One Last Stop

After leaving Dan in June to defend my thesis, in July to visit my family, and again this last week to visit my friend Tiffany, Dan has told me that he is ready for the Alisa world tour to be over. I am too, but first I get to make one more stop at Girls' Camp this next week.


I had a fun time visiting Tiffany and her kids. Spending a little more than twenty-four hours with Tiffany, I got a glimpse, more or less, of what life is like with three eleven-month-olds. I was pretty tired by the time I got back to Los Angeles, but Tiffany made it all look like fun rather than hard work. Maybe that's because her three kids are basically pretty good. They're good about playing quietly while mom bathes one at a time or changes one's diaper.
Tiffany has a play room with a pretty good gate on it that allows her to leave her kids playing while she has one of them in the bathroom next door or in their bedroom one more door down. And when she puts them down for bed at seven, they play quietly until they go to sleep. Of course they wake up at six in the morning, but after Tiffany gives them a bottle, they'll stay in their cribs for another half hour, allowing Tiffany to get a bit more rest if she wants. Yeah, Tiffany spends all day feeding them, cleaning them up after feeding them, and changing diapers, but she also takes them shopping to Target or the mall.
It probably all seems like such fun to me because I got to leave the next day and go back to my life, but they are such cute kids and Tiffany made it look so easy.

Needless to say, I haven't done any quilting this past week and when I got back home I discovered that my gardening skills are also going to pot. About two months ago, I bought a lovely basil plant from Trader Joe's. I like to grow my own basil, but I haven't had much luck growing it here in California, mostly because the hotel next door blocks out all the sunlight. I decided to try once again to plant some basil seeds, but in the mean time I could use the basil from the bushy plant I got at TJs. After a week or two, I noticed that something besides Dan and I was munching on my basil plant. So I spent an hour one day, cleaning all the leaves off with water from a spray bottle, hoping to rid the plant of the critter. Some of the leaves continued to show signs of nibbling, but in general the plant is now doing much better. Then I discovered that the basil I had planted was also showing signs of nibbling. I was pretty bummed since they were actually growing really well. At one point they were about four inches tall with lovely, big green leaves. I had some hope that the bug would just move on and the plants would ultimately survive.

When I got home after being gone for just two days and one night, my little basil plants were nothing more than twigs poking out of the ground, and the culprit continued to munch in plain sight.
I was shocked by the devastation caused by this little green caterpillar. Once, I spent several minutes in sweltering heat watching a caterpillar eat a leaf on a tree in our front yard because I thought it was so fascinating. I'm not fascinated anymore. And I take some pleasure in the fact that now that this caterpillar has completely eaten my plants, he can't get out of the pot. If I help him out, I'll also help him over the edge of my balcony. For now, I'm giving up on growing basil until we move to Utah.