Apopheniac

Memorial Day

To those who have served and to those who have given those who have served,
a grateful nation pauses to show our gratitude.

23 Years and Counting

What a perfect anniversary. Early matinee movie of Shrek 2 with Kirk.
Came home and made a Dutch Baby's Brunch. Watched Moonstruck, one of our favorite movies. Then danced to mp3s of our favorite tunes. Perfect.

This week's "Best of the Beds"

You grow tomaytoes and I grow tomahtoes

The tomatoes are really shooting up. Note the espresso grounds we are placing around them as mulch.

How does your garden grow?

Quite well thank you. With lots of tomatoes and cucumbers, squash, peppers, eggplant, grapes, cantelope and watermelon.

Good Morning

Went for a pleasant sunrise walk this morning. Met a nice horse and chickens.
This neighborhood shows a whole new level of diversity.

Perky Pig

We had barbecue at Matt and Carol's this evening and dropped into the kennels to check on the boar. It is coming back to health nicely. It is larger and much more perky than when it showed up. When Carol goes to feed it (several times a day) it comes to the fence and wags its tail until she tosses in the chow. It rooted clean one of the dog runs so they moved it to another.

Drip Obsession

We have made such progress in getting Jean's flowers and plants that watering had become quite a production. Lubbock is so dry (and will be so hot in summer) that the plants must get adequate water, often. We had started out with soaker hoses on several of the beds, but as we put in the drip irrigation systems for the vegetable and berry beds it became obvious as the better way. So then I replaced the soaker with a micro-mister drip system for the roses and cannas. This was so superior that the soaker hoses on the perenial/annual bed came out for a string of micro-sprinklers. Finally, after looking at online photos of a system for orange orchards, I linked all of our new ornamental and fruit trees with a system that drips just the right amount of water onto just the right area around each tree, every other day. Yesterday and today I am burying the 175 feet of hose connecting the rings.
Stop me before I drip again!

Half a century of Mattness

Monday was the day but Sunday was the celebration as Matt's odometer rolled past the big five-oh of birthdays. Have a great year Matt.

Happy Mother's Day Jean

What do you give the woman who has everything for gardening? Something to put it in.

Berries and Beef

Friday and Saturday were the days of berries and beef respectively. Friday morning I opened the front door at 8:30 to find a large box sent from Arkansas. Via the net, Jean had found a company which specialized in all manner of berry bushes. She placed our order just after their stated April 1st deadline, so when they didn't cash our check and nothing came, she just assumed we had missed the boat. She had even gone on to buy a couple of raspberry plants at Home Depot.

Well, here was this box to say we had assumed wrong, and a brief online visit showed that the bank had indeed cleared our check last week. So here were 34 healthy, bare-root blueberries, blackberries and raspberries in need of immediate planting and we had not even started to prepare a bed. Clearly this Friday was not going to be the one I had written out in my day planner.

We called Bernadette who graciously said we could borrow her roto-tiller. While Kirk and I went to pick it up, Jean started to soak the roots. By 2:30 we had dug 100 feet of 3-foot wide bed along the fence and planted 25 of the bushes. We broke for the heat of the day and ran to the garden store. By dark we had planted the rest of the bushes and installed a drip watering system to take care of the whole bed. Here is one of the blueberries:

"So much for the berries, where's the beef?", you ask. Well, that was Saturday's outing. Jean has been orchestrating our journey toward healthier eating, and we have moved away from factory-farm meat and poultry with its force-feeding, hormones and anti-biotics. (For more on why, check out "The Meatrix").

Online, I had found PaiDom meats who's range-fed beef, goats, lamb and chicken are held to standards more stringent than "organic." They sell by mail, selected deliveries and through a few health-food stores. We had tried their hamburger from Well Body health foods and it had been good, so I placed an order. Yesterday I drove to the bank parking lot to meet their May Lubbock delivery and pick up our 30 pound order. Jean and I tried a couple of the eggs as soon as I got home. The large, dark yolks stood tall and they fried up to taste like I remember eggs tasting as a child. Last night I grilled a sirloin steak for us. Because this beef is much leaner than grain-fed beef, you cook it less to not dry it out. I did and it was so flavorful and delicious. As we had noticed with the hamburger, it seems to be more filling. I don't know if that is nutrients, lack of fat, our imagination or some other factor but it seemed to take less meat before we felt comfortably full.

DSL Status Page

We had a period when our DSL was loosing synch or disconnecting multiple times a day. Since it was an intermittent problem, the phone company had some trouble isolating it. In addition, we were never sure if we were connected until we tried to load a page or submit a form and it failed. Kirk wrote a script for a DSL status page which runs on our server. I can open a web window and see it at any time. If we are not actively connected, the background turns to red. Then he got a new dsl modem which gives additional information so we could see info on the quality of the connection as well as if it was there. The result is that I can pull up the window below any time I wish, or just keep it open in a corner or the background. Good job Kirk.