The unpredictability of seeds

One area where I am aware of how little control I have is my garden.

I have written about gardening issues before, and how there is so much outside of your control:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/12/an-apparent-detour-new-garden-update.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/01/three-things-gardens.html 

One post has examples of things I understood and didn't. A fun example that I did not include was: the year that I planted corn, and then my yard was full of crows pecking. Only one corn stalk tried to grow and didn't make it... I was pretty sure I understood what had happened there.

Anyway, part of that saga was thinking that maybe the issue was the soil, working on that, and getting a late start this year. One concern about the soil was the pumpkin seeds not growing. This year there would be no reason for that, but the pumpkin seeds still aren't sprouting.

I'm wondering now if the issue is the seeds, Ed Hume Jack-o-lanterns. I have bought those for two years, but previously it had been something else. In general I think the Ed Hume seeds are good, but maybe that particular one is a bad fit for me. Now I am experimenting with some different sprouting methods, but my beans and peas have not been coming up either, and the peas were strong last year, just late.

Corn, potatoes, and sunflowers are doing well, so it's not a total loss and there is still more planting going on... 

It can be discouraging. 

The phrase "growing like a weed" is apt, but it is only the weeds that shoot up like that. 

One of my issues is that my goals are both growing food for the humans but also being a friend to nature. Add to that lots of space, not always as much time or energy as I would like, and it feels like I have a mess. Grass is so sterile and wasteful and against all my goals, but it is perfectly socially acceptable. I feel like a messy hippie; what will the neighbors think?

I also decided to help keep me on track that I should post a daily picture for the summer. It's a reasonable goal and can be helpful, but it is also some pressure. It's a shorter period than the #365FeministSelfie, but requires going outside while the sun is up (and figuring out what's most presentable) every day. 

However, a few days ago I was looking into the back and feeling discouraged at the jungle needing taming, and yet it was teeming with life. 

There were bees and butterflies and birds, including a hummingbird. Those are all mentioned in the various wildflower mixes I have been using. 

A part of my goal has been met already, even if there is still a long process pending. 

Peace. 

The horrible week

One thing that I think is important to set the horrible week in context is that we'd had a brief vacation right before. 

We went up to Seattle over Memorial Day weekend. It was a whirlwind trip that checked off a lot of boxes on our list for that city. I am currently writing about that on the travel blog, and we did enough that I will be writing about it into August:

https://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2026/05/seattle-overview.html 

There are two points with that. One is that highs and lows follow each other and get all mixed up together. It is important to keep perspective.

The other point is the "whirlwind" part. 

We kept up a fast pace so we could get everything done. Talking to one of our drivers about what we had done, he said that pace would kill him. Based on his kids' ages, I think he was pretty close to me in age, so that feels kind of good, and we got what we wanted done.

We came back very tired.

The first thing that had gone wrong happened earlier but I was still dealing with it.

For my capstone, I need to post on online learning module. I had previously used Canvas, as did almost everyone else because they had a free-for-teachers option that was handy.

A data breach that came in through that program got it canceled. They will try and work something out by fall, but that doesn't help now.

If I had already posted everything and then lost it, maybe after recruiting my learners, it would have been worse. It still sent me reeling. 

I could not decide what to do, so I was just going to come back to it after vacation. I had a lot of thinking and working to do.

Then the washing machine stopped working.

Okay, I got a service call scheduled but there was a wait; there always is. 

Add in trips to the laundromat to the things I need to do. Okay, no problem.

Then the phone rang. 

That always strikes fear into our hearts that it is Mom, but it was a different relative in the hospital after emergency surgery.

The next day's trajectory was waiting for the repairman, finding out that repair didn't make sense so ordering a replacement, dashing to the hospital to pick up keys, going straight to her apartment to feed her cats, then going home to pick up the laundry on the way back to the laundromat.

I didn't get any schoolwork done that week.

A month later, things are subsiding. We do have the new washing machine, the relative is back at home (still needing some help, but it could be worse), and I am getting things loaded into Google Classroom. 

I am graduating later than I'd wanted. 

Life goes on. 

Probably not exactly as planned. 

Especially not the schedule part of the plan. 

The taste of irony

My Sunday blog post talked about meal trains, going over my tendency to have some scorn for them and a new appreciation of how that was wrong.

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2026/06/all-aboard-meal-train.html 

The inspiration was two recent things that are both mentioned in that post, but the timing was good because last night I got a call and today I am taking a dinner. 

I'm glad to do it. There's a need, it's something I can help with, and it's not even difficult to help.

It's just funny how life works out, sometimes displaying a real sense of humor.

That is good, because lately I have been thinking more about how life doesn't work out.

Well, it might be more accurate to say how things work out while looking like they are not.

Let's just say a lot of things have been going wrong, but none of the setbacks have to be permanent.

I will write more about that. 

Anyway, I think I am making pasta with some chicken. 

Focusing on schoolwork

I am taking the next two days to focus on schoolwork. Enjoy the break! 

Personality differences

I am currently in the middle of some statistics reading.

A significant part of my capstone project is going to be crunching the numbers on the learners' experience going through my learning module. My hope is that reading these books now will give me some inspiration about what to look at and what measurements would be helpful.

Right now I am halfway through the third of five books; there will obviously be a later post about the project overall.

The best so far has been The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg.

(Published in 2001, and maybe not incredibly popular, it may take a little extra looking but I think is worth the effort.) 

It may be the most helpful for my goal; even the title refers to a question that arose over how something could be proved... how to test, how many times to test, etc. Then, it goes over other developments and the situations that inspired them.

There are some great stories with some interesting characters, some of whom were known for their generosity as mentors and others who could be quite frustrating. 

One of the notable frustrating ones was Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher. Some of his students went on to do great work, so he probably could be inspiring, but he could also really hold a grudge and then use that grudge to discount a person's work, no matter how correct or significant that work was.

(It is perhaps not a surprise that he got pretty passionate about eugenics.)

Here is an interesting thing about Fisher: he had remarkably poor eyesight (that may make his interests in eugenics not well-thought out). His math instruction needed to adapt to that, using different methods not relying on him being able to read or see. This helped him develop a way of viewing things in more geometric terms. That probably was a critical factor in his ability to not only conceive of concepts differently -- coming up with innovative solutions -- but also part of why others had difficulty understanding his work and why Fisher could be so dismissive of other people's completely reasonable solutions to various issues.

There are a couple of things that I find interesting here.

One is that the other mathematics branches that came up the most in the reading were algebra and calculus. Having noticed in school that most people either struggled with algebra or geometry (but were usually okay with the other one), I have to assume that there are different mental processes with the two. That particular difference would affect perspective.

At the same time, the more geometric perspective isn't necessarily superior to the algebraic one, at least not overall. There might be times when the geometric perspective would work better and other times when the algebraic one would.

That's why it was so interesting that a lot of the history referred to collaborations. Some of the collaborators struggled, coming out with different results, but persistence allowed them to learn new things that they would not have gotten on their own.

Perhaps even more interesting is that sometimes older reasoning that had been retired would become helpful again for certain situations.

I have been thinking about that more due to examples of people being unpleasantly certain (and sometimes certainly wrong). 

If we really want to find answers I believe it will take respecting each other.

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2026/06/perspective-check.html  

Books about daughters

One of my shorter reading lists (though it is connected to many other lists) was "daughters".

It didn't start out as its own list. When planning reading, I kept confusing The Heretic's Daughter and Galileo's Daughter. Yes, Galileo was tried for heresy and forced to recant, but that wasn't in the title; The Heretic's Daughter refers to a witchcraft trial. 

I noticed a title pattern, and there were six with no other connection. Mostly, I had read reviews or something about them that made me think they were interesting so I added them on Goodreads.

Well, I do love a theme.

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss

Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution by Randal Keynes

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards 

Fire-Keeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

In that configuration they connect to reading lists relating to complicated relationships between Asian parents and children, trauma, and adoption. Poised between the losses of both parents, I have been trying to catch up on them, but this was the first of those sections that I actually completed reading.

I recently completed the sub-section on Asian parents, which I mentioned, but I know there will be at least one other post later. For now, this seemed like a good topic leading up to Father's Day. 

Some of them have come up before. 

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter and The Heretic's Daughter were read fairly close together for Spooky Season and got written then. The Strange Case and its series got a second post because of how incredibly annoying I found it, but The Heretic's Daughter was pretty gripping. I actually just adjusted my Goodreads' ratings for each in retrospect.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-witches.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-sheer-unmitigated-gall.html 

One of the books will come up later. Fire-Keeper's Daughter was about family issues, but it may relate more to The Seed Keeper, which then relates to Braiding Sweetgrass which has some other parallels. At some point, when I am ready to write about my Native American Heritage reading, there's going to be a lot. 

To be fair, Fire-Keeper's Daughter was added later than the other five. It was published in 2021, and I know from other posts I had this list at least in 2022. Still, the title format seemed to fit. 

(It did get a mention in the music post: https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/01/songs-for-native-american-heritage-month.html) 

I have not written about Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution and Galileo's Daughter exactly, but I wrote about some science reading last year. Reading those two books cast everything in a new light, especially the chapters on Galileo. 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/06/science-reading-list.html 

Learning more about Darwin, at least from the Keynes book, was mainly an interesting look at how all of these famous names were connected. This happens in other times and places too, but is always kind of fascinating. Also, chronic digestive problems.

The review that interested me did not sound like the book I read, so that may be part of my ambivalence. 

I also found a children's book when I was looking for it, though Etty is a different daughter than Annie, the focus of the adult book.  

Etty Darwin and the Four Pebble Problem by Lauren Soloy. It's okay.

Galileo's Daughter resonated with me much more. I think it was better-written, but maybe it was more the sense of connection. There were places I had been and places I wanted to go and I felt a kinship. Shortly after finishing it we went to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. There was a statue out front... well, there were three, but there was one that I knew right away was him and it was like finding an old friend.

https://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2026/01/los-angeles-griffith-observatory.html 

Finally, I did not love the people in The Memory-Keeper's Daughter or their choices, but as I am working on a module about mental health treatment for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, I keep thinking back to a scene where a nurse looks around an institution and cannot leave the newborn baby girl there. It's easy to forget now how common it was then, but there are still effects, and it isn't completely done.

There is other media that comes back too; I know I will write more about that.

Have these books shed any light on my own relationships with my parents? It's probably too early to say. There are still other books to read.

I can see how all of it enriches each other, and that insights don't always come the way you expect them, or when you might expect them. I don't see my reading methods changing any time soon.

That's a lot of links already, but here's one more:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2022/11/deciding.html 

Who's on top?

At times you will see it said about various groups that they are not a monolith ; of course that is true. They are made up of individuals and those individuals have differences.

Some groups do seem to be more united than others. 

One factor in this can be the resistance faced for dissent. Sometimes the price for speaking out is high enough that it discourages people from complaining, even people who are very discouraged. That can be a reason for holding some optimism that some groups may not be as bad as they seem, but it may just signal a problem with cowardice and inertia.

It is also possible that people outside the group don't care about the distinctions. That may be convenience; if you want to believe that the other side is wrong and bad, noticing details about individuals will probably only get in the way. Latching onto the most reprehensible aspect of the fringe and deciding that's how they all are can work pretty well.

That factionalism is one aspect of dominator culture, but there is something else that is relevant, which is a tendency to take shortcuts along previously existing vectors of prejudice. This works because they are already embedded into a structure where some positions are viewed as inferior and superior and the structure tends to be accepted subconsciously. 

There is usually more than one system in play and the interactions can sometimes skew things. Add in different people with different levels of connection and -- while things aren't exact -- patterns emerge.

Consider the earlier posts this week.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/06/this-will-seem-like-diversion-but.html 

I suspected that part of Dan's annoyance with me was because I wasn't even an attractive girl. 

There are people who doubt the existence of "pretty privilege"; I believe in it, but know it has its limits. 

If a gorgeous girl knew more songs than him, I think he still would have been annoyed. Misogyny (which sometimes might be more helpfully called male supremacy) would probably still be stronger. However, a pretty girl doing well (but not quite as well as him) or agreeing with him would be more impressive.

I acknowledge this is somewhat speculative, but I have seen some things.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/06/dominator-culture-all-around.html  

This was so unnecessary. If you must talk, talk about the match or your opponent or so many other options. If that moment is about demonstrating that the white men are back in charge and there is nothing you can do about it, I guess insulting a Black woman makes sense.

(Of course, then acknowledging that makes someone being transgender an insult, which I don't want to do, but it was clearly intended as an insult and is also not true, which is why I refer to it that way. Terrible people lead to a lot of frustration.)

Anyway, it becomes quite normal under these circumstances that you might see people promoting incompetent, almost demented white men, even when there would be a lot of good reasons for them not to. 

It doesn't mean they only do that or that they all do it in the same way -- not a monolith -- but there are patterns they are following, consciously or not.