve somehow become a 14 in the UK, after decades of being a size 10 or, in a bad year a 12 (oh, the benefits of the sex and drugs and rock and roll diet I lived on in my twenties and thirties), which means I’m a 16 over here. A 16? Bloody hell, my mother used to be an 18 and I thought she was fat. Enough reminiscing over the size of jeans I used to be able to wear. I need a pair of jeans and these, courtesy of being found in the GIRO clothes shop, cost one dollar.

Get home and try them on (when the clothes cost a buck, you don’t get a changing room, you just take your chances). Okay, they fit, but… What the hell is with jeans? I have never, since my long ago hippie hipster days, found a pair of jeans with a fit I liked. (Well, that’s not quite true. I did find a pair with a good fit in my thirties, but the major downside to those was the fact that they were acid wash, so least said about those the better.) These new jeans surpass all my negative expectations. What’s with the cut? Either they are so high waisted that their natural resting position is an inch under your boobs or, if the waist band is actually on your waist, they’re some sort of ghetto boy wannabes, with the crotch hanging inches below your actual crotch. Point this out to Mike when he congratulates me on finding a pair of jeans for a dollar. He suggests jeans were cut for someone with a much bigger ass than me. Hmm. I guess that’s a compliment.

Well, never mind, mission accomplished. I now have a pair of gardening jeans. (And I truly do not care if gardening wrecks them.)

However, instead of starting the process of destroying the ill fitting jeans in the garden, I decide I really do need to do something about the kitchen floor and the coating of dust everywhere.

After an afternoon of cleaning the house, make a cup of tea and go down to garden to admire my efforts so far. The Blueberry Hill rose bush is really putting out and the bees are still buzzing around it and the ceanothus (although its days of flowering are numbered, sadly). That bed really is begging for some lobelia. Where, I wonder, will it end?

PS Chicken burritos for dinner, improved immeasurably by the addition of lots of lovely coriander from my herb garden. (Oops, once again, that should be cilantro here. Will remember eventually.)