All the lads

I believe I mentioned before that months ago I saw an incredibly silly article claiming that wearing skinny jeans was a "Millennial trait".

I don't say this is completely inaccurate, just that it's silly regardless.

Now every time I see a pair of skinny jeans getting worn, my brain goes "A Millennial???" without my permission.

For the record, I have not yet noticed them on any teenagers or very young people, so it's possible. But on the other hand, they are still making and selling them in fast fashion stores, so I'd be astonished if this were so universal (not to mention the average pair of jeans is much shorter-lived now than when I was a teenager in the late 90s, and most adults still had jeans they'd bought ten years before. Stretch denim was unknown as far as I remember up to 2001, when I was 18 and buying new jeans was a substantial preoccupation of mine because it was hard to find ones that fit).

Sigh.

Also, I am a millennial (or 'xillennial'), but I can't begin to tell at a glance if a stranger is. Or maybe it counts as beginning, since I can guess they're, like, almost certainly between 30 and 70. 😂 But I can't continue!

I have been reading and skimming 1920s magazines and have not got tired of that yet. I have learned so much more about the period, and have a much firmer grip on the idiom of the time.

It was a didactic article about world literature from one of these 20s women's magazines that actually made me curious about the Arabian Nights - I didn't read the whole article, bc racism, but the brief history inspired me to read on Wikipedia. The history and background there fascinated me, and I wanted to read the translation of

The Leiden Edition, prepared by Muhsin Mahdi, [...] the only critical edition [...] to date,[48] believed to be most stylistically faithful representation of medieval Arabic versions currently available. [... It] was rendered into English by Husain Haddawy (1990).[61] This translation has been praised as 'very readable' and 'strongly recommended for anyone who wishes to taste the authentic flavour of those tales'.

It is very readable and really entertaining! In fact I've stayed awake longer than I meant to several nights this week because of wanting to finish one of the stories.

I've also realized that the... maybe not exactly subgenre; category? of Arabian fantasy is all stylistically influenced by them. That seems painfully obvious now that I've thought it, but I've never thought about it before! I have not read much of it, though, and I know there are newer fantasy novels in that setting that are not written by white people, some on my to-read list; they are possibly quite different or more diverse. But in the past (mostly childhood), I've read

• Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones (1990), set in the universe of Howl's Moving Castle


• The Harem of Aman Akbar by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1984)


• Night's Master and Death's Master by Tanith Lee (1978-79)

Oh, Wikipedia even says on the page for the last series that it's inspired by the Thousand and One Nights. I must've seen that before I read them (it was only like five years ago maybe) and forgotten.

Wax and I planted 136 bulbs yesterday evening: tulips (including 7 more of the red and white stripey Carnaval de Rio), crocus, daffodils, fritillarias, and three kinds of allium flowers - a few of the big dramatic puffy purple ones and then 40 smaller blue and red-clover-colored ones.

We bought a bulb planter a few years ago, a very handy little low-tech device. But we both have ADHD and we couldn't remember where we put it or find it again. Unfortunately, garden... stuff... tools... are spread around in the basement (very poorly lit and low-ceilinged so I hit my head on a beam at least 1/3 of the time I go there...), the boatshed that I can't enter because there's a smell that makes me like unable to breathe that nobody else can smell, and our uninsulated-but-enclosed porch, which WOULD be the ideal place, but it's too small. I guess if we lined the walls with cork board and cubbies and shelving and drawers like a garage workshop all the small garden tools would fit, but it's also the entryway/airlock area from the front door so... nah. There's a cabinet (one of the original wooden homemade kitchen cabinets from the house, so smaller than current cabinet sizes) that currently holds most of our tools, and there's one of those island-height tables with a vinyl tablecloth on it for basic repotting and stuff (whose top quickly fills up with muddy gloves and birdseed bags etc, because we have ADHD, but it's too necessary to eliminate the surface).

So we planted them with trowels, which is much more work, and I tried REALLY hard not to put my knees down on the ground but I ended up having to scrub the knees of my sweatpants anyway. Then we raked a few big bags of potting soil over the bare ground left after our plumbing excavation, because the surface left by the digger guy was mostly sand, and then we scattered the clover seed over that. Feeling very accomplished right now!

We put a bunch of bulbs near the new bushes, at the side of the house along the street, which is a place we don't usually think about much becasue we hardly see it. But we're running into a problem with our perennial beds:

There are two long rectangular beds with perennials in them running along the edge of the embankment/retaining wall leading up into the main yard. (We live on a hill.) And they have had perennials in them before, because a diligent gardening genius USED to live in this house - not sure if it's just the original owner, from 1950-, or her daugher-in-law, who moved out somewhere around 10 years before we bought the house. The intermediate owner did nothing to the garden, just let grass cover everything and mowed it flat, so the grass took over most of the perennials, and they only gradually started to come back when we weeded etc. They didn't ALL come back, but the shape of the beds as originally intended was still clear, so over the past 6 years we and our tenants have gradually added more perennials to these two beds. But kind of at random. In different years.

So looking at this long rectangular bed NOW, in the fall when everything has stopped blooming, it's like:

"I know there are a lot of daffodils... I think sort of mainly over here on the left?"

"Don't they go more towards the middle? I think there are daffodils out to HERE."

"Okay, let's try to put them down here I guess. What about this side of this bush? Some more tulips?"

"I think some of the tulips are there already. Aren't they? Were't there some tulips like over... here?"

"Oh, maybe. And what about up here then, in the upper left corner of the bed?"

"I think we put something there. I can't remember what though. Maybe it died."

Etc. Etc.

We need a complete map of these beds. Wish us luck remembering to document them next year.