Making lists

This morning my only "work" away from home was to teach at school from 8:15 to 8:30am then my next "job" was to pick the children up from school at 3:40pm and take them to piano. So I had a lot more time at home than I usually do so decided I needed to make myself a list of all the things that I needed to get done rather than just wandering around wondering what to do and then actually getting nothing done at all. I am the Queen of lists....I can make huge lists and manage to get through most of the things on them - taking great pleasure in putting a line through each item as it is completed. The first thing on my list today.... "Make a list"! Nothing like writing things just so you can cross them out again.....
One of the other things on my big list today was to dig some of the sweet potatoes. I had two different patches of sweet potatoes this year and really had no idea if there would be much under the ground or not, but I was pleasantly surprised. All the odds are against me growing good sweet potatoes in my garden. All the books say that you should grow them in very sandy soil., but my garden is an ex-rice field which means it has a very hard clay base - limiting the amount of drainage. (If you want information about how hard it actually is to achieve this clay base check out the archives about Heather's Rice Chronicles at "Shinshu Life"). I threw the plants into the ground and forgot all about them... losing half of them in a drought. I let the weeds get a bit too big before finally removing them. I forgot to keep pulling the spreading vines off the ground so they wouldn't put down extra roots and take away all the nutrients needed to go into the big potatoes. I would have to say that a sandy soil would make harvesting them a little easier, but there are some whoppers in the lot I dug out today and my neglect of them hasn't seemed to have too bad an effect.
Now I've just got to try and pull the rest of them out of the ground.... after trying to get rid of all those lovely green leaves.... I think I'll leave it for another day when I have time to make another list....