Over the years, a handful of people have helped keep Purgatory running, and the Cast page hasn’t kept up with all of them. So here’s the full story of the “personal assistants”.
Before the pandemic, I advertised on Craigslist for a PA. I was specifically looking for help with the house plants and with building a home inventory system. I ended up hiring the first in a series of assistants; let’s call this one Agent D. Agent D worked for me for about nine months but became rather unreliable, and then the pandemic hit and I let them go. I also ended up with their bug-infested ficus tree. It got booted out of the studio building and sat outside for close to three years… more about that in a bit.
Once the pandemic was easing, I decided to try again, and this time I used Indeed.com (see Plant!). I had a lot of interesting candidates, and I was dithering between two of them (both would have been fine, but both would have had rather lengthy commutes) when a late applicant popped into my queue. Their resume looked great and their zip code was the same as mine, so I set up a video call through the site. As we chatted, I found out they lived just down the mountain, about a ten-minute drive away! So I asked if they’d be willing to come up and see the place in person that day. They promptly did, and needless to say, Agent B was hired.
This was before the garden shed was even built (see A Girl Needs a Shed). Poor Agent B was promptly abandoned for six weeks to tend the house plants and keep the bird feeders full while I buggered off to Ohio to help my parents in October 2021. The crew finished the garden shed while I was decluttering my parents’ basement, and when I got back to California, our regular painter painted the interior and exterior (see Painted Shed), I sealed the workbench, and Agent Smith installed the plastic cladding (see Cladding a Shed). It was only then that Agent B was able to call the shed their office.
For several years after that, Agent B worked up here three days a week. They kept the bird feeders filled with seed, mealworms, nuts and sugar water (we expanded our offerings thanks to them; see Feeding the Birds: Our Setups), the bird baths clean and they kept all the house plants happy.
Including, as promised, the ficus. After a couple of years outside, the previously barren and thought-to-be-dead ficus showed signs of life, so Agent B moved it to the east side of the studio. More and more leaves started sprouting, so they repotted it into a Lechuza pot, and eventually, in 2023, brought it into the house. It has flourished ever since next to the sliding glass door in the north hall–and it makes a handy hiding spot for Tenar. See if you can spot him in the pic below…
Backing up a bit: for the 2024 nesting season, I hired someone to monitor the nest boxes twice a week. Let’s call them Agent M. I needed a second helper, as neither Agent B nor I had time to regularly check our two dozen or so nest boxes (see Birds and Boxes) and record the data in NestWatch. NestWatch is a citizen science project run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Volunteers check nests and record what they see–which species moved in, when the eggs were laid, and when the chicks hatched and fledged–and the Lab combines those records from across the country to study bird breeding and the bigger trends that affect it, like climate change.
Agent M did a pretty decent job, but they weren’t available for the 2025 season, so in the spring of 2025 I hired Agent J to handle the nest box checks. They were good at the job, but then circumstances suddenly changed and Agent B needed to stop working here for a while. So when Agent B dropped out, Agent J took over their duties too. They did an okay job… but just okay. I got tired of the mess they’d leave the garden shed in, and my plants started to die. Then, through a bit of happy luck, I ended up with Agent Pigeon.
That story is that in early 2026, a friend I know through volunteering at the local wildlife center (before Larry Ellison screwed it over) was in the process of moving and needed a spot for her aviary/coop of rescued pigeons. Since we had the tent-shed and weren’t really using it yet, I suggested she move her coop up here for a couple of months. The tent-shed would let the pigeons be outside, but no hawks or other predators would be able to harass the wee birds. A friend of said friend came up to help unpack the U-Haul of coop bits back in February 2026. That is Agent Pigeon. (The coop stayed from February until July 2026, when it went off to its new home in a PODS container.)
Fast forward a bit: I went to Little Purgatory for most of June 2026, and during that time Agent J had a vacation planned–they had recently graduated from college. Agent Pigeon not only came in to handle feeding the boys, so Agent Smith wouldn’t have to handle that duty while I was gone, but also picked up Agent J’s plant and bird feeder/bath duties during the week and a bit they were off.
When I got back, the boys were happy, but the mess Agent J had created in the garden shed had grown to epic proportions, and many of the house plants were suffering… and many were dying. So I decided to make a change. Agent Pigeon was more than keen to become my primary PA.
During all of this, since the veg boxes had been finished and filled with soil (see Veggie Sarcophagi), Agent B had come back to work for me just handling the veg boxes. They _really_ like gardening and they were distraught at the state of the plants they had worked so hard to help flourish, and so they were happy with my swift change of staffing.
Now, a few months on, all the house plants that survived are flourishing again, with lots of new plants created from cuttings Agent Pigeon made. Plus this first year of veg gardening produced many, many, many tasty tomatoes, along with basil and zucchini. So many tomatoes, in fact, that I’ve been busy preserving them into sauce, which I’ve given to some of our other workers and contractors. So Agent B and Agent B make a good pairing!
Then there is Agent P, a seldom-mentioned staff member who joined the team in 2023. They live far afield but help out with website work: keeping the images over at stega.org ticking over, and helping on this site with copy editing and some other back-end items. In the future, their role will be expanded… if I ever get the long-planned podcast off the ground. Now that I’m getting caught up on posts here that if is far less iffy.