Okay, I know its the day after the holiday, but hey! I don’t have to go to work! So that means I don’t have to write a blog post either!
Happy holiday!
My So Called Life
The garden is dead! Long live the garden!
Now that the new garden is really getting into the swing of things, I have to say, I’m liking it a lot better than the old garden. Note that this is very specific to me, because my reasons are rather selfish ones. I believe I have put them here before, but I’ll reiterate:
- It is SO NICE having the garden across the street from our house. You’d be amazed at how much easier it is to keep up on it, even though it was only a few blocks away before.
- A garden is much nicer than an abandoned lot.
- We have met nice, friendly people. There were nice, friendly people at the old garden (some of the same nice, friendly people I might add), but for whatever reason, we never met them there. This is probably due to #1.
- We only gardened at the old place for a couple of years, so we weren’t unduly attached to it, the way we might have been if we were there longer.
Certainly, the new garden is looking a lot better than the old garden site is looking right now:
What's left of our old garden (the red arrow is where our garden used to be)
I should mention that it is actually a lot worse than that; I took this picture some time ago, before all of the construction equipment and temporary construction trailers moved in.
The new garden, meanwhile, is looking pretty stellar. Our gnome, Lloyd, finally has a garden to keep watch over.
Lloyd keeps a look out
People always have all kinds of things in the garden, so we felt a little left out. I wanted to gnome to face inward, but Evie insisted that he face directly toward the plot that has a plastic shark, to keep an eye on it. A laser wouldn’t have made a straighter line from Lloyd’s eyes to that shark than Evie did when she positioned him.
We got our first strawberries of the year! Three strawberries were ripe all at the same time, so Sara, Evie and I all got to try them simultaneously. We’ve gotten a few strawberries since then, but not more than a handful. The strawberries are sending out runners like crazy though, and it’s clear we’ll have 5 times as many strawberry plants next year. It’s very clear that the strawberry box was necessary, as the plants have already made several attempts to escape its confinement.
I don’t know if we have green thumbs or what, but at first our tomatoes always seems like they are a little smaller than everyone else’s. Walking around I’m always like, “Whoah, look at this guy’s tomatoes!” But then at some point I take another look and realize that ours are now as big or bigger than everyone else in the garden. I don’t know if there’s something we do particularly right, the variety of tomatoes we have, or what, but they look extremely large.
We didn’t plant quite as much this year, so there’s nothing that we’ve really been able to harvest yet, but I am already looking forward to some delicious veggies!
What I’m Doing
What I’m Watching:
- The IBW, new episode premiering tomorrow! The old episodes are still available, so there is time to catch up!
- District 9
I hadn’t heard hardly anything about this movie at all. Occasionally I would hear somebody say, “That movie is really, really good” but that was about it. Then, it was nominated for a Best Picture Academy award and I was like, “Say what now?” But everybody I had ever heard talk about it universally liked it. I have to say, this movie totally lived up to the hype! It was really good.
Even when I started watching it, I had no idea what it was about. Based on the logo (above) I had the vague idea it was a cartoon or something, which it is not. In fact, on the contrary, it has really good special effects. This movie had that rare quality of really good sci-fi, where it can be both entertaining as an action movie, and simultaneously be a commentary on our culture. Also, I would say that it is pretty much universally appealing, even to non-sci-fi fans.
I think my comment at the end of the movie was, “Wow, I have a lot to think about now.” Highly recommended.
What I’m Listening To:
Satellite by Lena (Germany)
I love it. (Told you I liked it Meg!) This song was this year’s winner of the Eurovision awards. The Eurovision awards are kind of hard to explain. It’s like combining the craziness of American Idol with the fanatical patriotism of the Olympics. Basically, different European countries pitch their best (?) musical acts against each other, and the results are voted on.
Sometimes Europe is a strange place to us Americans, and Eurovision really highlights this. You can see some examples here. All the bad European stereotypes seem to come out of the woodwork. To an extent, I think this is somewhat intentional, because countries want to highlight something unique about their culture, such as a particular folk music sound or costume.
Anyway, the cream does tend to rise to the top and I think Satellite proves this. I probably listen to it several times a week.
What I’m Reading:
The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1
I have mentioned before being pleasantly surprised with the stories of Philip K. Dick, so I thought I’d give him another go around (actually two more, since I also have volume 2). Sure enough, the stories are pretty good.
However, when reading these sort of “golden age” sci-fi stories, you always have to look at them through the lens of time a little bit. I don’t know when these particular stories were written, but they have a very 1950’s feel to them. I’m not just picking on Dick here either, the same is true of a lot of older sci-fi, specifically from people like Heinlein. It’s probably true of literature as a whole, but I think sci-fi really highlights it, because of the advanced technology.
For example, in these particular Dick stories, you have people living on the moon and Mars, living in totalitarian futures, fighting robots, time traveling, etc. and yet, there is no such thing as a cell phone. In one story, we have the technology to time travel, and yet the guy has to pull over into a gas station and use a pay phone. Almost inevitably, the foe or competitor is the Soviet Union. It’s like they could imagine some things in the future, but everything else is still locked into the time period in which they were writing.
My personal favorite is when something is set in the far off future, which is already in the past to us. One story was set in the far off future of 1992, where robots could pass as humans, but still bragged about getting 22 stations on their cathode tube televisions. Did I mention that these amazing robots ran on punch tape, not hard drives?
It’s not just technology either, it’s social aspects as well. Like a character describing how amazing it is to have a woman driving a car, how it makes him feel like a king. Or a building in the future being described as, “full of well-to-do Negroes”. Well, there’s a phrase you don’t hear every day! Many of the sci-fi stories from this era feature the traditional strong male. Anything done by a woman is greeted with this sort of attitude like, “Well, look at that! From a woman! Amazing! Isn’t the future just grand folks?”
The scary part about all of that, is that I think these people were really trying. But, because of the culture of the time, they simply could not imagine some of these things. But they were trying, and that was more than a lot of people were doing at the time. Certainly, the literature of today is probably going to look just as bad to people reading it 50 years from now.
And, despite all of that, I’m glad they didn’t update the stories. I’d rather see where we’ve been and why we got where we are now, then sweep it all under the rug and forget. I’m glad we’ve gotten to the point that well-to-do Negroes and women drivers are too common to be worth mentioning. And if you can get past all of these funny little extra pieces, there are some pretty fine stories underneath too.
Father’s Day
Well, another Father’s day came and went. The thing about Father’s day is that, by definition, it is not relaxing. Because, in order to participate in Father’s day, you must have had some kids somewhere along the way.
So the day was a little hectic, but we had a really good time nonetheless. Evie gave me a card in which she wrote “Daddy”, so that was pretty cool. It was so cute, Sara told me she had to redo it a second time because she made a mistake the first time and she didn’t want to give me the one with the mistake.
The best part about the day was the time we spent playing in the “zero-depth” reflecting pool that Sara discovered close to our house. Zero-depth means that the water is maybe an inch deep; when I stand in it the water doesn’t even cover my feet. Evie just loves it, and we got some great pictures.
This thing is so cool, and huge too! It looks awesome. It’s amazing that such a thing could exist so close to our place and you wouldn’t know about it.
It looks cool day...
...or night.
And I guess we weren’t the only ones who didn’t know it was there, because very few people came over while we were there. So we pretty much had the thing to ourselves. We ran and splashed, played hide and seek and pretended we were dinosaurs. Like I said, the best part of the day.
Our dinner plans included grilling some shrimp for pasta. However, when I opened the package to clean the shrimp, I found out the shrimp was already cooked! So, I saved myself all the time of cleaning, skewering, and grilling, but I was a little disappointed because I had been looking forward to it! Finally, we capped off the day with some strawberry rhubarb crisp from the strawberries and rhubarb we bought on Saturday at the farmer’s market. Heavenly! I’m glad Sara discovered she likes rhubarb, because it’s one of my favorites. Evie likes it too!
So anyway, that was father’s day. Thanks to the well wishers, hope everyone had as good of a day as I had!
l337 status
I have 1337 comments on my blog right now. I am officially l337. Is this thing on FTW, best blog EVAR. Internet, you’ve been pwned.
What n00b is going to comment and ruin it?
Shane Halbach 