CSI: My Garden 2: Electric Boogaloo

I sat outside today reading Neal Stephanson's Anathem (cause I'm cool, and that's what cool people do on their saturdays!) The book is a sprawling science/philosophical fiction tour de force set on an alien world with seven thousand years of history and multiple languages. Its fun though it takes a while to get used to sentences like: “Fraa Spelikon told me to go to the Telescope of Saunts Mithra and Mylax and retrieve a photomnemonic tablet that Fraa Orolo had placed there hours before the starhenge was closed by the Warden Regulant.” It was a good thing I decided to do this today because my landlords had gotten someone to go through their and my gardens and clear out the weeds (my landlords live next to me, which actually works out well because they're very nice folk).

I had grown attached to many of the weeds and engaged in hurried negotiations to save some of them: I salvaged the wild carrot and another plant whose name I can't quite recall but it tastes a bit like arugula. I stayed on the porch with that awkward feeling when someone else is doing work around you. Occasionally, I would have to interject to save some of my plants – though I wasn't in time for one of my tomato plants. Luckily though, he was an intact-root puller (a technique that I had not mastered when I weeded the garden) so it could be replanted.

The bottom line is that I'm very glad I decided to read instead of going on a bike ride and returing to see my garden annihilated.