ambition

Ambitious people are a little headstrong. They fight the naysayers. They take calculated risks. They imagine results that aren't really likely. And then they work to make them happen anyway. They never wait for opportunity. They don't believe in opportunity. They believe in taking charge.

Surely it's not a good thing, therefore, to be overly ambitious. You should take note of your limitations! Scale down! Work hard and adjust accordingly!

Good points, just not ones I could ever live by. I've always veered toward being ridiculously ambitious. Though perhaps not in the way you would define ambition. Mine is a little jumpy. One day it may be doing a class of all classes, the next -- to eat the most perfect breakfast on the porch.

Today, it isn't about the classes or the breakfast. For one thing, it's cooled down a bit. So we eat indoors. The sunroom.





The ambition focuses on the outdoors. Sometime in the middle of the day Ed asks -- do you suppose we should extend the flower bed all the way (from the farmhouse) to the sheep shed?

Say what? That would mean ripping out mountains of quack grass and creating insane amounts of space for multiples of  flowers, strawberries, who knows what else.

Yes!





So we begin the job. Neither of us really has the time for it right now and yet, once started, my insane ambitions click in and I want to do it all, today, now, perfectly.

We work our tails off. I don't know how else to put it. We rip, dig, clear. It turns out to be a hellacious  project, yet I never once reconsider.





The bed is (mostly) cleared. We need to dump chips on it. Then plant it.

Ed grunts -- who'll take care of this if you die? (We are prone to such curious conversations.)
Don't worry! Perennial beds last forever. (I say this, but I don't mean it. So I guess I have to keep on living. There's no other way.)


In the early evening we head out to Jung's garden center in search of replacement (dwarf) fruit trees for our young orchard (the starting of it was last year's ambitious project). We're too late. Dwarf cherries, pears -- all gone. Sold out.

We settled for bareroot strawberries. Last year's strawberry crop was a total failure. All devoured by... well, I don't really know by which species of animal. For some reason, we think that merely by planting again we'll be lucky this time around. As if the wild animals are satiated. Or tantalized by other garden crops.






It's been an exhilarating set of days. I'm glad that it'll be cold and wet tomorrow. I have a boatload of work to do. I can't afford another day of ridiculous ambition.