Climbing That Great Big Hill

So my wife and I like to garden. Making our own stuff out of nothing but seed, dirt, sunshine, and water is cool. In most cases you get near-immediate results, and if you're lucky, you get to have more stuff to eat for free, which is always nice.

We just moved to our new place in October, which is actually kind of perfect for starting a new garden, since during the entire winter, we've been doing all the things that needed to be done in the house (putting stuff where we want it, hanging art, figuring out the heater, etc) and thinking about the garden.

Our backyard is a little kitschy, with a moderate hill and a small copse of trees in the very back. I tried to take a few pictures to illustrate the blank canvas, as it were; a starting point to all later garden updates.

Here we have the view from our back porch/patio. This really is the width of the backyard, as we share a wall with our next-door neighbor (to the left), and there's a fence on the right side that goes all the way to the back. In the middle third of the photo above is the hill. It's about a 45 degree incline.

I tried to get better shots of what the hill was like, but I think I effectively just shot a lot of pictures of dirt and weird little sprouting things that we think are onions.

This is probably the best picture to see the hill in action. My plan is to cut away three foot terraces and then block those sections with brick or paving stones. I think I'll get three vertical sections, and maybe four total horizontal sections.

This shot is looking back at the back patio from atop the hill. You can almost make out the line of bricks in the center of the shot.

The copse of trees. Just behind the big tree on the left I want to build out a six foot diameter compost bin/leaf holder. I built one at our last house, and the dirt was just really getting good after three years of feeding it.

This is the corner of the weird line of bricks mentioned before. I think someone had the same idea that we have, but they wussed out and didn't really follow through.

The first year is always a learning period for new gardeners or old gardeners at new locations. It's a time to try out different methods, different plants, and find out all the conditions that your yard and plants have and need.

I'm excited.

When will February End?

Son got two shots yesterday, he's complaining a lot of soreness today. They say while he was getting the shots he was such a trooper and was telling them to give him more. And now, he's just bitching up a storm about the pain.

It's weird, this completely diametric approach to life, and I've seen it in him before. One minute everything's cool, and he's chilling with us watching tv or something, and the next he's a whirlwind of terror, fighting with his sister and chasing the cats.

Boys will be boys, I suppose, and he's all boy at this point.

Nana is taking the kids to go see the Bieber movie today; they're super-excited. I think us parents will take a trip up to the local clothing outlet mall to see if we can replace some clothes that we lost in a recent basement drainage issue.

In other news, this keyboard is acting up, might be time to look for a replacement.

I narrowly avoided doing six months in county yesterday. Got pulled over a few weeks ago for speeding (like, 6 above), and a broken license plate light (didn't even know I had one). Cop said he'd give me a warning, but had to hold me for tax evasion.

Long story short, I didn't file my local taxes for two years. I did state and federal, but the local peeps want their money. After appearing in court, and talking things over with the local tax official, I'm set up with a payment plan that will stretch about six months, but at least I can spend that time free rather than sitting in a cell with bubba.

Although I doubt there's enough room in county for a small-time "crook" like me...

Jagged Pills

I like to think I'm a pretty patient person. Patient and compassionate, you know, I don't really hate people, I don't invoke huge amounts of unnecessary chaos, and I want to make sure my kids grow up into being good people.

But there are seriously some things in this world that I hate.

I understand when there is a need for something, sometimes R&D gets thrown to the side while production is ramped up. If you just need some form of capturing data, but all the power is out, you grab a pen and paper and start writing shit down. It's cool, if the need is that great, MacGuyver a solution, and keep moving. But when the power comes back on, revert that paper information back into the system.

When you need a communications device to send images of paper to other people in other places, I get it, you needed to do it RIGHT THEN, and a fax machine was all that was available. It's alright, it was 1985, fax machines were hot shit.

But you know, it's 2011. We have better stuff now. Hell, whole companies are running paperless. Get rid of fax machines. The options available to you only start at email, ftp, and something like dropbox. There are countless options for conveying data from one machine to another. You're using one option now.

Get rid of fax machines. They're dirty, use paper, use electricity, are loud, take up a phone line, take too long to communicate, and are from a time when some guy just needed to send this paper to someone across the country without using the pony express.

I hate fax machines.

Continuing in this direction, I hate printers, too. We have lots of ways of looking at information. You can view it on a monitor. You can dredge it through a front-end to make it all pretty and then display it on a scoreboard for a sports team. You can throw it up on a wall using a projector. You can even use your phone to look at it.

Printers are loud, dirty, wasteful little inventions. I get it, you needed to get information out of the computer that you typed everything into. You couldn't read punch-tape, so you needed the computer to convert information into letters and numbers that were recognizable. It's cool. It was 1985, printers were necessary for business.

But... it's 2011. Paperless companies... Think green...

I hate Blackberries. More specifically, I hate the Blackberry Enterprise Server software package.

Smartphones are a great thing; I can do a significant portion of the things I can do on a desktop workstation computer on my phone. It isn't easy, but I can struggle along. I can view email, I can watch video, I can even open files and edit them, then send them off somewhere.

But the evil beast that created BES decided that they really hated anyone that administered a company full of BBs. There are a ton of restrictions, extra components that have to be installed to a server, and all these weird licensing regulations. If Google had the same requirements to use their services, to access the stuff you need... they'd be out of business.

There are other things I hate, or at least dislike, but these take the top of the list.

Break the Crust

So many plans, so many things to try. We moved to a new place in October of last year, so this will be the first spring in the new place. First steps in getting a garden together, in getting the patio just right for grilling. First shovels of dirt flip-flopped around to mix in better dirt, to prepare beds for flowers and fruits and whatnot.

I'm getting older, and I can feel it. I once relished the thought of days and afternoons sweating over a 10'^2 plot of earth to get a few more tomato plants in the ground. I used to really enjoy walking behind the too-loud lawn mower, lost in thought and totally segmented from reality for an hour while the engine I trailed filled the air and blocked all everything else.

But I'm getting old. My bones hurt. My joints would rather sit in a hot tub or lay on a soft bed. I like the after-effects of gardening, but do not want to pain myself more in the process of getting there.

Alas, it is my duty (and more than a little my pride) to wait for the ground to fully warm up and dig out the grass and replace everything with what is needed to eat, if not for just a meal or two.

When I was much much younger, I would sit on the couch and watch gardening shows with my mother and sister. Shows like The Victory Garden, or The Square-Foot Garden were often on in the early afternoons. We'd watch the hosts walk around these... these simply awesome back yards where anything and everything grew. It appeared almost like they could exist completely on the harvests of their crops.

But I grew up, and now I understand that man cannot live on peppers and tomatoes alone.

At the last place, we tried okra, radishes, sunflowers, and other small fruits and veggies, but never really got anything close to enough food to sustain us. It was really nice to be able to cut something and toss it in a pot, or to slice up a tomato for a burger, or to rip a few basil leaves to add to a marinara. But there isn't enough land nor time to grow enough food for everybody.

Maybe if I had a big farm, and I didn't have to work in an office all day... maybe then I could grow food and have some animals and do something worth-while... But then I recall that I'm getting older. My body doesn't like moving all that much.

Really, I'm not that old. I'm barely old enough to be losing my hair...

And in a way I'm excited about getting out and getting dirty, even if it's only for five minutes at a time.