The Rubber Ducky Place

I had to work tonight, which although this post will date itself the 26th, it is still the 25th to me.  Working 4p to 12:30a on Christmas. And while I choose at this point for Christmas to be pretty much like any another day to me, I cannot help but be in the midst of everyone else's holiday. I had more than my usual number of text exchanges before I went to work.

One such exchange was with Kathleen. She asked me if the money would be good, if I was still working at the Rubber Ducky Place.  That made me laugh out loud.  Everyone who knows about my currents source of income knows about the ducks!  From now on I will be calling it just that.  The Rubber Ducky Place.  It is such a bizarre job. It has this intimate, mostly regulars feel, and some of my customers call it Cheers, because I bother to remember their name and what they drink and smoke.  Has it not occurred to them that Cheers was really a bar full of addicts who had no life without the drink? Or that my reason for being there is to take their money, like Sam and Carla? My hope being if they like me and the service they receive, that they will rejoice in giving me more money.  I keep a firm line in the sand and I do not socialize with customers, ever.  There are many I genuinely like, and a select few that I might hang out with were they not my customers, who drink and gamble for fun.  But, honestly, I am not looking to make any friends, only money.

Holidays can go either way financially, I cleaned up on Thanksgiving this year.  I've tracked my income for my entire tenure and this is my 5th Christmas. Tonight it was painfully slow. I was on the cranky side internally.  First I forgot my phone charger, dammit! Jim!, if I can play games and go online, at least I have something to do.  My phone will not sustain 8 hours of constant use without juice. Second, if I'm not making money, the Rubber Ducky Place is horrific.  And on Christmas, my favorite customers, the ones who play big, hit large and share, are home with their families. What's left is the lowest level of player, the pathetic ones, who play the minimum lose the paltry amount of money they brought in, then go outside to scape up a dollar in change from the floor of their car, if they have one.

The store I currently work in is far south and not easily accessible even by bus, I so no longer have many customers who don't have a car or at least access to one. I clung to the gratitude of that tonight.  I spent the two prior Christmas' in a store in just about the worst part of town, where the pathetic ones out numbered the good ones by a lot, and it was a good shift if I didn't have to kick someone out.

This Christmas, in my new store, I hung all the decorations and trimmed the fake tree the day after Thanksgiving.  I had to go to the dollar store and purchase a cheap felt skirt to go around the bottom of the tree, so I did not have to look at the metal stand.  I've done this every year at every store I've worked in even though I did not do the actual decorating. Certain things about Christmas have to be right, a skirt on the bottom of the tree is one of them.

The Rubber Ducky Place is a ridiculous job. I am amused at the work and the fact that I am doing it, yet, I know there is no better money to be made in Reno with my skill set.  This is an in the meantime space and time, and I am so grateful I can afford to live and on my own time, I am completely unplugged from it. And now the gift of calling it the Rubber Ducky Place is one more tool to remind myself of the absurdity of it all and not let the bad guys get me down.  Thanks, Kathleen!  I love you.

Christmas

There is this sneaky little guilt that creeps in every year at Christmas time because I no longer participate.  I am going to write about it and let it go.  Merry Christmas to me.  I have to get ready for work right now and finish up when I get home tonight...watch for an update. 

The 2013 Cash Crop

For me, one of the great joys of living in Reno has been planting and harvesting every year. I am so completely happy when I have my hands in the dirt.  Heaven on Hillcrest has provided the most delightful blank canvas. This started out as a blog about the watermelon, I think, since I named it the cash crop, lol.  I have a lot of drafts started.  I would think about something I wanted to blog about and I would enter the title so I would not forget, this happened a lot while I was sorting the pictures.  So rather than try and sort these out, I am just going to write about each one till all the drafts are posted. 

 

This is where the huge pile of wood chips was. We raked and shoveled all the wood chips into the paths between beds.  This picture was taken before I'd planted anything yet, I had cleared and turned all the brick planter beds, then I just started carving out the beds from the sidewalk back, lining them with rocks from the property. I spent a lot of time in the fall and winter looking at the space from the bedroom window, imagining the shape my garden would take and how I could use the elements left on the property to create a pleasing aesthetic. 

 

I went to a retreat during the Continuum years called Dreamtime Wilderness Gathering. We camped on a sacred piece of land for 4 days. One of the things we did was find a section of that land and create an earth portrait of ourselves.  That's what the backyard was to me this year, a place to express myself with the earth I have been given.

 

I had run out of rocks by the time I got to the circle in the center of the trees. If you can't tell, it's a yin/yang shape, lol, very me. The watermelon would be planted on the moon shape and the tomatoes would go in the tear drop. The shadow you see in the foreground belongs to a horrible holly bush, that I would dig up if I owned this house.  I did, however, cut it waaaay back.

 

 

This shot was taken when growing season was in full swing.  I had planted watermelon seeds that never took.  I gave them 4 weeks, then started looking for starter plants.  I hadn't seen any and was about to plant some wildflower seeds, then I saw them at Lowes while I was there to buy dirt. I bought six tiny plants and put them in the ground that day.  The watermelon is probably about a month in the ground at this stage. It's the second batch of tomatoes on the right, the first ones died in the April Frost of 2013.  I sort of knew better than to plant that early, but I took a shot since it had been such a mild winter. About 50% of what I planted survived, so I felt lucky. Along the fence is a bed of mammoth sunflowers and morning glories. The sunflowers were amazing, look for more on those later, but the morning glories never really took off.  The soil was pretty sandy over there and I was running out of budget for dirt. The sunflowers are weeds that will grow anywhere, but the morning glories will need a richer soil next year.

This is just a nice shot of the midsection of the yard just before I planted anything. The one below is mid August and by this time we were eating tomatoes, corn, and cabbage,(which survived the April Frost of 2013). Both corns are in the back, clockwise from Corn 2 is zucchini,(which was originally 4 strawberry plants that died in the April Frost of 2013, lol), cabbage, watermelon, and tomatoes.

Here is the watermelon near the end of the season, it was taking over the yard. 

Another watermelon view from the opposite side. I used a bunch of twigs and branches from the yard to line the area and guide the vines where I wanted them to go.  I missed a couple of days once and I had to unwind a watermelon vine from the tomatoes. The center path between the two beds became quite narrow.  Yeah, watermelons need a lot of attention if space is an issue.

I was tickled and delighted every time I found a new melon. The entire experience was running a close second to the corn love. I will plant watermelon again, allowing more space, and knowing better when to pick the fruit. I think we harvested 15 or 16, maybe more, there were quite a few super small ones by the time the cold said no more and it was the end of the season. I learned all about ripe in a whole new way....big is not ripe.  Even though the first one we picked was huge and beautiful green, inside was almost a milky salmon color. The meat of the melon was already getting sweet, but nothing compared to the ones at the end that we let stay on the vine longer, even all those tiny ones. They were delish!

 

The following few photos are the evolution of the first melon I found.

 

 

Random....