Technology is whack

Those last two posts were made from my mobile phone (moblogging is what they call it, and by 'they' I mean 'people who like to use silly clumsy words that I can't bring myself to say without feeling like a git). I like posting from my phone, it's a good use of bus-waiting time and coffee-queue daydreaming, but I do surely wish I had more formatting options (the no-HTML blocktext hurts my eyes).

Even wackier is the fact that I'm posting this from my front porch, where I sit not with my mobile phone but with my laptop, using the wireless connection emanating from my bedroom. I've left my keys somewhere (bugger it, I do this frequently), and you know what? Surfing the net while waiting for a flatmate to get home is a WAY better use of lost-key time than just about anything else I've yet found.

Also with my lost-key time I've harvested a good two dozen little yellow (sunrise) and red (sweetbite) cherry tomatoes and four elegant purple beans. Watered & checked all the porch-plants. The lemon-thyme is looking inexplicably sad, and the zucchinis are looking close to packing it in, almost white with powdery mildew. It'd be nice to get more fruit off them before they die completely, but I've definitely learnt my lesson- tiny seedlings grow into huge plants and it is NOT a good idea to put two in the same pot!

fire drill

While a Friday afternoon fire drill is the perfect opportunity for everyone else to nip off home early, I was rather enjoying getting lots of work done in the already sparsely-populated office (I'm not proud of the tendency but I sort of regard colleagues as impediments to work- team oriented I'm not). Besides i'm pretty sure the precise alarm tone they're using is designed to cut through my hung-over brain as painfully and ruthlessly as possible. The only possible solution is another coffee while I wait for the shrieking to finish.

sore head full heart

I should note after all my grumbling about the closing queer bars that I went to Mr. Mary's last night in Redfern and it was really lovely. Gorgeous music and a gardenia-scented courtyard and an entire table-full of friends all simultaneously hitting the high-point of intoxication- raucous, witty and loving.
My garden is good to me at the moment. Any time the bounty starts to feel a bit predictable something new emerges- purple beans these past few days, and radishes which are gratifyingly fast. The bowl of tomatoes on the window sill has been full all week and the strawberries are dotted with white flowers and promise.

Threes and fours

One friend said "Oh, you poor thing- it's been a tough week", and she's right, but-

Change, even hard change, can be good. I lost one job last week and this week my other job has finally become the work opportunity I never thought it would be. And it's not going to be easy, taking over this role full-time, but it's a good thing. The best thing really, and what I was moving towards, but with a sudden jolt rather than a slow progression.

On the full moon the country voted out the government and the next morning I broke up with my girlfriend. I am inclined like all humans to seek patterns in things, to count in threes, and while I have been warned to look out for a third trauma (job, girlfriend- what next?) I am inclined to see three big changes, not necessarily easy but right.

From partnered, shift-working queer under a Liberal government to single, full-time employed queer under a Labor government in less than a week. That's some pretty powerful momentum for change.

Plus, I can see. Which is undeniably awesome but a little bit challenging too.

Contact

I'm used to dealing with the world at a safe, comfortably fuzzy distance, to reacting to shapes & movement rather than detail or texture. I'm extremely shortsighted, something I haven't had the money or resources to 'deal with' since I was in highschool, so my glasses are about 10 years out of date and quite useless. I've travelled the world in squinty-eyed splendour, having to stand directly beneath info boards at airports to find the right flight and always, always leaving an extra few minutes in case I incorrectly read an 8 as a 0 or a 9 as an A. I can read things close to my face, and guess at things a few feet away, but there are plenty of people in the world convinced I don't really like them because I didn't see them walk past me on the street and so completely ignored them.

"Get eyes sorted" has been on my long list of Grown-Up Things To Do for years now, but I keep putting it off because while the diagnosis is free, the solution inevitably costs money. And there always seems to be some other more urgent use for those few hundred dollars, and you know- I coped. With the occasional scraped knee, missed bus, knocked head or wrong direction, I coped.

Anyway, I finally went to the optometrist last week and yesterday picked up my contact lenses (cheaper than glasses and less cumbersome for constant, all day wear- "You HAVE to wear vision correction when you leave the house" says the optometrist, shaking his head at all my years of surviving against the odds of my blurry, fuzzy world). I've been wearing them a few hours a day, gradually increasing the time and I can see why you'd need this slow build-up- it has nothing to do with the comfort of the lense in the eye and everything to do with a brain suddenly freaking out at the intensity of all this visual input.

My eyes suddenly want to track every leaf on every tree, count every blade of grass, read the tattoos of people on the other side of the street, react and catalogue and see everything. All this extra information in the world being directed straight through my eyeballs, and on top of that the athleticism of constantly shifting a correct focus from something far away to something up close. It's completely exhausting in a really intriguing way- almost hallucinogenic ("You're staring at your breakfast like it's a cinematic masterpiece" said J).

I'm not convinced I'm any safer crossing roads or hailing buses now than I was without the contacts- where before I might have missed seeing a car, now I'll be so bloody intrigued by every scratch, dent and bird-shit spatter on it I'll forget to move out of the way. So I'm being careful, and taking it slow, and working my way up. Maybe soon I'll be used to seeing like a normal person, and the fuzziness of mornings and nights without the lenses will seem abnormal. For now though (I'm about to go take the lenses out) I'm looking forward to having the world retreat back to it's safe distance.

Only half drunk

I lost one of my jobs this morning, which is sort of bad and sort of OK but mostly a bit of "WTF? I was gonna break up with you! You can't break up with me first!" I've been feeling OK about it, although it's always a bit of an ego battering, but I was feeling really down tonight. Wondering if I really have what it takes to see myself as a functioning adult human being, to forgive myself my failings & celebrate my successes and all that. Wondering if I'm seeking joy in the right places and investing in the right moves.

And it's fucking crazy, but half of what I was feeling so down about was the fact that the only two queer bars in Newtown are now closed, and I feel lost. I pay a stupid amount of money to live in a tolerable house in a neighbourhood where I can walk up the road to meet my friends for drinks on lovely afternoons- seriously, that convenience is the only justification for about $70 per week of my rent. And it's not like I can't or won't hang out at the other local bars, the area is full of pubs, but I'm feeling like the ghetto I was raised in & chose as my adult home base is collapsing around me. Which makes me question a lot of things, like, why pay so much rent to live here, and where else would I live, and what else is important, and what do people do anyway when they live in places where they have to commute to go see their friends?

And when you've lost a job, even if you know you can recover from it with barely a break in stride, that sort of thought process drags out into all sorts of shit, like, what the fuck am I doing with my life anyway, and, how long can I justify giving myself this creative freedom and space when it actively jeopardises my ability to disguise myself as a Grown-Up Worker In The Mainstream Job Market?

It's nice to come home from a night like that to an email from an editor letting me know that the half-finished, half-arsed, "I almost wasn't going to even submit this I'm so unhappy with it" first draft I sent in for a chapter in a (real, live, to-be-published) book is "very polished- I really like it". And to realise that even drunk & sad at a pub I spent my alone-minutes scribbling out designs for things I will actually make into my useful book. Which is all to say, I'll be OK, and I'm filled with lists of why it's all alright.

Rejoicing

There was much rejoicing last night as the succulent lover & I sat down to a dinner of pesto(1) pasta, steamed zucchini(2) & salad(3). I might even have declared something along the lines of "I rock", a statement she may have been forced to agree with. The quantity & variety of Things I Grew that are making it into meals seems to expand every week, and wow does that make me happy.

Similar rejoicing caused by flowers opening on the bean plants & strawberries, and the huge frangipanis finally bursting into bloom. My house was nicely warmed on Sunday afternoon when my backyard was filled with friends who all looked lovely arrayed between the flowers... it feels like summer is finally inching it's way forward, and it's beautiful.

A complete lack of rejoicing was experienced when I woke up at about 5 o'clock this morning in so much pain I was doubled over & whimpering before I even registered I was awake. My body seems to be making a concerted effort to make a liar out of me for every time I've ever suggested that periods, while not being wonderful, aren't all that bad. This is bad, bad so bad you can't sleep through it and the strongest drugs they sell for it only barely take the edge off. If this is a downhill slide to somewhere, I don't wanna go.

1: Pesto made of backyard basil & rocket- do you have any idea how much basil you need to grow to keep yourself in a steady supply of pesto? Shitloads, that's how much. I laugh in the face of anyone who has ever mocked my forest of basil.
2: Zucchini from the 8-ball bushes, which are sadly succumbing to what seems like inevitable powdery mildew, but are fighting on with the assistance of weekly milk-waterings & a strict no-damp-leaves regime.
3: Salad of backyard leaves (rocket, pretty-coloured silverbeet & beetroot), frontyard tomatoes (red & orange cherries, sweet and perfect), baby backyard chioggia beetroot, and a few other non-home-grown veggies.

from the salon chair

I am wearing a sort of high-fashion tin-foil hat, suitable for blocking mind-control rays and casting a fetching halo of light around my face. This is the first time i've had my hair done 'properly', in a salon, in about 3 years, and the peroxide smell is overwhelming and the same old nervousness about letting someone play with my hair surfaces. It was clearly time though, years of home-dodgy jobs have left my hair scruffy and odd and entirely incapable of swishing nicely for pretty girls. The strangest thing about all this is that i'm going deliberately blonde, after 10 years of various reds. I have no great love of blonde hair as a concept but I'm sick of bleeding pink dye at the beach all summer and panicked party-season re-dyes. Maybe i'll become a seasonal red-head, turning back when the leaves do.

Wheels

Given that I have never voluntarily entered a gym in my life, I don't pay much attention to these things, but I noticed the other day that I seem to be developing some sort of, I don't know, swelling in the upper arms. To be truly honest, I wound up sitting at a pub surreptitiously squeezing my own upper arm muscles, thinking "where the hell did THAT come from?" Cos it certainly wasn't there six months ago. It's nothing especially sexy or dramatic but what a shock to realise that all this hauling of 30 kilo bags of potting mix and stacks of giant pots around has made a tangible difference to my body. I always assumed I guess that something as gentle-seeming & pottering as the small urban gardening experience wouldn't have any impact (not like those real farmer grrls from up north!), beyond the fact that when I'm gardening I'm not sitting on my arse in front of my computer, but it would seem that it all adds up.

Food, a beautiful environment and now very small muscles to show off to the ladies! Is there anything gardening can't do?

Adventures On Wheels:
Yesterday was one of those days that have an inadvertant theme. The theme was wheels.

1. Little Red Shopping Cart: I took my little red nanna-chic shopping trolley up the road to meet up with a woman who was giving away a bunch of geraniums. For future reference, nanna trolleys are not ideally designed for cracked-footpath navigation when filled with teetering geraniums plus the dozens of succulent cuttings she couldn't help but give me (I fucking love gardeners, can't let you leave the premises without half a new garden's worth of plant starts). I got us all home in one piece, except that I was pretty sunburnt and the aeonium cutting lost a few leaves.

2. Re-potting: Applied some sun-screen and potted up the cuttings, and also re-potted my Baby's Necklace into it's new (shiny red truck-shaped) pot.

3. Shopping Trolley: Went down to Metro and was filled with deep, irrational desire to buy lots of potting mix (this is stupid- I usually wait til I'm with someone who has a car to do this, it makes much more sense). So I pushed, shoved & hauled 60kg of potting mix aaaall the way home by way of a wonky, crotchety, scarily-listing K-Mart trolley. That railway overpass bridge was a killer.

4. Incredibly Convenient Platform Thingy: Ms J dropped by to say hi and being the one-track-minded freak that I am, I recalled these gorgeous, perfect big grille/gate thingies abandoned in the park on the way home, and made her come scavenge them with me. On our way she, being similarly one-track-minded, stuck her head in a dumpster and emerged with this awesome rolling platform/go-kart thingy. Please admire how perfectly the security grilles fit on the wheely-thingy. Please also admire how perfect those grilles look being trellises for future vegie plantings in the raised beds. The universe is quite startlingly generous sometimes.

Heroes

On Saturday night I went out (via an expensive but incredibly fast taxi from far-away work to the Opera House) to see Kiki & Herb. They were better, if anything, than last time I saw them, really genuinely good cabaret, good art, good performance. Tears in your eyes and foot-stomping applause, a sense of wild joy. I was left gasping & thinking about how much I need that, which is odd for someone who has always shied away from art in any sense but uncomplicated enjoyment, and who has an intense fear that any admission that I want to engage in art beyond simple enjoyment will leave me open to all sorts of judgement & vulnerability. I'm such a fucking wuss sometimes. So I'm hoping to get over that, and add 'art' to 'friends', 'gardening' and 'food' as things that I'm willing to pursue & love as necessary parts of a well-lived life.

On Sunday night, still dressed like a polka-dot milkmaid from Newtown Fair Day, I went out dancing and managed in the process to meet the stars of the show and thus throw myself into this ridiculous self-conflict. On the one hand being quite proud to have engaged in intelligent (I think) conversation with people I really admire, and yet feeling like an enormous dork that it even mattered so much to me, and therefor being too shy to even mention to anyone that I'd done it. Because you're not supposed to be excited about these things, are you? You're supposed to Play It Cool and refuse to allow it to ruffle you. If you show that it matters to you then you've blown all your cred right there.

And I don't particularly care about my cred, I'd much rather be having fun than worrying about maintaining something so ridiculous, but I've come to realise that some of the people in my life- well, they do care about my cred.

It's horrible to realise that there are people in my life who are embarrassed for me when something that I see as purely good happens. As though a life spent standing back, refusing to put yourself on the line for fear of potentially looking like a fool, is going to be more rewarding than just going ahead, looking like a fool, and doing something you really wanted to do in the process? I don't get it.

This post should have read something like "Oh wow, I met Kiki & Herb! I love them! They were so sweet, and I had a conversation with Herb about gender politics in San Francisco, and it was great! I left on a real high, what a great night". What the fuck is up with feeling like enthusiasm is a crime?

When

after nearly a year, one continues to fail at something one has been pulled up on time and time again- either the failing is innate, and can't be changed (because there have been so many attempts, and still this constant failure), or there is something wrong with the expectations- or both.

All of the possible scenarios suck. It's these times that you realise that there is no good way out of this. Is there ever meant to be?

And an old rocking chair..?

I'm not usually a big fan of the North Shore, and resent having to treck out here for work, but at this time of year from the 19th floor where my office is the entire area back to the harbour is patched with intense lavender- jacarandas in bloom. It's beautiful, and kind of hilarious to see them from high above, to really see how many of them there are. The sun sets late & golden over it all and it's all sort of- beautiful. From up here, that is. Down at street level it's the same old panic-inducing suburbia.

My current highest goal in life is to find a quarter acre block in Marrickville or surrounds, somewhere with a nice northern aspect & a dodgy little fibro house on it, not too far from the shops. Keep chickens, grow veggies & small fruit trees- go to work probably to pay the mortgage, come home, eat my veggies, feed the scraps to the chooks, pile the cook poo into the compost bin, rake the compost over the veggie beds, grow more veggies- and so on. Grow it and grow it til it's a huge, wonderful jungle of food-producing, life-producing green, with enough room left over for a big work table for recycled rubberwear projects & ridiculous long brunches.

It is so peculiar to find myself infected with such an ordinary daydream, to feel it with such intense passion. I've never 'gotten' any of this before, and now it clicks so hard I can feel the jolt all through me. I race home from whereever I am to steal an hour in the garden, and work frantically til the last light has faded and the mud is so ingrained in the creases of my hands it takes two scrubbings to get it out. Not that it's work- it's always adding something new to grow, something new to look at and watch and wait and ponder, a new arrangement of things, or gentle care of established things.

Sucked In

Long have I blogged, and before that kept on-line diaries, and constructed various scattered personal websites now in stages of advanced decomposition and neglect. But I have managed to resist, without even really trying, the entire phenomenon of social networking sites. They don't interest me, never have. I maintain a miniscule MySpace profile for the sole benefit of people too lazy to email me, and spend about three minutes a month on that site checking messages from those same people. Have never even been stirred to check out Facebook. The main reason I never signed up for LiveJournal was, apart from the irritating interface, this bizarre fixation on 'friends' and 'groups', with all the potentially ridiculous fuss that seem to be inevitably involved in managing such faux-real relationships. I'm a bit of a throw-back to the web of the late 90's, I guess- heavy on user-generated content, extremely low on user-connectivity. I'd rather broadcast from my blog, keep in touch from my email, discuss on forums & keep those worlds quite distinct, thankyouverymuch.

This has all changed, and like about 90% of everything in my life that has changed in 2007, it has a lot to do with gardening. Gardening, it turns out, loans itself extremely well to 'social' networking of a sort. Because as any gardener rapidly learns, the best resource to learn from is other gardeners. Lots of them. The more similar their growing interests are to yours, the better. If they grow in similar conditions to you, you've struck gold- a conversation with them about their last season's experience will teach you more than memorising the entire Yates Garden Guide.

Last week I signed up as a beta-tester for MyFolia, a website that I think aims to fill the gap between gardening blogs (linear, broadcast-oriented) and forums (discussion & community based, low on technical detail). It's pretty much MyGardenSpace or something, only rather than just having a profile for me, there's a profile for each of my gardens, and within those, each of my plants. I can post photos & journals of the progress of each plant & each garden, and clicking on any plant will take me to a list of everyone else growing it- including their photos & progress journals. You may need to be a gardener to appreciate how bloody miraculous that is, but oh my god it's so good. Absolute gold for the newbie gardener, and quite possibly for the more advanced ones too.

It is in effect an enormous, linked, multi-layered garden diary of the sort that every gardening guide tells you to keep. Next season when I'm wondering how long it took from planting my determinate tomatoes to seeing the first flowers, it will take me about 0.3 seconds to find out. How long was the productive season for that zucchini bush? Easy. And when I need a little inspiration because it seems to take SO LONG for things to graduate the seedling bench & get into the garden, well, someone else will have a lovely photographic time-line to admire.

Being still in beta-mode, the site has a few rough edges, and obviously this sort of garden-tracking is not for everyone (like every form of social networking site around, it's capable of sucking up an enormous quantity of time). But I fucking love it. I have been thoroughly sucked into social networking (Web 2.0, just three years too late!) and it's all for my garden. Surprise, surprise.

(An excellent use of the web as a garden recorder, for the benefit of all: Hanna's Tomato Tastings. Nothing tricky, no complicated content, just a purely excellent resource- the essence of good user-generated content).

A thing of delight

I've been holding out on this but I just can't resist. These are my "Girls & Girls" impatiens (originally called "Boys & Girls" cultivar til my dad got cheeky with a pen), planted into a triangular metal planter thingy I got at Reverse Garbage & drilled holes in the bottom of. I hope you know where this is going...

Yes, I am now in possession of a real, live, living, growing PINK TRIANGLE! Of lesbian flowers! It makes me so happy! Gardening joy wrapped up in a bad pun wrapped up in old-school queer liberation! OK, so some of the flowers are more purple than pink, but really, does a combined lavender & pink display sound any less queer to you than a plain old pink one? I didn't think so.

These flowers are also making for a delightful ocean of pink & purple in my main garden bed. It's quite lovely, really.

It has also come to my attention that one can find a thing called Lesbos Basil (or more 'correctly', Greek Column Basil). I must have it.

Tragically

Google has no suggestions for what to do with burnt brownies.

Anyone else? Really don't want to have to throw them out. They have, um, special ingredients.

My oven is pure evil. Deliberately set the temp guage 20 degrees below, just in case (haven't baked much in this oven), but nope- 30 minutes into a 50 minute cooking time, distinct waft of burnt chocolate. Motherfucker.

Phase three of the 'trying new things to decide if I should grow them': Broad beans

Apparently I had too much coffee this afternoon at work because I came home with the intense need to cook excessively. You know... roast pumpkin, garlic & beetroot green polenta with blue cheese & zucchini. That sort of thing. While all that was on the go I shelled a bag of broad beans I got from the organic market on the weekend and boiled them up as a pre-dinner snack. With parsley, butter, salt & pepper, they were... OK. Better once I pulled the inner skin off the big ones. Good flavour, nice texture, but an awful bloody lot of work, and not nearly as much 'bang for my buck' as the fennel & radish experiments.

Would I grow them? Yeah, if I had a spare spot to plant them in at the right time of year. And if I had plenty of spare time to sit and meditate while double-shelling. They were a tasty legume to be sure, but didn't knock my socks off enough to be worth all that effort on a regular basis.

Final tally on the first round of experimental veggies: two in favour of growing (radish & fennel), one 'maybe' (broad beans). Not bad for foods I'd never met before the past few weeks!

I attempted to sneak in an extra vegetable to the experimental rounds, in the form of a bunch of red amaranth from the markets, but despite stashing it in a glass of water (which promptly turned bright red) the leaves were shrivelled & unappetising by the time I had a spare moment to consider cooking them. So apart from the fact that it has a very short shelf-life once harvested, anything to be said about red amaranth?

Raised beds filled!

The smell of a station wagon full of poo is simultaneously vile and quite exciting, because it meant the chance to finally fill up the side raised garden beds and plant into them. There was no way I could've gotten the materials together without the help of someone with a car, so I've been hanging out for a while.

This dragonfly turned up to check out my performance later on when I was weeding out the front.

All day in the sun after a rather large-ish night out was a bit exhausting, but a dinner of THREE ZUCCHINIS (from my garden!) with pasta, beetroot greens (from the garden) and lemon dressing was delightful enough to revive me. I think this was the first time I've fed my produce to another person, and oh how sweet was that "wow, these zucchinis are great!"? I'm pretty sure she had to say it after all that build-up, but it was a sweet thought.

I didn't order the apocalypse- did you order the apocalypse?

I'm out on Oxford st in the middle of this huge, beautiful, catastrophic storm. I'm sure i should be thinking about music or pretty girls or drinking but actually i'm thinking about my poor seedlings being flattened by this downpour, and wondering if i spoke too soon about my two extra zucchinis. It's gorgeous this kind of weather, huge and undeniable- rivers in the gutters and bomb-shelter cameraderie among those of us who're out- but i can't help wondering how my garden is faring. Enough so that i'm writing this from my phone from a nightclub, because i don't want to bore my friends with 'garden talk'. Something doesn't quite add up here.

Squash-mad (now with photographic evidence)

I wanted to post this from home so I could include photographic evidence but a storm last night wiped out our internet connection. Ah well. Later, I suppose.

But I just had to tell you! Ali's Zucchini Dating Agency has been met with great success! Lots of zucchinis & no dropping blossoms (except for those that had already closed before I tried this hand-pollination gig)! I picked one today that was way bigger than the other two measly ones I've picked so far this season, and there are two more ready to go tomorrow I think. Hurrah for my dinner coming off a plant! I guess this means I'll be giving them a bit of a regular hand... the fine art of interfering in the sex life of plants commences.

I think I'm a bit of a zucchini fiend. I have lebanese & yellow patty pan heirloom seedlings that are already putting out two or three true leaves each, just about ready to go into the raised bed (whenever I manage to fill it up, that is), and three crookneck squash seedlings almost ready to be potted on. I planted them thinking they wouldn't all survive, but apparently I underestimated them. Anyone want a crookneck squash seedling? I think three might be a tad excessive even for a sqash-crazed lass like me.

My very inexperienced seed process for non-direct-sown seed is like this: cut & fold up the bottom of a toilet roll, fill it with seed-raising mix, pop the seed in, put it under a clear tupperware bowl til it's cotyledon's are big & strong & it has roots poking out the bottom of the toilet roll. Then unfold the bottom so the roots can come through, pop the entire thing into a left-over seedling pot with some potting mix til it's thrown a good number of 'true' leaves, then plant it into the garden. At some point in this process the toilet roll is supposed to just crumble into nothing, but meanwhile, it's protecting the roots of the little plant from transplant shock. Also, being free (which I like). I have yet to follow this process to the final, in-the-garden step, but so far the first two have worked great (except for a slight slug problem that I intend to counter-act in future by growing my seedlings on a bench with it's feet in cans of beer).

The Useful Book

It's time for me to get a new Useful Book, and consign my current one to the growing clutter of them on my bookshelf. This one is very near to completely full of meeting notes, half-stories, sketches of webpage designs, costume ideas and garden layouts. I have one- bound in pink sequins- that has scribbled maps of how to get to japanese youth hostels in the pages along with painful drawings of teddy bears and almost anthropologically detailed descriptions of the courting behaviours of 14 year olds on tour. Another one, plain green exercise book, filled with collective meeting minutes and bizarre venn diagrams attempting to explain my sexuality at age 18.

I don't have all of them by any means- i lost one in a bookshop in Berlin, and there are probably many i've forgotten- but what i do have is a wonderful and frequently excruciating record of whatever it is i've needed to jot down somewhere handy over the years. A notebook many times over.

It's such a useful habit to have acquired, such a common one at least among my friends. I smiled and smiled when at a recent dinner an impromptu reading was proposed and after some rummaging at least half the people there had some recent writing in a small book that just happened to be with them. I've started to shift some of the function of my Useful Book across to my phone- it's just as handy a place to scribble out thoughts, and easier to save onto my computer later if they happen to be worth making a story of- but i can't imagine ever being without the need for a place to draw out my latest idea for a harness. Or hanging basket design. Or whatever.