Sylvia's Journal

On Mondays I usually work from home, but an important visitor from Afghanistan was in the neighborhood after having completed a 2 week course at Harvard.  And so I drove to work at the usual early hour.

I shepherded our guest from meeting to meeting and to Whole Foods for lunch. Ramadan is over. Muslims around the world are in the middle of the Eid celebrations but at MSH it is an ordinary day; much like our December 25 and 31 were ordinary days for us in Kabul.

While Axel was trying to get T-Mobile to accept their guilt in letting third parties bill us for random and non-existing services (T-Mobile customers check your bill carefully), I cut the raspberries back. My work was more satisfying. While on the phone with a call center somewhere in India, he looked up this third party company that bills us every month. As it turns out it sits at the top of a list of companies being investigated for shady practices. Huh? Duh?

After cutting back the raspberries I dug up one of the three remaining half rows of potatoes. This surfaced another few pounds, good for the next few weeks. After this we have one row left for the winter.

It is good there are shops around to complement our harvest. I don’t think we would survive the winter – our winter squash died after it produced one small acorn squash and was just starting on another – the main vine had shriveled up for reasons unknown.  The berries never make it to the freezer, nor are the beans.

On the other side of our little peninsula, someone is having better luck with winter squash – two men have made it a full time job to grow two giant pumpkins; one is already 1200 pounds and the other is a couple of hundred pounds behind. They are shooting for a 2000 pound pumpkin which would be a world record with a nice cash prize. One giant vine is feeding each pumpkin – each commanding a circle that is 30 feet in diameter. The caretakers nip any new growth in the bud to make sure they all feed the mother ship. It looks like the invasion of the body snatcher, a little creepy.