[Petronius_II]

Actually, I haven't. The sound card on my computer doesn't work, and I still haven't figured out how to fix it, i.e. whether it's a hardware or software problem.

I'm talking about the kind of transplant shock where the little seedling curls significantly, and instead of snapping back upright within one day, it takes two, three, maybe even four days. That's serious transplant shock, and I've often been able to remember exactly which specimens it happened to, and side-by-side compare the results to plants of the same variety only a few feet away that I didn't screw up with impatience and clumsiness.

You may or may not recall reading John Dean writing about how Richard Nixon was about the least mechanically inclined person he ever met. When asked about the infamous eighteen-minute gap in the Watergate tapes and who Dean thought might have been responsible, he replied, he thought it was a certain person he once knew who left tooth marks on the cap of a fountain pen because he couldn't manage to unscrew it the way it was designed to do.

My own clumsiness has, at times in my life, approached near-Richard Nixon proportions. Gardening, however, has taught me a lot about keeping a steady rein on my inner Nixon.