Caped Gooseberry – Page 2 – Deborah Makarios

September 22, 2024September 22, 2024

Rumours of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

There are two kinds of blog readers: the kind who notice when someone doesn’t post in a while, and the kind who notice the silence only when it ends. I am of the latter sort, myself, but for those of you who are of the former, this reassurance: I am indeed alive.

Alive, but not in the best of health – hence the nearly three month silence. After struggling for some time with a variety of issues with which I will not trouble you, I have now received a “working diagnosis” of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (which, yes, is what the Caped Gooseberry has had for lo these many years).

Sitting up – as opposed to sitting down – is something I don’t have as much energy for as I used to, so sitting up at the desk for the hours needed to produce a blog post on the computer has not happened in some time.

A painting of a woman dressed head to toe in flowing blue-black, collapsed on a green sofa piled with cushions. She is looking at the closed yellow book in her right hand. Her left hand dangles off the side of the sofa. — Battery unexpectedly flat.

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May 23, 2024May 23, 2024

This Is It

If there’s one subject on which I have written a good many words over the years, it’s the topic of Getting Rid of Stuff. Way back in July 2014 – nearly ten years ago! – I was Feeling the Urge to Purge. Then in September I was wondering how much distillation it would take to get Drunk on Life.

By late February 2015 an alert reader was commenting that “The number of times you talk about purging, your house must be completely empty by now,” – and that was just before I’d posted about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

I regularly listed things I was getting rid of as 2015 continued, pausing in July to toy – for the first time – with the idea of Zero Based Budgeting: starting from zero and adding in what I was sure I wanted to keep, instead of starting from Dear Me What A Lot and subtracting only what I was sure I didn’t want to keep.

Black and white. An empty room with a fireplace, an open door, and a busy floral pattern in panels on the walls.

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November 4, 2021November 4, 2021

The Nasty Secrets of Scientific Nomenclature

Of late I have been reading a good many gardening books, and a good many of them use scientific nomenclature for plants. This is to avoid confusion – or at least it would be if those in charge of said nomenclature didn’t keep changing the names between books. Still, once you have a bit of Latin (and occasionally Greek) under your belt, you have a nifty resource for extracting information about the plant in question.

The first part of the name is the surname or family name; and the second part is the specific species name. To give you an example, if I was a plant I would be Makarios deborah, or, if members of the family Makarios were the subject of discussion, just M. deborah.

Camellia sinensis, to give you an actual plant example, is a camellia from China, and is the plant that produces tea. Camellia japonica, on the other hand, is from Japan, and… also tea. If you like. It is said to be higher in caffeine and lower in tannin, so if you need to absorb iron but also stay awake all night, Camellia japonica tea may be for you.

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