Smoke gets in your eyes

Right now I'm tidying up my little gardens. They have been abandoned while I've been battling flues and eyeinfections. Every now and then I stop and ask myself if I've really been that ill. In some cases I've been driven to desperat messures. To save the bigger part of my seedlings I planted the tigernuts and nasturtiums in the same container and the same soil as I used for the carrots and the turnips. You shouldn't do that, I've been told, and now I know why. Some desease in the soil, or perhaps some bug on the purslane, have now affected all of the plants in the bin. The leaves of the nasturtiums are all bumpy and have dry areas drained of all moist. Only now do I realise that I should spray them with something, or at least figure out what the problem is.

Unfortunately I'm not coherent yet, and the reason is my eyeglasses. They are sixteen years old. My last pair of contacts was infected with the eyeinfection so I'm forced to use my glasses instead, and they are not up do date with my eyesight. My brain has to put a lot of extra effort on interprete the pictures delivered, and less power are left to actual thinking. The last days have been full of Duh! moments. For one thing I've lost about five dollars paying doubble fees on the bus.

But the worst accident was with the aluminium pan I found in the metal recycling bin. You know; you need some kind of container if you are going to sterilize soil in the oven. I don't want to use our regular kitchenware, and it feels wrong buying new stuff. So, when I found the pan in the metal bin I thought "Bingo! Finders keepers!"

I won't be ashamed of using this pan for soil. The teflon layer inside has been ript several times, the outside is burnt black, and how does a pan like this end up with all those dents? What did they do? Slammed the cupboard door on it? Jumped on it? Ran over it with a car? Perhaps they did all this and some more too, but I can never know for sure.

The pan was smeared in something sticky. The dishwasher would take care of that (dishwasher detergent is extremely corrosive) so I didn't worry about it. On the other hand I smeard some of the goo around while carrying the pan, and when I used the kitchen cloth to remove it I didn't feel like using the cloth for kitchen chores any more. But a stRong woman knows what to do; I decided to boil the germs out of the cloth.

I've actually saved an old saucer just to be able to boil my kitchen cloths. I took the saucer out, filled it with water, added some washing up liquid and the cloth, put this on the stove on the hottest area and myself in front of the computer...

I woke from my computer coma about an hour later smelling smoke. I warned my hubby and returned to the kitchen to get some nose spray (to be able to detect the source of the smoke). I didn't need to sniff around. In front of me I found an dry saucer with a charcoal cloth glaring at me with its embers.

Duh!

I'm going to the optrician at tuesday, and then I'll have to wait a week for my new contacts. Untill I get them I'll try to stay out of the more firery chores of gardening. But I'll sterilize some leca tomorrow - those of you who can; pray for me.