My So Called Life

Missing: One Garden Worth of Produce

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Remember how I bragged back in July about how our garden was growing like crazy, and we were harvesting a ton of lettuce and strawberries? Well, not a lot has happened since then.

Our tomato plants and beans grew and grew and grew like crazy, consuming our entire garden to the point where we have to hack our way in every time we go to water it. The bean plants in particular are constantly grabbing onto our tomatoes and the tomatoes in the garden next door, like some kind of hungry tentacled monster.

This seemed like a good sign, but where’s all the produce?

I believe 2 of our 12 tomato plants (8 planted tomato plants and another 4 or so naturally occurring) have actually made tomatoes. And even those are hardly producing. The beans have just offered up a handful of beans, but I’m hoping that’s because we started them late.

Why aren’t our tomatoes producing? We currently have 2 theories. The first is that it was just too hot at the wrong time. My sister said that the plants won’t produce flowers when the temperature is over 100. This could explain it, since we had a heat wave right at the time that the plants should have been blowing up. The other theory is that we seem to have some aphids this year. We also have ladybugs, so the situation seems to be controlling itself, but one gardener posited that perhaps the tomatoes were worried about growing defenses rather than fruit.

Luckily we got 13 pounds of tomatoes from my dad, so we spent 3 1/2 hours on Sara’s birthday canning 7 quarts of tomatoes.

The only things that seem to be going well in the garden right now are the peppers (and the eggplant). Specifically, our jalapeno plant is going like gangbusters. I picked 15 large jalapenos the other day, and there were still more coming. This was after we had already frozen about all that we would probably use (I have to admit, we don’t use a ton of jalapenos in a year, especially since we haven’t canned any salsa so far this year).

I’m still holding out a little hope that the tomatoes are just delayed, and we still may get some kind of tomato explosion. Then we can all look back on this post and have a good laugh together, as we try to give them away to anyone who will take them.

Please?

That’s flat out rediculous

/ Shane / 1 Comment

The motor on Sara’s new blender is so powerful  that, if you put veggies in to blend for soup, the friction of the blades will actually heat it for you to the point that you don’t have to cook it…and it only takes 5 minutes to do so. That’s faster than on the stove!

Google+ Extensions

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Now that I’ve been using Google+ for a while, I’ve found the need for a few add-ins to make things work a little better. I should note that these are actually add-ins for Chrome, not directly for Google+, so they will only work for you if you use Chrome (and if you don’t, then I don’t have much sympathy for you anyway). I’ve been using these for a while now, and I will vouch for each of them.

Start G+ – This extension is essential! This one consolidates my Facebook and Twitter accounts with my G+ account. I can make a post in G+ and have it automatically go to Twitter and Facebook. I can see all three of my feeds in one stream. I don’t actually like having my Facebook stream combined with the other two, so I turned that option off. At this point it is still easier for me to view Facebook via Facebook, so that’s a personal choice for me. But I basically never used Twitter at all, and now I am, because it’s conveniently co-located with a service that I like. The downside is that people who follow me in more than one place have to deal with repeat messages, but I already had my blog going out to all of those places, so there was already a lot of overlap.

+PhotoZoom – When you hover over an image, it pops up full size. I thought this one sounded stupid, but everyone kept recommending it, so I tried it. It’s amazing! I’m so used to it now that I try doing it in Facebook all the time. Some examples of when I use it are: when I get a notification that someone changed their profile picture, the thumbnail is so tiny you usually can’t figure out what it is a picture of, but it’s not necessarily worth clicking on the image to see it bigger. By the same token, when someone puts up pictures, sometimes the thumbnails are good enough for most of the pictures, but you want to see one a little closer. So you can just mouse over it, and you don’t have to be taken out of the whole flow of your stream to see it.

Useability Boost for Google Plus – This is a really minor one, but it just tweaks the CSS a little bit of the G+ page. The main thing it does is change the background from white to gray, and add a little space in between posts. This might not sound like much, but it makes it so much easier to read. I tried turning it back off once, and I had to put it right back on.

+Comment – This was a way to collapse comments. When I went to get a link to where to download it, it seemed to be gone from the app store. Upton further review, it seems that it was not needed anymore, because Google+ folded that functionality into the base program. So, good on you Google. Looks like I can uninstall this one.

The one thing I’m really missing is something to automatically push my blog posts out to Google+. Right now it automatically goes to Twitter via WordPress and Facebook via Networked Blogs. But there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent yet to push things out to G+. So I am manually pasting the link in every day, which is kind of tedious.

Anybody know of anything to do this? Any other extensions you like?

Have Bikes, Will Travel

/ Shane / 2 Comments

While we were on vacation, we ended up as the unintentional owners of a pair of bicycles.

We were shopping for a camp chair for Oliver, and we found ourselves next to a Goodwill. We decided to go inside and look around, but before we even got inside we saw two bikes sitting outside with a sign that said, “I’m for sale!”

There was a brand new mountain bike for $15. The tires were a little flat, but it looked like it had just been sitting in someone’s garage and never used. There was also a well-used racing bike for $10. Although it had obviously seen a lot of use, it looked like it was pretty well taken care of and only needed a new seat. So $25 total for a pair of pretty good looking bikes. We didn’t have any bikes (though we already had helmets from our trip to Mackinac), so we figured, “What the heck?” The icing on the cake is when we put air in the mountain bike tires and they held! So we didn’t even need to replace the inter-tubes.

We were pretty jazzed about our purchase, but the question now is, what do we do with them?

Surprisingly, we just don’t have much of an opportunity to use them. I say surprisingly because Sara walks all over the neighborhood, so you’d think this would be a godsend. But the kids complicate this quite a bit. Evie might be able to keep up if it was a short trip, but what do we do with Oliver? It’s just not worth the purchase (or the storage!) of some kind of trailer or anything. Even to ride the bike recreationally, we’d be talking about one of us going for a ride while the other stayed with the kids. Not all that appealing for either of us!

I’m sure we’ll be able to get more use out of them when the kids are older. You don’t pass up a deal like 2 bikes for $25! In the meantime, any suggestions on what we do with the bikes?

Finally, something more worthless than the EZ Cracker

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I previously thought that no invention could ever be as worthless as the EZ Cracker. That was until I saw the Chef’n Bananza Banana Slicer:

Seriously, does anybody have a problem cutting up a banana? The knife doesn’t even need to be sharp. You don’t even have to use a knife: I cut them up with forks and even spoons all the time! And what is more difficult, slicing bananas, or cleaning between all those little blades on the device? I guarantee that takes more time.

Why stop there? Why not an Automatic Corn De-kerneler

Again, I’ve never really had a problem doing this quickly and efficiently with a knife. And furthermore, how often are you doing it in the first place? The best thing for removing corn from the kernel is my teeth! (Well, I think actually that Oliver’s teeth are the best thing from removing corn from the kernel…that boy eats corn faster than Grandpa Johnny!) (Not really. You’ve never seen Grandpa Johnny eat corn. But I digress…) I don’t know if this thing accommodates different sizes of corn, but I bet you spend more time wrestling with the thing, trying to get it working, than you do with the original “difficult task” of cutting the corn off with a knife.

Link via Sara.