Falling Behind

This could be a bad pun based on the near approach of the season, but since we basically don't have Fall here in Hawaii, it means pretty much what it means.  I got up at 4:30 to do my Rosary and my elliptical thing and to water the greenhouse plants - and once again, I notice that the greenhouse is in sad neglect.  There are weeds and overgrown things and not much production going on.  (Although, I did notice that the jalapenos, which I thought were long gone, are actually producing a second crop of rather nice looking peppers).  Since I basically have to walk through the hanging laundry to get to the greenhouse, I noticed that there is an awful lot of dry-ish laundry hanging out there, too. 

My husband has been making a great effort to finish up some projects around the place.  He put up the glass tile in the coffee corner in the kitchen and finished the grouting on the kitchen bar.  He put up four very sturdy saddle racks out in the tack room and some heavy duty shelves.  I just got several panicked calls from the cinder hauler, so I guess he ordered cinder, too - which is good news for the sheep pen (hope that contractor's check doesn't bounce - because we've had trouble with him before - and that job's where the money came from).  My next wish list is baseboards in the bathrooms, but I don't really get a say - and I think baseboards are inordinately expensive and possibly not terribly important in the scheme of things. 

The outside garden is, as it has been all year, a wash - pretty much literally.  We've just had so much rain, which is sad because just over the lip of the mountain and down into the south part of our island, they've had nowhere near enough.  I wish there was a way to proportion it out - so we could both grow things!  My plants all drowned and theirs all dried up.  The only thing growing well is the thick grass that is choking out the kalo. 

Cross Country season means that most of my weekends are devoted to races and then doing as much catch-up around the house as I can.  It means getting home really late because of practices and having just about enough time to monitor homework and cook dinner.  It means very little time for gardening.  That's probably an excuse that I could find a way around, but to tell you the truth, with the beginning of school, my own exercise schedule and my kid and family obligations, I tend to put it on the back burner.  It is also not as fun to do it all alone, and basically, that's what it means with our family schedule - me being alone in the greenhouse or garden.  Fortunately, we have quite a lot of very accessible and reasonable year-round Farmer's Markets to make up for my lack of effort. 

I am starting a research project on agriculture and food-production, so hopefully it will motivate me to watch the kids get fired up, too!  I hope so.  It's time I stop "falling behind" and start "catching up".