Pandemic Garden Club

Welcome to the May edition of Pandemic Garden Club! Growing good things in strange times!

Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.

As for myself...

( Under the cut because photos... )

Lake Lewisia #526

“What are you doing up here,” the raven asked the boy when it found him amid the branches as far up as his weight would allow, “hiding or seeking?” Since this was the kindest thing the boy had heard all day, he didn’t mind that it came from a bird, and he answered, “I thought, if I got high up enough, I would be able to see a way out.” The raven, who had been advisor to kings and gods with their war maps and their carrion fields (or at least had heard the stories often enough to give a credible impression of firsthand knowledge) knew an adventurer when it saw one, and it offered, “For a share of your future fortunes, I can show you ways out and over and through and in.”

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LL#526

plague journaling

Huh. Got my relief check in the mail. $1200.

Honestly not sure how I feel about this. I mean, I'll take it, obviously. But I can't help thinking about how long it took to get it, or about how little it is when it's (currently planned to be) a one-time payment.

I'm lucky, especially right now. I haven't lost my job or even had my hours cut. I'm not the sole financial support of my household. (My parents, incidentally, haven't received theirs yet, though Mum eventually set up the necessary bits for direct deposit for them.) While our expenses are...complicated, we're also not as bad off as we could be/have previously been. So this money in no way means the difference between survival and death for us. I'm honestly planning to just stuff it away in my savings account and pretend it doesn't exist until I have an unavoidable need. Because I'm paranoid like that.

If this had happened, say, a year ago? When I was working 3-4 days a week in a fast casual restaurant and on Medicaid with no diagnosis or treatment in sight yet for my chronic pain and fatigue? A $1200 check would represent about a month's wages--after three years with the company, I made pretty good hourly rates, but I was working a very restricted schedule.

I haven't been back to the restaurant since leaving--I believe in clean breaks--but I don't imagine things are going stunningly well for them in the current circumstances. It's still open, so maybe I would still have my job. Maybe I would even be picking up extra hours, though god knows at that point how my body would have held up to that. Maybe I would have bowed out to leave hours for people who needed the money more than I did at that point.

A month's wages are helpful, certainly. They're better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. That's not exactly the metric I was hoping would be used, you know? I'm just baffled by the people who put this together from a position of a) no one could possibly need more than this, and b) no one could possibly need this more than once, and c) no one could possibly have an urgency of need such that a month or more of delay in payment would cause problems.

Which just seems so hilariously out of touch with the daily reality of most Americans, I wonder if anyone involved in this plan has actually visited this timeline previously. They're obviously not from this one originally.