#dennicek

my solo ontario trip was rlly fun, toronto is a cool city and i had the sweetest little airbnb in saint catharines complete with the sweetest elderly kitty (named maple!! can you believe it..) and a ton of vintage cat decor. food in canada is kinda bland tho, i think most of europe and asia just have higher standards for uh..food tasting rlly good? i dunno but it really feels like that from all my travels. i did get addicted to boston cream donuts from tim hortons tho and i think about them every day

anyway i did get a huge kick out of seeing all the wildlife, the racoons!!! squirrels and cool birds everyday!! wish i saw more ... i know skunks are p common but i didn’t get to see one :( niagara was.. touristy but still pretty majestic, and they do have a margaritaville restaurant so i really reconnected with my inner jimmy buffet

coolest place i visited was the prehistoria museum & skullstore oddity shop!! the guy there was extremely cool and knowledgeable, i got to hold a narwhal horn, and bought a mink skull and a mounted pumpkin cicada!

getting little cat pictures from my mom & dad while they were catsitting was great

my balcony garden is an absolute jungle, i’m harvesting a ton everyday and it’s all so green and it makes me happy!! this year i have some tricolor baby & also regular tomatoes, orange bell peppers, cayenne peps, spinach, pink pinto beans (that i bought in edinburgh!), three kinds of strawberries, a fucking ginormous basil plant that keeps killing all the other herbs so it got it’s own big planter now lmao, parsley, chives, lovage, lemon balm and verbena (perfect for tea), catnip (turns out my cats don’t care for it and pluto would much rather eat every other herb i grow, esp. lemon balm and parsley), and i also got a packet of scottish wildflowers - a “meadow mix” designed for bees, that suddenly grew to be like 70 cm tall yellow flowers? pretty tho. i also have a lantana and a lobelia plant - my dad is a flower kind of guy and got me those, he doesn’t approve of me only growing leafy plants lmao

anyway got a nasty tooth fixed, fucked up my feet walking thru toronto, hannd still not completely healed from my nasty animal bite, and got covid? probably? and was sick for 2 weeks, and the cough remains :’) idk why i got all the health issues at once but i’m not super happy about it. i looked thru my tumblr to see what i reblogged when i was feverish and man i was out of it, half of my tags make no sense lmao

also made an egg separator in ceramics class and i think it’s my fave so far

so this is a ramble about my new job, a long bit about my plants and my garden.

i’ve been at this new office job (scoff!! why, again?) for 2 weeks and i’m not sure i’ll last more than a month. after the whole quarantine thing, i realised how much i love just... not having to wake up in the morning when i’m least functional, getting ready (i hate how much effort i have to put into my appearance. i know i dont HAVE to, but I feel like once you set a standard at a new workplace you kinda... can’t go below it without people actively noticing it), and taking 40 minutes by buses to get there. this was supposed to be a remote job!! and i don’t feel competent at it at all!! and people are pretty dismissive and rude!!! and i wrote like 3 paragraphs just complaining about it, but i deleted those just now. idk, what’s the point, right. i just don’t like it here, and i will last till the end of the month so i get one proper payout and then i might just quit and REALLY try to survive on freelance. if ONLY i was more successful at building an audience, and potential customers!! jesus. i don’t know. i don’t draw because i don’t feel like people care to see it, and obviously if i don’t try i won’t gain anything. why am i like this

anyway, a nice thing is that i feel like my plants are trying to cheer me up?

first of all, pretty much all of my 16 houseplants are doing well - my monstera deliciosa is SUCH a good lil bugger, she keeps sprouting new leaves every week! soon she’ll have to be repotted at this rate. and my finicky calathea, whom i recently treated of mites, which involved meticulously scrubbing every leaf with a toothbrush, is also sprouting two new leaves - something i have NEVER seen her do in the months of owning her. i guess this is her way of thanking me!

in addition to that - after my balcony garden got SCORCHED by the sudden heatwave this month, it’s finally recovering - i threw out the ugly little flowers that completely dried out and replaced them with fresh herbs (more my style, the flowers were a gift from my dad). i planted my some lemon balm, chives, oregano, mint, and my favorite herb - parsley. in addition to that, my strawberry plant has waken up from its little coma - after the insane harvest of spring berries it exhausted itself and went dormant - and now it’s round two, baby! she’s full of fresh leaves and flowers and everyday i get to snack on at least 4 new ripe strawbs. i can’t believe my dad suggested throwing her out after she stopped bearing fruit and got burnt leaves from the sun! look at her now. beautiful. dad’s jealous now, too, we bought the strawberry plants together from the same store and his never did this well.

i still have an abundance of cherry tomatoes and my bell peppers are finally ripening too, which is nice. on top of that, i planted some raddish and kohlrabi (turnip?) and to my shock, after my weekend camping trip, i found that they have both sprouted already! that’s like, four days! damn.

my heart still aches after the tragic loss of my favourite one  - the pea plant that i managed to, in record time, raise from a seed into a full grown plant that gave me exactly 12 delicious pea pods before succumbing to sudden 35 celsius heat. I nearly cried when i had to throw it out, but i kept the pot.... and like a phoenix from its ashes, it has risen again!! a little sprout, but we’ll see how it does. we do love a good comeback story!

today i also bought an ivy plant that i planted next to the herbs (is that a good idea? idk we’ll see) and some seeds that i planted, too (basil, more parsley, more chives, spinach, and some pea seeds that i sprinkled around my pea plant to give it some company hopefully, haha). we’ll see. i enjoy growing plants from nothing - it feels incredibly invigorating to see baby greens poking out of the dirt where there was nothing before. it’s not easy, but it’s rewarding.

random cute stuff from the past week that i can think of :

-camping trip was nice. saw a lot of gorgeous nature, went for a really nice long bike ride, ate some really good ice cream.

-biking is still amazing, i love my bike (i named him lestat, cause he’s got sass) and i go almost every day. thank god petržalka is such a heaven for cyclists. 

-cashier lady in billa complimented me on my stag beetle brooch that i have on my bag strap. it is a not much of a brooch, it is literally a 10 cm plastic beetle that i glued pin closings to, and he’s very visible on my chest. looks pretty realistic. it was nice to see him appreciated!!

-i might start streaming, just for my friends? like, videogames. i’m good at some, very good at others, and i can talk passionately about most, and that’s why throughout my life many of my friends and family members really enjoyed watching me play. i don’t know, but i don’t mind. i don’t really want an audience of strangers, but i don’t mind the occasional company and giving my friends something to fall asleep to. i mean i play vidya often anyway, so there is not much extra effort there haha