How the Sausage is Made

I've been passing this bench on my way to work for years, and in recent weeks it's been slowly degrading. You'd think the council would come along and at least remove the old one, which looks a bit dangerous, if not replace it entirely. I have an app that allows me to report discarded rubbish to the council, but I'm not sure it covers furniture repairs. Still, I might report this bench.

Reader Ellen D. asked yesterday whether I make notes each day for the following day's blog post. The answer is, sometimes. I usually open a new post every morning and just write off the top of my head. I sometimes think I have nothing to say, but if I just start writing (often prompted by a picture, of which I seem to have a virtually endless supply) I usually find there's a post in there somewhere. If there's something specific I want to mention, or I want to quote something funny that I read or that someone said to me, I might open the post the day before and make some notes, save it as a draft, and then write it out the following morning.

When I was in high school my AP English teacher used to assign "timed writings," in which we'd be given a topic and 15 minutes or so to write a brief essay. That was a good preparation for blogging, though as you saw in my recent post about the Beholder, I was journaling even years before that. I've had a lot of blog training! It's actually quite surprising that I didn't pick it up until 2006, given that blogs were around for years before that, but I was initially wary of sharing personal information on the Internet. As you can see, for better or worse, that dam has burst. Now you can't shut me up.

The somewhat unlovely "stinking iris" is once again blooming. These iris grow wild in our garden. We initially tried to remove them because they're not that pretty and they do have a weird, meaty smell when you pull them up. But we've found that they grow well in areas that don't support much else -- shady, dry spots particularly. So now we let them live and proliferate. I saw a bee on one the other day, so apparently the insects like them, though I'm not sure they offer much in the way of nectar or nutrition.

And here's another shot of our yellow peony, which is going gangbusters. As you can see from the dropped petals on the ground, some of the flowers have already fallen apart. (The ones Olga brushes against when she bulldozes her way through the garden.)

On TV, Dave and I are watching Jon Hamm's show "Your Friends and Neighbors," which we like a lot. We watched two episodes of "The Studio" with Seth Rogen, and I like it but Dave is not a fan, so I may have to pick that one up on my own. I finally finished the first season of the Australian crime drama "Black Snow," which I really liked but which also got the thumbs down from Dave, so that's also one I'll probably have to watch on my own if I want to continue it. I think there are two more seasons. I don't get a whole lot of solo TV-watching time so we'll see if I can make that happen.

I'm in the same situation with "Poker Face," which I watched for one episode and I love Natasha Lyonne so I want to keep going, but Dave is not enthusiastic. Like Olga, he's getting harder to please as he gets older. I think watching YouTube on his phone has trained him to accept only what he specifically wants to see, you know?