wiredfool

Archive for March, 2008

Little Guy

Ps'd

From what passes for is 1 year photo session, but really it was from about a year and a couple of weeks.

This is trying out some photoshop techniques, which I haven’t done for many images before. I’m trying to brush up on my post processing skills to do better touchup and less literal images.

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Passing – Sheldon Brown

Way back when I was first on the internet, before these blog things, people talked on usenet, and some people talked a lot on usenet. I was a part of the bicycling community at rec.bicycles.tech, and I remember the contributions of Sheldon Brown. (I think I remember 3 or 4 names from that era now.) He always had an answer, and almost always had the part you needed. He built some crazy tandems and fixed gears, welded together out of whatever junkers crossed his path. I ordered a few things from hish shop, and I think even biked by it once while I was in the area.

I left that community for the web, or it disappeared, or something around the time of the 1999 internet boom, so I never knew that Sheldon Brown had MS, or that he was in failing health. He died last month.

Sheldon Brown obituary – Times Online

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Gardening

Our garden has been humming along, until it hit a full stop last Saturday. Two weeks ago, we rented a big roto-tiller (two cylinder, 16hp. Now that’s power) and attacked the mess of gourse and blackberry roots in our large garden location, as well as a killing off the sod in a couple of other spots (one called and shaped like nevada, one like a pie wedge) for some other garden uses.

Last Friday evening and Saturday, I defined the beds in the big garden, and then put in one load of compost over half the garden. Then, stoppage struck, as the compost loading tractor wouldn’t start when I went back for the second load, and half the family got quite sick, and remained that way for most of the week.

The big garden is a rectangle, with 16 3 foot wide beds on each side of a center aisle, each bed about 10 – 14 feet long. There are some smaller ones on the north side, and the ones on the south side tend to be on the longer side. At about 30-40 square foot per bed, there’s a good amount of space for smaller stuff, and there are enough beds to give the bigger stuff its space as well.

Helpfully, I had put the compost into the ‘later in the summer’ area of the garden first, and not where I was planning on putting the early season stuff. One more trip to the compost place, no luck — they’re out for 2 more weeks. So. Garden plans are reversed, and I’m now planting early season where I intended later season stuff.

So, Today (Saturday) I mixed up the fertilizer (following Steve Solomon’s complete organic recipe — 4x seed meal, 1/2x lime, 1/2x rock phosphate, 1/2x kelp meal) raked it into the 8 beds, and planted the first seeds (and starts). There’s a bed of Walla Walla onion starts, a bed of chard, one of peas, and one of favas. Ben has a garden bed of his own with radishes, peas, and onions. Tomorrow we’re expecting to put in a bed of spinach and lettuce, and 2 of potatoes.

Next month, we’ll start more peas, more potatoes, more salad stuff, and probably some brassicas.

In May, another batch of potatoes, more salad stuff, and who knows what else. Probably beans.

Memorial day, we go for hot weather loving plants, tomatoes and peppers. Sweet Corn too, in the nevada plot.

And in mid summer, in go the overwintering things, more brassicas, leeks, favas.

Obviously, there are big plans here, but I think we’re past a large part of the early work.

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100% Cat

This cat, our 10yr old resident 20lb feline couch cushion, here looking very unamused that I was coming after him with a camera, did something cat like that he hasn’t done in a long time, if ever.

He Caught a Mouse. A one piece real formerly live mouse.

He caught and played with it in the hour before we woke up this morning. As we came downstairs, he then got up, strutted over to his food bowl as if to say: “Yep. 100% Cat. I’ve still got it.” And after breakfast, time for a catnap.

Unamused Cat

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Pointy

Pointy

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