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Some poor soul has accidentally found their way to this little blog.  Now I'm actually going to have to write things.

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The difference between Democratic accidents and Republican accidents.

President Obama takes an elbow to the lip while playing basketball with his Secretary of Education.


Dick Cheney shoots an old man in the face.

First harvest

or,

THE $95 CHERRY TOMATO 

Our garden has produced food.  The fruits of our labor have finally ...erm...borne fruit.

There are a lot more of these on the way.  It's a good thing I've lined up three families to take tomatoes of my hands, because I'm going to have huge numbers of them on my hands in a short while.  I'm afraid I picked this one a few days early.  It was just a touch green, and when I ate it, it was a little sour.  But it was delicious.  

We also have a green pepper ready to go, any time I want to pick and eat it.  We re-planted green beans, in the hopes that they would sprout before the frost.  The package said to expect sprouts in 7 to 14 days; in 3 days, 90 percent of our seeds had sprouted.  It's AMAZING.  They have flowers, like three weeks later.  Hopefully they get enough sun, as the days get shorter.

Effing mosquitoes.

At the beginning of June, one of our local TV weatherpeople was answering questions from viewers. (I heard about this second-hand. I have no use for our local news. It's just like the national news, only smaller and more depressing.) Someone e-mailed in, "Why are the mosquitoes so bad this year?" The weatherperson responded, "Excellent question. The worse the moisture is, the worse the mosquitoes are. The average rainfall for this time of year is 4 inches [or something like that; I don't remember the exact numbers]. So far this year, we've had 13 inches of rain." That was like 8 rainstorms ago. The mosquitoes are, for the first time in my life, keeping me indoors. 

People say that fish eat them.  So I can't REALLY declare genocide on them.

So I'm adding to my wish list a mosquito trap. I think the plan this year is to suffer through August and September and possibly October, at which time the mosquitoes will winter. I'm going to hang a bat house, so it's ready to go next late spring, when the bats are looking for new places to live.  And early in the spring, I'll buy a mosquito trap.  (Current finances don't permit such a major investment.  Those things are expensive. If there were any justice in the world, giving out mosquito traps to anyone who wanted one would have been part of Obama's stimulus plan.)  So while this year, one of the wettest years in recent memory, will continue to be a misery, we should be well prepared for next year.  When we're likely to have a drought, and a mosquito shortage.

My new favorite machine

What possible purpose could this serve, except to kill zombies?

Pole chain saw

In the garden

Apparently, a lot of the food we eat comes off of plants.  All I'm saying is, if somebody had told me when I was 9 that apples were just the birth sacs of apple trees, I'd have eaten a lot fewer apples.

Since we have space, we decided we would plant our own plants, some of them for eating, some of them just for looking pretty.  At a first go, we decided to plant tomatoes (which I love, but C. only really likes in sauces), green peppers which C.'s mom gave us (which I love, but C. doesn't really like), green beans (which we are both very fond of), and raspberries (who doesn't love raspberries?).  Preliminary results are in:

We've done okay at the tomatoes.  We were concerned that we got the seedlings into the ground too late, but they look like they may do all right, after all.  They're starting a little late, I think, but you can see a tomato nub, there in the center of the picture.



The peppers are a mixed bag. The green pepper plant is doing terribly. (None of my "manky leaf" pictures turned out.) The orange pepper plant has a little pepper on it.



After a few false starts and two raspberry plants left for dead, we have a flourishing raspberry plant. No raspberries this year, but maybe next.



This next picture is of the place where the green beans entirely failed to come up. No, it didn't look like that when we planted the beans.

This is the sort of crap I'm talking about.

Two weeks ago, I set out to remove four old fence posts from our yard.  Today, I got the first one out. 

From Home

Seriously though, WTF?

The posts were used to hold up a welded-wire fence, and stick out of the ground about 4 feet.  The cement bases stick into the ground about 3 1/2 feet.  Why would you do this?

From Home

What did the former owners keep here?  Zombies?

The fence was designed to hold chickens.  The fence posts were designed to withstand a rabid chimpanzee attack.  The corral was designed to hold--I don't know.  Rabbits would burrow.  Small dogs would get bored.  Big dogs wouldn't be able to defecate and lie down. 

So I dug the first one out with a shovel.  It took me forever, because I never guessed how far down either the post or the concrete went.  Then (eventually) I pulled them out of the hole I dug by grabbing the posts and lifting.  Yes, it is as heavy as it looks.  No, I didn't herniate anything, thanks for asking.

From Home

While digging this hole, I found water.  It could have come from one of 3 places: a.) It's been raining a lot.  I started digging this hole and let it sit.  It might have collected during the storm.  b.) The posts don't have caps.  It could have leaked out of the post into the hole I dug.  (By the way, you see those roots?  They weren't fun, either.)  c.) Do you know what a "water table" is?  'Cos I might have hit it.

I did manage to get out two posts today, before I started to worry about dehydration.  I'll take out the next two--some other time.

Also:  Why does my dirt change color and get a lot harder about 14 inches down?