I've reached the "coughing my lungs out" phase of my cold. It's better than the "head feels like a block of wood filled with snot" phase. I think. If I'm going to be sick, it could at least be cold. Then I could light a fire and snuggle under a blanket.
And if it were cold, I wouldn't feel guilty about not doing any yardwork. It's been obscenely warm. We have the door open right now! The plants don't know what to do with themselves. A bunch of daffodils are up, the parsley never died back, and on Monday I saw a baby cilantro sprouting in the vegetable garden! The ones we planted last year must have seeded. I hope it survives. We did have one cold night this past week, and I was going to cover it with straw, but then I got sick and forgot.
On the bright side, the seed & plant catalogs are starting to arrive. I'm having fun making wish lists. Probably many times longer than what I'll actually buy. For Christmas I got a gift certificate from my favorite seed supplier, JohnnySeeds.com, so I can go crazy if I want. I'm definitely getting Benary's zinnias from them like last year, and lots of sunflowers too. I like to plant them around the daylilies at the top of the bank by the driveway. But I think a little taller this time. Last year I got the tiny sunflowers, only a foot tall, and they were kind of hard to see from the road. Johnny's has one that's about 2 feet tall with reddish flowers. That sounds nice. And I want to put some talls ones in the new bed we're building out front. We don't hang out in that part of the yard, so we need big & colorful flowers that can be appreciated from a distance.
I'm going to try hollyhocks too. I read that they're biennials, which I'm normally not into. Kind of weird that I like annuals, but reject biennials as too much work. What's that about? Anyway, hollyhocks are supposed to reseed readily, which makes them seem more worth it. I'm also thinking about growing yarrow from seed. It wouldn't bloom the first year, which is kind of a bummer, but it's about 50 times cheaper than buying potted plants.
Watched the third disc of "Samurai 7" last night. Now that I've just seen Seven Samurai and it's fresh in my mind, I'm surprised at how similar the anime is to the original. I thought it was going to be "loosely inspired," like the Soderburgh Ocean's 11, but no, it's much closer to the movie. The samurai especially. They're not all exactly the same, but they do serve the same plot functions and many details about their characters are the same. The anime did add a bunch of subplots. A necessary change for converting a 3 hour movie into a 28 episode series. But the samurai are very closely based on their counterparts in the movie. The changes are the kind of things you'd expect in an anime: first of all, the bandits are giant flying robots. Mifune's character is a robot too. Which makes sense in the context of the show. And the peasant's daughter has been split into two characters, one of whose part is so greatly expanded, she's basically the star. And she has a cute toddler sister. Again, no surprise. If I was going to be annoyed by that kind of change to the venerable Seven Samurai, I wouldn't watch an anime remake of it.
Anyway I'm enjoying the series so much that I'm very happy about still having 4 DVDs to go. I'm just bummed that I forgot to put A Scanner Darkly back in the mail until today, so I won't have another disc of Samurai 7 until Monday at the earliest.
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