chroniques d’une fraise

My neighbors across the quiet residential alley from my balcony probably wonder why I contort myself so strangely to take photos of plants: every once in a while I’ll spot someone staring at me oddly. Today I got on my back to see my first nearly-ripe strawberry at eye level. This photo shows how attractive a strawberry plant crown can be — the crown is the center of the plant just above the soil. I’ve been removing about half of the flowers, which you’re supposed to do with everbearing strawberry plants until June (it spares growing energy for the plant itself), wanting to leave others on just for the fun of watching them develop. Only three days ago, this little bunch of strawberries looked like so; they’re ripening quickly.

My PC as it was for two years on the left, and my “new” PC on the right. For my birthday two weeks ago I got a nice discount from my favorite PC-related electronics site (LDLC) and so used it to upgrade my PC a bit. I went from my old CD burner/DVD player to a CD and DVD burner, so that I can finally burn backups to DVD, and got a real “multi-drive” to replace the old portable one I used to read SD cards. Drives photographed here. With the discount they cost me about thirty euros all together, and as can be seen, they make the computer look much better too. I’m really glad I know how to put together a PC; it’s saved me a lot over the years. It also gave me the chance to clean out furballs that had gathered inside the case.

For a bit of computing and geek history, I worked on a portable 80486 not too long ago, and there’s a photo of me in 1992 on a 486/66 playing Space Quest IV. With a 4-button mouse and drafting tablet for AutoCAD! 5.25″ floppies! Nerd glasses! And a two-year-old! (I was 16, or half the age I am now.)

This unique nighttable is another of my secondhand — which in France often translates to “antique” — finds. I bought it two years ago and promptly loaded it with books. With nearly everything packed for my move now, I took the opportunity to photograph it bare. It was love at first sight when I found it, and inexpensive since it has some minor damage and at the time was missing both knobs. It’s made of solid wild cherry!

Over the years I’ve found that it really pays off to visit secondhand shops and wait for coups de coeur (roughly translated, “loves at first sight”). They don’t happen often, but when they do it’s so much more fulfilling. Right now there’s a gorgeous dining table I want, but since the shop in question doesn’t hold items for more than five days, I have to wait until I know for certain when I’ll get the keys…! La date de signature hasn’t yet been set, though it should be soon.

While packing for my upcoming move, I discovered that the photos of China I’d long thought lost were, in fact, packed in a box along with other backups. Today I uploaded, organized and mapped them in a photoset: China 2003. The photo here was taken at a temple in Tianjin. I happened to notice the Carrefour supermarket we’d just been in behind one of the temple gates, and thus this photo bringing together over a thousand years of architecture. Plus a weird contrast between spiritual and material values, not to mention between East and West (Carrefour is French).

Other favorite photos from my trip to China:
o Musicians in a park playing traditional instruments
o Bell pagoda in a Tianjin temple
o Roof tiles, Summer Palace, Beijing
o Old bridge, Summer Palace — the photo turned out like an impressionist painting
o An imperial guardian lion’s ball
o Fan dancers near Yonghegong (Lama Temple)
o The long at Longqing
o Pagoda on a cliff, Longqing Gorge

My air plants arrived this week. They’re too small to put in the glass candleholders I’d found, but were just right for the two bonsai pots from the same secondhand store. I also got a bell cup to hold one of the tillandsia. Air plants care gives better information than I’d seen elsewhere; I’d been under the (mistaken) impression that a very humid room would be all right, with sprinkled water occasionally. But they need more water, and more directly than that!

There are larger photos of the rectangular pot with its brachycaulis abdita and three different ionantha, and the circular pot with its albertiana and ionantha rubra.

I am happy to learn that my cat shares the same talents for club dancing, yodeling and postmodern cardboard deconstruction. Malo also works with plants, although he has a specialization in the pruning of acer palmatum.

(Don’t give kitties too much tuna, as it’s not good for them beyond a very small amount. Malo gets kitty-specific wet treats that he adores to the point of assaulting my eardrums with persistent, high-decibel meowing the moment he hears me open one.)

Photos: before (left) and after (right) repotting plants

Ever since finding my new apartment just over a month ago, I’ve been bitten by the gardening bug. Since it’s the perfect time — spring — to buy new plants, I haven’t wanted to wait until the final deed is signed in early June. Two weeks ago I got six strawberry plants, which have grown very fast since. I realized they needed to be repotted, so decided to repot all the other plants that needed it too. In the “before” picture on the left you can see that my red maple and myrtle (the green plant with loads of new growth) look too big for their pots, which is always a reliable sign that a plant needs a bigger home for its roots. The strawberry in front also shows clear signs of needing a new pot!

I found a bunch of true lavender plants (lavandula angustifolia) at the store where I bought pots and earth. Lavender repels insects naturally, and of course it smells wonderful and is a beautiful flower. I took home one of them, it’s the very light green bush on the left in both photos. In the “after” photo on the right, it’s pretty clear that the lavender plant and maple tree look much happier. The lavender plant inherited the myrtle’s old pot — this photo shows the myrtle better in its new pot, and here are some strawberry plants in their roomier new homes. Brand-new cherry tomato plants can be seen sprouting in the bottom left there. I planted thirty-odd seeds in two pots, thinking not all of them would sprout… but they all did! I moved half of them into two other pots. It should be interesting to see how the city gardening experience works out; this is the first time I’ve tried growing fruits and vegetables in pots. When I lived in Oregon there was plenty of land to go around!

As a woman you get used to having to prove yourself above and beyond men, who are much more often believed on their word. When visiting my new apartment and negotiating its purchase price, one of the things I noticed immediately was the state of the electrical outlets in the kitchen. One was right next to the sink drain (as in one centimeter behind it), another was right next to the sink, and for the clothes and dish washers, an extension cord had been used. Not a heavy-duty one, just a regular extension cord. The refrigerator had also been plugged into the extension cord. When I pointed out that the outlets by the sink were not only not to code, but also downright dangerous, and that I was surprised a fire hadn’t been started by the extension cord, my real estate agent — a young man — laughed derisively and said, “mais qu’est-ce que vous en savez ? Vous êtes une femme !” (”What do you know about that? You’re a woman!”) I repeated that the outlets were not to code and for good reason, they were dangerous. “Oh mais ouiiii, mais moi je suis agent immobilier et je peux vous dire, madame, que je vois ça partout. Ah ha ha.” (”Oh yeah whatever, I’m a real estate agent and can tell you, ma’am, that I see this everywhere. Ah ha ha.”) I stared at him as if he were mad, and insisted that all of the outlets would need to be redone. He still refused to believe me. A few minutes later, when I took out my measuring tape, he again laughed and said that a woman didn’t need such a nice one.

I then pointed out that my entire family is in construction. He chuckled and said it was clear I was the exception. I wanted to rip off his head. Parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins… the majority of them work in a construction-related field. I learned to use a hammer not too long after I learned to read, and a handsaw as soon as I was old enough to understand its risks. I’ve used measuring tapes ever since I can remember. Would a man need to give all those explanations?

Two weeks ago an état des lieux (condition report) was done for the apartment, required for the 0% loan. The inspector remarked that all of the electrical outlets in the kitchen had to be redone to code before he could give his OK. I phoned an electrician, who visited along with a different agent from the same real estate agency. This agent, although older and more mature, nonetheless laughed as well when I said the outlets by the sink had to be removed and that the extension cord downright frightened me. He called over the electrician and said, “please comfort the little lady and tell her everything’s all right.” The electrician looked at the drain outlet first: “oh my GOD! That HAS to go!” “Merci…” I smiled politely. He then looked up, to the outlet near the sink. “Uhh yeah, that has to go too,” he said. He then looked straight at the agent and said, “the lady was right.” I grinned and laughed in a gesture of gratitude. Then I pointed to the extension cord. “What’s this extension cord for?” he asked. The agent said, “oh you know, they plugged in their washing machine, dishwasher and refrigerator there. You can see how they made an outlet for the refrigerator from another cord. Pretty good idea, eh?” The electrician’s face went white.

The real estate agent held his ground and said that the extension cord seemed fine to him. I firmly said that it had to go, since washing machines need dedicated circuits. The electrician looked at me appreciatively and confirmed, quoting France’s electrical code. He knew it much better than I (naturally!), and had excellent ideas for what to do with the kitchen.

The photo above may look complicated, but it’s a simple TSX Micro PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) wired to an electrical and pneumatic setup that turns on some lights and powers a piston according to a program I wrote. Guess who drew up the wiring plan and wired it? Yours truly. (Yes. By myself. From start to finish.) I also have a basic electrical certification from when I was a technical writer for a major PLC manufacturer. I don’t know why I should need to say that. I don’t understand why, as an intelligent human being, my perfectly reasonable statements about electricity weren’t taken for the good sense they are. I don’t get why, when doubted, they didn’t simply say “oh, I’m not sure” and then look it up themselves in the abundant, free reference literature available, rather than making me out to be clearly in the wrong for… having a second X chromosome rather than a Y?!

Translation: “Strawberry has strawberries.” Hmm… Strawberry strawberries strawberried Strawberry strawberries. English is great. Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo! But I digress.

I was browsing a “nature products” store here (Nature et Découvertes) last week, waiting for a bank wire to come in that finally arrived this morning, and noticed they had a wild strawberry kit. At €16.50 I didn’t think it was worth it, so used the free inspiration to go to my favorite gardening store near Cours Saleya in Vieux Nice. Every time I’ve gone there they’ve been friendly and helpful, advising about plants and diagnosing the fungus malady that ravaged my maple tree last year — as seen in this photograph, my red maple is now healthy again! The store is Fiol Graines et Semences, 12 rue Alexandre Mari.

Their strawberry plants were only €1.50 a piece, or a tray of six plants for €6, and they had five different varieties from which to choose! Some strawberry varieties only give fruit once a year, while others produce throughout the summer and autumn. I chose these everbearing Ostara plants because their fruit is small (and tasty), and they do well in flower boxes. I could only find a commercial link about them: ostara strawberries.

To my delight, also in the store were peony plants of all sorts! I fell in love with the flowers last year when I bought a bouquet of peonies on Cours Saleya. I decided on the “Sarah Bernhardt” variety shown in the photo above. It looks gangly now, but it’s still only March! I chose it because I liked the tree peonies less, and it says “pink” (rose) on the tag. Apparently the Sarah Bernhardt peony is a lovely one!

The owner also said they’d have tillandsia in another two weeks. My current apartment is going to be overflowing with plants before my move…! (Early spring is a great time to find plants.)

After gorging myself on as many color and style ideas as I could, narrowing them down by my new apartment building’s own style (art deco, pale yellow/eggshell walls and pale green shutters) and my own tastes, yesterday I decided on a color scheme for the bedroom and living room. Pale blue like the tray photographed here for the bedroom, and a pale green similar to the shutters, but a bit lighter and more subdued for the living room. Habitat had some outdoor dishes that will match wonderfully.

The bedroom is going to be a real indulgence for me. I plan to use my favorite colors, pink and purple, as accents, so when I found this bowl in a secondhand store today, I grabbed it! Even better, it looks to be a real chawan: its bottom is signed and the sides have a motif different from the inner bowl. To my astonishment, it was priced at only two euros… less than the two glass candleholders beside it, which were three euros each! (They are made of nice, thick glass. But clearly the store owners had no idea what the chawan was.) The inner motif is of cherry trees in full blossom, with a few maple leaves in the wind. The sides show just maple leaves. Cherry blossoms, sakura, are a spring motif; maple leaves are an autumn motif. I’d never really seen sakura done in purple before.

The glass candleholders will be home to some plain stones and air plants, an idea borrowed directly from that link. Tillandsia, also called epiphytes, don’t have roots like other plants. They gather moisture and nutrients from the air, and so do well in humid places such as bathrooms.