"songbird" wrote in message
Farm1 wrote:
songbird wrote:

so what's up in edible gardening lands?

Phew! It soudns like it was a very productive year for you 'Bird. You
must
have been flat out like a lizard drinking (Aussie for 'really, really
busy')
to plant, care for, harvest and then process all that lot.

it's actually pretty reasonable most of the
time around here with two of us gardening as
we have time and energy. most of the gardens
are established or mulched enough to keep the
weeds down. if we have a dry spell that means
very few weeds in the limestone mulch. i work
about 4hrs a day average and some of that isn't
gardening as much as it is landscaping or basic
maintenance like caulking the cracks or fixing
the fireplace cap or improving the drainage or
dot, dot, dot.

i'm only a bit jammed up now because of
the illness, which gets to a story...

last spring Ma was very nice to get me a
gift for my 50th birthday of a new front
tooth (i broke it off when i was a kid diving
over a snowbank preceeded by my ice-skating
step-brother). after several months of
getting my teeth white enough that the doc
would match it (he really didn't want to put
a yellow crown on and i can't blame him).

Sounds like he just wanted to get mroe money out of you with the teeth
whitening. My dentist has done several crowns on me and he matched them to
what I've got in my mouth. I'd have not looked kindly on him suggesting
that my teeth needed whitening - my teeth are a natural colour that no doubt
arose from the places I've lived and where I've drunk local water.

so finally a few weeks ago we did the new
crown (with the modern gizmos it can be done
in a few hours now instead of waiting weeks
for a lab to cook it up). anyways, when he
was grinding the old stump to make a good
base for the crown i breathed in some of the
dust and i suspect that contained the
bacterial critters that took me out a few
days later - been hacking lungs out since then.

Hmmmm. That doesn't make sense to me. Those critters would have been in
your mouth before, and not jsut at the time of your dental treatment and you
can't tell me that they couldnt' have found a way from your mouth to your
lungs at any other time than when you were at the dentist.

someone said i could have picked it up any-
place, but i'm usually very good about keeping
my hands out of my face and washing them when
i come home from being out. and i rarely go
out anyways (a part of personal vows taken at
age 25, but that's a whole different round of
stories and not even close to on-topic here
). it's never my fault. never. heheh.

we keep joking about this gift as being
the one that keeps on giving, but damn that
new tooth looks very nice compared to the
old one... i'm a movie star! *cue theme
from Beverly Hillbillies* whee!

i'll be much more like a flat out lizard
drinking in the next six to eight weeks,

The way to use that expression properly in that sentence would be: 'I'll be
much more flat out like a lizard drinking in the next 6 to 8 weeks'.

the
past few weeks i've been more like the frozen
lizard sleeping.

:-)) Nice analogy.

Ma's been running rings
around me lately. today she's made bread,
brownies, and fed me more sugar than a bear
in a bee hive. i just had a wonderful mug
of hot chocolate (left-over frosting )
and half a pie pan of male brownies (with
walnuts (the ones without nuts are female
brownies)). don't worry, i had some veggies
today too, but i'm still going to be awake
until 4am... one of our other running jokes
is wishing for mining lamps so we can garden
at night. it's only a joke, i really don't
want to be out there with the raccoons as
i'm sure i smell really chocolaty and
dewicious and i can't run far at the moment.
i'd be a sitting duck... *qwack*

'Bird, I've had a filthy cough too and I have bee using mentholed chest rub
(Vicks) at night and that has helped, but the best help has been from a
cough medicine called Rikodeine which has stopped the hacking at night. You
might need a Doctor's script for it depending on where you live as it has
codeine in it - it's the only cough medicine I've ever foudn that works.

The one other thing that actually also helped was putting Vicks on my feet
before going to bed and then putting socks on over the Vicks. I mentioned
that to someone and they said that was their Mum's secret to chesty recovery
when they were a child.