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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Garden update with a gratuitous chick picture
OK, we have had our first garden casualties this year:
Spinach, being devoured by striped cucumber beetles. EVIL EVIL BEETLES. I offered the kids a bounty of a dime a beetle and they found and squished over a hundred of the demonic little beasts. Anyone know if we can wash this and eat it, or if we should just count it a loss?
Something also ate a bell pepper plant down to its stem. The others have a little damage here and there (grasshoppers? More beetles? Tomato worms?), but this was pretty extreme. Wonder if it will miraculously come back.
But all is not lost; here's a pea blossom.
And most of the pepper plants look more like this. (Fortunately.)
itty bitty baby zucchino rampicante plant. Grow grow grow!
I still need to plant the rest of our squash and the melons. This is SUPER LATE to be planting. I felt all motivated to go out and do that a few minutes ago. Lemme check -- OK, nope. All gone. Darn. (I'll do it later anyway.)
Tomato plants.
Tomatoes and basil. Early on something was eating the basil but the new leaves seem to be OK. Probably because the beetles all headed for greener pastures in the spinach bed next door.
Claire's 4-H bed. :) She's got potatoes (which we need to bury; another project for today or tomorrow), onions, a tomato plant, a pumpkin vine, a Jerusalem artichoke, and probably something else that I'm forgetting.
And as promised, cute young chicks:
HA HA I'M SO FUNNY. (They look like teenagers.)
Friday, May 08, 2009
Garden and CHICKIES.
I have been INCREDIBLY LAX with garden posts.
Well, OK, I've been incredibly lax with ALL posts, really, but let's put that aside for the moment.
Anyway. I still don't have pictures of the tomatoes and peppers I'm planting tomorrow, because I am A SLACKER. But I do have SPINACH PICTURES. Yes, that's right, for the second year in a row, something I planted in the ground has actually grown.
Itty bitty carrot tops! Oh yeah, I said spinach.
This year's spinach! Popeye would be proud.
And even more exciting:
Volunteer spinach, sown naturally from seeds that fell from last year's spinach after it bolted, and not discovered by us until we were cleaning out the bed to plant in it in April. This whole nature thing, it really works!
And MOST exciting of ALL... baby chicks!
We're allowed to like them because these particular hens will have long lives of egg-laying; they're not for meat.
One of the chicks (we bought twelve) on the day we bought them, when I THINK they were about two days old but I don't know for sure:
You'll notice that they're reddish and not yellow. That's because they're Rhode Island Reds, see. Not Rhode Island Yellows. (Actually, I think yellow chicks grow up and become white chickens, if it's anything like it is with ducks.)
After a mere week of gorging herself on chick mash:
(full disclosure: I have NO IDEA if that's the same chick. There is virtually NO WAY to tell these girls apart, except that one is kind of small and retiring like a runt.)
A few in one spot: (They had their first outing today; we took them out and put them in the chicken-wire enclosure around the base of our recently-planted apricot tree. SO CUTE to see them scratching and pecking at bugs just like real chickens. Oh. Yeah.
This chick was in the process of being really loud and drawing both Smokey and Scout from the far reaches of our property to gaze ravenously in at her:
She's also, by the way, sitting in one of the FIVE beds we mulched today, in preparation for the aforementioned planting of peppers and tomatoes tomorrow. Is it possible that I might do two blog posts in a row? Don't count on it.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
SHOPPING HELL AUGGHH.
I had to report for jury duty today (well, technically, yesterday. Tuesday.), and on Monday I suddenly realized that I had NOTHING TO WEAR. I panicked, looked over my stuff, and decided that actually I'd do OK if I got some new boots. See, I used to have these black boots (from Payless, of course) that I would wear on occasions where jeans were OK but oldish no-longer-quite-white athletic shoes were not. (In other words, these were my church shoes and no I'm not joking. The flats only come out when I wear a skirt and tights which is probably less than three times a year.)
Anyway. Those boots died a sad death thanks to a crack across the sole. (For $15 at Payless and several years of hard use I'm not complaining.) So I simply needed to replace them except that SHOCK AND TRAGEDY Payless doesn't carry them anymore. Apparently even Payless must occasionally bend to the pressure of changing fashions, which is exerted by an industry with shall we say a really heavily vested interest in women's felt need to reinvent their wardrobes every year in unison. (I am not a fan. Can you tell?)
I didn't find any other shoes that would be just right, because I'm not a loafer person and can you wear loafers with jeans, anyway, and if you do what do you do for socks? None of my skirts would be quite appropriate except for one that needs light-colored sandals to go with it, and my sandals are black because my otherwise-identical light pair wore out, and of course THOSE aren't available anymore either. So then I was stuck, and I decided to buy a skirt that would go with my flats, except I couldn't find just the right skirt either, and it was all simultaneously utterly miserable and utterly typical of my usual shopping experience. I hate shopping*, and I especially hate shopping when I have to find something by tomorrow OR ELSE, and I really especially hate shopping when I have only about an hour to go looking for clothes I don't want to buy anyway in three different stores before I have to dash to a class.
*for clothes. I like shopping for groceries just fine.
In fact, here's a list, in order of ascending horrificness, of things I would rather do than go clothes shopping.
- Take an algebra test, even a really difficult one with a million tiny error-prone steps to each problem and for which my studying had been slightly inadequate.
- Drink a giant cup of grape soda.
- Take a big load of trash to the dump.
- Have the measles.
- For three weeks.
- Over Christmas.
- For three weeks.
- Visit the gynecologist.
- Read a bad 1970's Harlequin novel.
- Out loud.
- During a visit to the gynecologist.
- Out loud.
- Ride the Tilt-A-Whirl four times in a row.
- and proceed to throw up on a stranger.
- Who turns out to be my gynecologist.
- and proceed to throw up on a stranger.
- Write a history paper.
- About Bodie.
- Pluck a chicken.
- Weigh myself in front of a gymnasium full of my worst enemies from all thirteen years of public education.
- Have a root canal.
- Have unnecessary major surgery.
- Have unnecessary major surgery during which the doctor accidentally leaves a pair of scissors inside me.
- Pass a kidney stone.
- Pass the pair of accidentally-abandoned scissors.
- Participate in a 24-hour adults-only Candyland marathon.
- Stab my own eyes out with dull, dirty forks.
OK, I confess that somewhere along in there I started exaggerating. But not very early on, and NOT BY MUCH.
End result: I did not find either shoes or a new outfit and decided to just show up in jeans and the old tennis shoes, which appears to be some kind of jury uniform actually, so that was good but it also meant that my misery ended up being ALL FOR NOTHING. Sob.
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Edited to add: Oh PS After a fascinating morning of watching the justice process at work -- specifically, sitting through voir dire, which is pretty much just like it is in John Grisham novels -- I did not get selected for jury duty, but not because I was excused for any reason. It was just because they had a whole bunch of extra people and didn't get to me before they'd filled the panel. But I'm "on call" for four more weeks, which means every Friday through the month of May I have to check in and see if they want me to come in and go through the whole process again. Fun times!
