Entry tags:	family, garden, lab
Crossposts:	http://jinian.livejournal.com/461551.html

Dad's finally having surgery on his back today. It's less invasive than originally planned (1-2 hours rather than 4), so it's not a huge deal that he's still a little anemic. He claims he will be leaving the hospital tomorrow, and after how energetic he was last time I kind of believe him. The goal is not to eliminate all pain, since unfortunately there's arthritis in there and still not a lot they can do, but to restore mobility. Good thoughts are still very welcome, of course, and I'll update later.

It was a perfect weekend for allergic girls to dig outdoors, since we're between tree pollen and grass pollen surges, and it rained a bunch to wash away what pollen there was. On Saturday, Wim and I finished cutting up the black locust saplings I felled a couple of weeks ago, then weeded out a bunch of those nasty pallid bindweed roots. Then I got a little more ambitious and cleared a bed in the vegetable garden (formerly upstairs neighbors' domain, but their tenant does not want), into which I moved the rhubarb that was getting shaded out by raspberries in the front and some strawberries ditto. On Sunday, I returned to the vegetable garden and cleared another bed: two kale seedlings and I think a wee carrot were in there amid the weeds, so I kept them, and I added a purple artichoke and yellow-pod snow peas and shiso, then stuck sprouted garlic cloves in a sort of sidebar bed. It's fun adapting my planting to existing structures. And the Oregon Giant snow peas now have strings. I gave the new peas some old tomato cages to climb on, so we'll see if they like that.

Plus the confocal really is fixed, hurrah!