Oldtimer's Disease

I've never been entirely good at writing. I have been a voracious reader, and I am happy to pick apart others' writing and give them helpful (hopefully) critiques. But putting down my own thoughts and ideas has always been painful. I really don't like for anyone else to read what I have to say. Plus, most of what careens through my brain is fleeting at best, making it difficult to capture anything useful

So why write here? I am old and forgetful and I am feeling the need to document my life for myself. I don't know if it's early-onset Alzheimer's, but it sure feels like it. Maybe it's just that I'm trying to do too many things at once or juggle too many thoughts and tasks. But I'm losing track of events, and I feel like time is flying by before I get the chance to absorb the significance of anything.

Of course, it's been almost 4 (!) years since I first decided to try and slow this memory freefall...and in that time I've recorded almost none of what I wanted to. So the theory is that I'm now going to try to go back and play catch-up with a weekly summary of some of the days gone by, in chronological order, with alot of help from the photos on my computer.

Wish me luck.

Starting Over

Six years ago (give or take a month or two), we bought 5 bare-root fruit trees (apricot, nectarine, asian pear, & 2 plums) and 2 bare-root grapevines (red & green seedless). We dug through the impacted Sacramento clay, did our best to amend the soil, rigged a drip irrigation system, and plopped the little buggers down in their new homes. I periodically fussed at them, worried over them, read (minimally) about how to nurture them, but mostly I ignored them. Despite my inattention, they started to bear some great fruit about 3 years ago. At that point, I realized that I should make some effort to prune them every year...and learned that pruning would have best been started early on, before there were crazy branches everywhere. Each winter since, I have tried to do band-aid pruning, and every spring the tree branches still go nuts. Last year, the nectarine tree even lost several big branches under the weight of its own fruit. So today I decided to hack everything down to the bare minimum so that I can try to regain control of these trees.

Hopefully I haven't killed them.

So I am thinking that maybe I will use this as a starting over point for me too. It's 2011, and at New Year's I didn't even try to pretend to make any promises to break. Which saves me from the disappointment of flaking on yet another new year's resolution, but I think that if I don't try to inject at least a little bit of structure into my chaotic life at this point, 2011 will fly by with as much speed and with as little notice as 2010 did.

If only I knew where to start.