
I scored some dwarf irises on Freecycle from a lady who’s re-landscaping her yard.
Then I remembered the dahlia tubers I dug up last fall. The flowers were a magnificent magenta color. Dahlia tubers won’t make it through the winter here in the frozen north, and dahlias are hardy plants.
This gives you some idea of how awful our winters are here.

I can’t find the dahlia tubers!
I stashed them somewhere I apparently thought was safe and obvious, but who knows what I thought was “safe” and “obvious” last fall?
Pas moi.
I’ll keep looking.
###
It’s actually supposed to snow here today.
The past two years, there’ve been snowstorms here in early April, which is one of the reasons why I didn’t start planting the garden during the warm spell last week.
The other reason, of course, is sheer laziness.
Last April’s surprise snowstorm wiped out my habaneros—I thought. At first.
But, no. The roots had taken hold, I guess. A week or so later, the plants started putting out growth. And last year’s habanero crop was the hottest I’ve ever had in New York, simply divine; I made the best carrot habanero sauce from it, as good as Marie Sharp’s if I do say so myself. Stress is good for pepper plants.
I’ll have to figure out another way to stress the pepper plants out this year.
###
What else?
I wrenched the lumbar muscles on the left side of my back somehow, so all day long yesterday I lurched around like Quasimodo.
At the TaxBwana satellite scanning station, a woman marched in, ostensibly to pick up hard copies of her 1040 and New York state returns. She informed me with a triumphant smile that she would not be signing the permission forms that allow us to electronically transmit returns to the appropriate tax authorities.
“I didn’t owe anything last year!” she kept repeating. “I don’t see why I should have to owe anything this year.”
Personally, I didn’t care whether she signed the forms or not.
I didn’t do her tax return. Presumably the person who did and the person who did the quality review had called her up to explain the situation to her.
So, with every iteration of “I’m not signing that thing!”, I treated her to a more dazzling smile.
At first, this seemed to puzzle her.
Then it made her mad.
What I wanted to say to her was, Look, lady. We’re volunteers, and we're offering a free service here. If you went to, say, H&R Block to have your taxes done, they’d be charging you $100 a form, and I’m pretty sure you would still end up owing money.
If I’d liked her, I might have taken a peek at the form and tried to explain it once again.
But I didn’t like her.
And I am not a social worker.
And most importantly, I am not getting paid to do any of this.
Eventually, Ahmad came over and spent half an hour attempting to mollify her—to no avail, of course, because this woman was not interested in information; she was interested in taking out her bad mood on people whom she figured couldn’t fight back.
Humans! Crossposted from Dreamwidth.