5AM. Feel tired but have been lying in bed for an hour unable to go back to sleep. Breezes blowing yesterday and last night, overcast, a pleasant change. Bothers Dale Sr.'s allergies something terrible, though.
Really tired yesterday---all I did all morning was to watch episodes of New Tricks, the Brit mystery series which I bought at CostCo.
In the morning. Dale Sr. was going to Home Depot and I asked him to get pepper plants and sage, five bags of citrus/palm tree food, and he did get all of those things.
Here are the pepper and sage plants:
He is employing Cam this week to re-do the wooden bed on his large flat-bed trailer.
I flooded the garden bed which the peppers will go in, to level it. I always do this, so that the bed can be flooded easily later. The way I level the bed is to keep raking it as the water sinks down, as soon as part of the dirt shows, I rake it into the deeper parts, and repeat over and over until the water disappears completely. It takes some patience, but it's well worth it later.
In the early afternoon I watered everything in the back end of the lot across the street, including the established trees. It was very pleasant with the cloud cover and the breeze blowing.
I was pleasantly surprised that one of the "red yuccas" (not a true yucca) is going to be the yellow-flowered variety. They've been in the ground several years and just now are starting to flower. .
They are not striking now, but when mature they will have great splashes of color in the two colors.
Of the desert trees (and one shrub) which you see below, I planted six out of seven of them. From left to right, "foothills palo verde", "blue palo verde", "palo brea" "shoestring acacia", "jojoba" (the shrub) "Texas ebony", "spineless prickly pear" (partly obscuring the Texas Ebony, this cactus was developed by Luther Burbank) and the branches in the foreground are also "palo brea". My aim was to create a natural-looking but prettier version of desert, and I think I've succeeded. The only one which I did not plant was the foothills palo verde.
(When we bought that lot, it had been bull-dozed completely, except for a large dying ironwood tree. Since then, two young ironwoods have grown to full size, but they are not shown in the photograph.)
All of these still need watering every two weeks, some still need it every week. The baby shrubs, such as the "pink fairy duster" and the" brittlebush" below, need watering twice a week still in the summer. They look insignificant now, but when mature will measure 3' by 3'.
When this little landscape is completely mature, I will be able to leave for an entire month, even in the heat of summer, and the plants will all be fine. But I'm finding out that the plants that need little water, also grow slowly. And if you water them more often so they grow faster, they do not bother to develop the deep roots necessary if you want them to eventually be able to go for a month without water. So patience, patience!
After a shower and getting ready to go out, I went up to the Boys & Girls Club. I was perplexed by the behavior of Jaycee, a third-grader, (startlingly beautiful, which can cause its own problems) who has consistently been my "star actor" this year, (naturally loud, expressive, gestures, etc. from the "git-go"). At least, she was thus when we were reading still from our scripts.
Now that we are trying to go through the skit from memory, this girl has completely deflated. She was so terrified of making a mistake. Her lack of energy was "catching" and the other kids also complained of being bored.
In spite of their protests I did make them go through the short scene twice. Then, because a very helpful middle-school aged girl was there, helping, I could ask her and one of the girls to practice their other script, if sent the two youngest kids to the supervised computer room.
I took the girl who had lost her confidence over to the side and we went through the skit again, and I kept praising her effusively. This time she remembered everything, but it was still as if the spirit had gone out of her.
It's the first time I've had that happened, that someone who was so ultra-confident before, so completely deflated when there was a chance she could make a mistake. Tomorrow I'm going up there again, to make some phone calls to see if I can get better attendance for the Wednesday group. I will see if I can work with this same girl again, for a short while, on her own.
She is such a perfectionist that the idea she might not be able to remember terrifies her. I think I'll practice one line with her over and over, and at Monday's rehearsal only ask her to remember that one line, and cue her with the others.
There is another girl, Nevaeh, who has not been coming to rehearsal because "she doesn't feel like it". I really hope to get her back into it because not only is she a super performer, but she has so many problems at home that I feel that being in the drama club production would be helpful to her.
It turns out that although she doesn't come to our rehearsals, she has been joining two other drama club members, on their own time, in practicing a dance number which we were planning to include in our little performance. I had to make it clear to her that she could not participate in performing the dance number unless she started joining us for rehearsals again.
When Nevaeh's grandmother came to pick her up, I mentioned this to her grandmother, that her grand-daughter might not realize she could not perform the dance number with the drama club unless she started joining us for rehearsals. I was dumbfounded when the grandmother yelled across the room at the girl in an angry combative voice, "Git over here!"
"You didn't go to drama club??", said the grandmother. And she slapped the girl 'upside the head'! Not real hard, but not playfully either.
This grandmother, who looks younger than I, is what you might call a "real piece of work". When she went into the computer room to get the other sister, out of the sight of the front desk staff, she (the grandmother) started giving a shoulder massage to one of the young men working there.
I will try to get these Jaycee and Nevaeh to both go through their lines with me this evening, even for a short while. I've learned from experience that the more little side practices I can do with kids, it pays off a great deal.
One time Nevaeh was sitting near us when I was doing some extra practice with the older girls, and one of the characters in that scene happened to be named Leslie. We were sitting at the long tables with attached benches, and Nevaeh leaned against me and said, "It's sad to me to hear that name because it's my mother's name and I never ever get to see her again."
So, have you heard the name Nevaeh before? I hadn't either, but since volunteering at the Boys& Girls Club I have encountered three girls with that name. It's "heaven" spelled backwards, quite popular around here.
I mentioned the inappropriate shoulder massage to the desk staff, in a low voice. Once before, I had seen the same lady reach over and stroke another young male staff member, on the neck.The desk staff just rolled their eyes when I told them, I guess it's nothing new to them either. If they made a big thing about it, the woman might remove Nevaeh and her sister from the club, and the club is a good influence on the girls.
So, you can see I learn a great deal about people, volunteering up there! When I coached drama at the middle school, I tended to get the highly-achieving type of student in the club, not kids with huge problems.
One of the Renaissance Festival street performers, who goes by the performing name of "Lady Tess", has become more of a friend this year. At the festival, she would let me perform at her little shady spot during times when she didn't actually have a show...much appreciated.
It turns out that in her day-to-day life, she is remarkably involved in Apache Junction civic affairs, not only on the board which overseas the Boys & Girls Club, but also on the boards of planning and zoning and several others! Chatting to her, I learned interesting information, such as why last year's B&G's activity director (great enthusiasm, unreal expectations) did not work out. The new activity director knows her personally, so it puts me more "in the loop" that I know her, and that she has told me he is a good person with a known history in the organization. (And, of course, I mentioned to him that she'd told me good things about him!)
Love,
Lennie
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