The Garden Where Nothing Grows

Tata: I've been weighing my compost, which is just quirky enough that I thought I should mention it.
Daria: What? Yes...
Tata: It's unscientific because the scale belongs to Ted, the tenant who is also Mom's chiropractor and who is wrong about everything, and the scale cannot be calibrated.
Daria: What do you mean he's wrong about everything?
Tata: We go to Wegman's and buy vegetables that cost a fortune and when we see him at the house he says, "Oh! Wegman's! Everything's so cheap there!" And let me tell you, he's got some very stinky ideas about women.
Daria: He's a good chiropractor, though. Mom says he really helps her.
Tata: Yeah. So weighing the compost is like performance art with broken numbers and an audience of mushy pineapple.

In the space of four days, I took outside 5.09 pounds of compostable material. That included two cardboard egg cartons I shredded by hand while I was steaming mad about Ted's generic bitter pronouncements about the nature of male-female relations. The pieces are very tiny. They'll turn into something useful a lot sooner than Ted's bullshit will.

The giant kitten, whose name this week is Lulu, is very pushy. She wants our attention a lot of the time, she wants the good scratchy-scratchy nails and she's first to the food bowl, which is working Topaz's last nerve. Working Pete's is finding cat yak all over the place. "Whoa!" he says, "Help!" It doesn't stink, so clean up is easy for me, but the downside is: it doesn't stink, so sometimes we don't find it right away. Last night, the kitten lay between us on the couch as we watched TV, then went off on some urgent kitten business. Some time later, I noticed she'd left us a surprise. A pile of cat yak between us. Surprise! We both sat there for a moment, staring, because neither of us heard, saw or smelled a cat tossing her waffles between us on the couch, so it was impossible for it to be there. It was so impossible, Pete couldn't see it for a moment because the colors of the regurgitated cat food matched the Mexican blanket on the couch, which was a thoughtful touch on the kitten's part, really.