parkrrrr

The garden looks pretty much the same this week as it did last week. The peppers are getting a little bigger (but still not flowering; I think they're a bit slow this year) and the herbs are all looking a little bigger than last week, but really there's not enough change to justify the usual set of photos. So instead, I give you.... my various plants' attempts to reproduce!

( Baby pictures behind the cut )

This post almost didn't make it. I've spent the last three hours trying to figure out what broke in my main desktop computer that caused it to not POST. Having eliminated all other possibilities, it seems it may have been the RAM, but that's not conclusive. Whatever it is or was that's broken, it seems to be in remission now, and it was all the fault of the horrendous storms we had earlier today. I really need to get some power conditioning here.

Anyway, it's working now, for now, so ( let's see how my garden grows... )

Okay, not really an afternoon. A few minutes, really.

I had some of that fence left over from when I put in the Bunny-B-Gone, and I was going to take it back to Big Lots whence it came, when it occurred to me that there's a project I've been meaning to do for a bit over a year and never got around to that it would be useful for. Elliott (the black Cocker Spaniel; Sam's the blonde one) has been doing what male dogs do on the corner of the air conditioner compressor, which hasn't done anything good for the copper and aluminum that it's made of. Last year, we had someone out to repair a hole that'd been made in it by such activity, and I vowed then to fence it off.

So instead, I went to Big Lots in search of another package of the fencing, because what I had fell short of what I needed by a couple segments. Sadly, I failed utterly to find another package; they've sold out of it and, being Big Lots, they'll probably never have it again. So instead I got some similar fencing that comes in longer segments, which works better for my purposes anyway and will have been cheaper once I return the shorter black stuff.

So, this afternoon, I spent a few minutes putting plastic fencing around the AC compressor in hopes that the dog won't pee on it.

That's right: Elliott has been Cocker-blocked.

(Those of you who know of my ongoing battles with the dogs will be laughing at my naivety right about now. Suffice to say that if Sam were my problem dog, I'd have started with a much larger, less flimsy fence.)

• Tomato flowers! If you look closely (i.e. by clicking) at the pictures of the grape and Early Girl tomatoes, you can see flowers! And this morning, I saw flower buds on one of the cherry tomato vines.
• Oregano! As expected, some of the green where the oregano goes was dandelions. I weeded those. But some of it is definitely oregano. My fingers now smell like oregano.

( Growing continues apace in my little green kingdom... )

I'm a little concerned that the basil and the peppers might not be getting enough light. I'm thinking I'll be tying up those tomato plants a bit so the littler plants at least get some morning light. (All of the pictures above, except for the overviews, were taken standing south of the garden looking north.)

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that my cell phone - a Nokia 6126 - is not the very latest in technology. It's a couple years old, and it was cheap. But it does all of the things a cell phone should, in my opinion, so I probably won't switch until it breaks (which, given that it's a couple years old, will probably be about any day now, but that's a different rant.)

( Cut to protect you from airborne spittle )

Gah. I feel like Andy Rooney all of a sudden.

Things haven't changed a lot in the last five days, but I thought I'd hurry this update so I could get in the habit of posting an update every Sunday. Yesterday, I added a fence that I hope will discourage the bunny who's been eating my parsley and my ancho peppers:
( cut for your protection )

With the storms lately, I've turned off the irrigation system more nights than I've let it run. I think that's a good problem to have.

( Someday I'll remember to add cuts )

Meet Pygathrix clockworki...



This is just a preliminary classification, and is subject to change pending peer review.

(For some reason now not well remembered, we decided this morning that we needed to determine the scientific name of this little guy. We reasoned that he must belong to an Asian genus of simian, as his foot says "Made in China." He looked a little more like a pygathrix than a trachypithecus, so we went with that.)

custardfairy asked how my garden is doing. This post is all her fault.

( Pictures behind the cut )

How sad that I now have two posts in a row about spam subject lines.

The latest one: "African bushmen reveal genital growth mysteries." I guess it takes all kinds, but I for one think they should maybe be revealing those mysterious genital growths to their doctors instead of to the Internet.

Somehow, My work address has managed to get on someone's "wants real estate scam spam" list. I'm not sure how, and I don't get this kind of crap at any of my other addresses, so it seems like it was someone's conscious choice. Nothing to be done about it, of course, other than catch the spammers and give them a very public and very messy execution.

So the spam I just got had a subject line of "Simple Realtor tricks." Putting aside the trademark violation, for which I fervently wish they could be sued within a micron of their lives, I realized that I couldn't figure out from the subject line whether it was simple tricks for real-estate agents, or tricks for simple real-estate agents.

Considering the source, I'm going with the latter interpretation.

(from here)

Style is what you get wrong, that makes what you do sound like you. Style is what you can't help doing. Style is what you're left with.

(For part the first, see New-Phemism)

Inspired by a typo I saw in Some Blog Somewhere:

Festure—n. A product feature that nobody really wants to add and that can't ever live up to the customer's expectations anyway.

So, it looks like I may have spoken too soon about the alien life form that is my cucumber plants. They seem to have soaked up the herbicide and said, "Yum! That had a little kick to it!"

In short, they're thriving. They've even got new leaves, most of 'em. A couple tomato plants haven't entirely given up, either; they may yet survive. We shall see. Of course, that means I have (or will have) a lot of extra cukes, because I did plant five more of 'em.

I haven't seen any significant germination-type activity from my tomato seeds yet. I'm hoping I'll see that soonish. I may end up going and buying some preplanted ones from Lowe's, and that will make me sad.

I saw this today while out driving. I've seen it before, so today I was prepared.

Yes, my windshield IS dirty. Thanks for noticing.

( Clicky for Picky )

I took my seedlings into the garage both of the last two nights to dodge the potential frost, but I've brought them back outside each morning and left them sitting in the driveway, where they could partake of the rain we got yesterday and not be too far away when I had to take them back into the garage in the evening.

So instead of dying from frost, they got to die because my asshole neighbors sprayed broadleaf herbicide on their lawn in a 5+ MPH wind. At least the corn will live. The cukes and the tomatoes are all dead, though. (I still had seeds left, fortunately, so I've just replanted. Cukes aren't supposed to be planted until 5/20 around here, anyway, so it's probably just as well.)

Would it be wrong of me to try to determine if they hired someone to do it, and if so to report that company to the EPA? Spraying when it's windy is a violation of federal law, and they should know that. (The neighbor wouldn't, necessarily, so if they did it themselves I guess the best I could do is point out how expensive it is to spray my lawn too.)

Some time ago, I filed a bug report in our internal tracking database that, in addition to the factual claims, said this:

Expected Results: Sunshine, happiness, unicorns, and rainbows.

Current Results: Ominous black clouds, bottomless depression, swaybacked horses with dodgy-looking fake horns tied on, and rain without bows.


Over the weekend, 42_months (who is a coworker and has therefore seen that bug report) sent me this link.

If you read my April 1 entry, you know what to expect. If not, well... maybe you should read my April 1 entry first.

( The page I mentioned in that entry )

Better late than never, right? Right?