garden

Garden, we hardly knew ye

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Well, I guess we better get some good crops out of our garden this year…looks like it might be the first and only year!  The land is owned by the University of Chicago who recently inked a deal to buy out a seminary on campus and move them to that location.  From the University’s liaison:

“As we have discussed many times over the years (most recently in my letter of April 2008), the community use and enjoyment of the garden is temporary. We have long planned to develop this land for University
purposes.”

I know we aren’t entitled to the land and there are certainly people who have more of a right than us to be upset considering we haven’t even harvested our first crops yet, but it is kind of a bummer.

So, we were told there may be a survey at work sent to selected employees.  Therefore, I was not too surprised when the link arrived in my email box.  But the first sentence just cracked me up: This is not a phishing attempt.  Oh, well that makes me feel a little better!  Surely if it were someone trying to steal information from me to gain illegal access to my computer they wouldn’t be allowed to say “this is not a phishing attempt.”  And in bold and italics no less, so they REALLY REALLY mean it sincerely.  I guess all of the other stuff in the email must be true too, like how when I forward it to 10 people a little animation of Bill Gates will pop up and hand me a $10 bill through my monitor which I can send to Nigeria to recieve a million dollars.  I think that email set cyber security back 10 years.

Okay, I don’t really like to participate in these blog chain letter type things, but when one is forced on me by an evil person, I must obey.  I’m really hardly better than a trained monkey, folks.  I will not force others to do it though!

What were you doing five years ago?
Hmm, May ’03.  Not married yet, not even engaged.  Wow, didn’t even have the cat yet!  Hadn’t started grad school yet either.  What the heck was I doing??  Getting ready to move frm Norristown to KOP and playing a lot of guitar I guess.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?
1. Get Evie to take good naps – check
2. Get Evie to eat all of her food – check
3. Finish all of my hours for work – check
4. Go for a walk with Evie and water the garden – no check
5. Write a blog post – soon to be checked

What are five snacks you enjoy?
1. Potato chips
2. M&Ms
3. Cheese and crackers
4. Ice cream
5. Popcorn

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
1. Quit my job and start my own consulting company.
2. Become a land baron.
3. Send Evie to the Lab School.
4. Donate to Keith and the Girl.
5. Find some really good cause to donate to where the money could really make a tangible difference to somebody, like building roads in Africa (West Wing reference), rather than the “popular” causes that everybody donates to.

What are five of your bad habits?
1. Being moody and over sensitive.
2. Talking too much.
3. Compulsively cleaning my plate.
4. Actually, just being compulsive on finishing things in general (projects, etc.)
5. Licking my fingers after eating (courtesy of Sara)

What are five places where you have lived?
1. Janesville, WI
2. Fort Wayne, IN
3. West Lafayette, IN
4. Wayne, PA
5. Chicago, IL

What are five jobs you’ve had?
1. Paper boy
2. Sandwich artist
3. Food service captain
4. GUI team lead
5. Software Engineer

It’s a farmer’s market

/ Shane / 3 Comments

So today was the first day of the 61st and Dorchester Farmers’ Market, which we have been looking forward to for some time.  The weather was beautiful and there seemed to be a pretty good turnout.  I have to say, I was a little bit underwhelmed.  I realize in retrospect that my expectations were perhaps artificially high.  After all, as Sara pointed out, what vegetables would they even have to sell at this point in the summer?  Still, we got there at about 10:30 and as far as I could tell there was only one stand selling vegetables and they were already sold out.  The market is supposed to go to 2:00, so I guess they underestimated a little bit.

Don’t get me wrong, what they did have was nice.  There were flowers (but no fresh cut flowers, only to be potted), a lamb stand, a cheese stand, a homemade salsa stand (I didn’t try any because the proprietor was being interviewed by NPR and I didn’t want to get involved) and a nice bakery stand.  The bakery was more of a sweets kind of place and we weren’t able to get any bread, which was one of my main targets for today.  We did eat a delicious goat cheese and basil croissant though and there were many muffins and scones I intend to try in the future.

So I’m really not complaining, it was okay for what it was.  I’m just saying, we came with a bag intending to fill it and we went home with it empty.  This was the opening weekend, their first chance to make a big splash.  If I came today and left with nothing (and I didn’t live one block away) I don’t know if I would be inclined to come back again.

As it is, I was able to tend to the garden a little bit and get rid of some weeds.  I’ll be back to tend the garden regardless, so I will definitely be back to the farmer’s market.  Of course I will give it another chance (and a few more after that) and especially report back after the growing season really gets cranked up.  But for all this talk about Woodlawn being a “food desert“, I’m not sure this is what the doctor ordered, and I’m not sure any of the people I saw would have trouble making it to a “food oasis” as it were.

Down and Dirty

/ Shane / 1 Comment

We got our garden set up today.  We went over first thing in the morning and hoed and raked out all the weeds, turned over the dirt and hoed up the clumps, and mixed in a couple of wheel barrels full of dirt and compost.  It started to rain so we came home, but later we went back and planted carrots, beans and corn.  There is a plant sale next weekend for tomatoes and peppers and then we will plant some more beans and squash in a few weeks.  We already have green onions, cilantro and basil coming up in the pots on our porch, but no sign yet of the parsley.  Sara also planted some flowers on the porch.

Then later, my arms were too sore and tired to hold up a skewer for the kabobs we were trying to make for dinner!

Unfortunately, we realized too late that today happened to be World Naked Gardening Day (warning, there are extremely surprising and hilarious old naked hippies waiting for you on that site).  Oh well, maybe next year.  Or maybe not…I think gardening definitely falls under the category of “bad naked“

Milestones

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Today is Evie’s 9 month “birthday” which I think is a significant milestone because it means she has now been out as long as she was in!  Speaking of milestones, our realtor called yesteday to remind us it was the 1 year anniversary of our closing on our condo.  I can’t believe that was a year ago, but on the other hand, it seems like it was a lot longer than that!  So much has happened since then.

Tomorrow we are planning to get our garden into shape, assuming the weather holds.  It is covered with grass and weeds, so we need to rip all of that up and loosen up all the dirt, and then plant some seeds.  We will buy some of the other things that require plants (tomatoes, green peppers) later.

Here is a physics based puzzle type game.  You have to draw shapes and stuff that are then affected by physics to move a ball to a flag.  It can get complicated where you make fixed mounting points and then hinges, etc.  It was interesting for a while but I didn’t get very far before I gave up.  Physics is hard! 😦

Finally, I will leave you with this.  You know how with Snakes on a Plane you knew everything there was to know about the movie based on he title?  Well, there is a movie scheduled to be released this year named Zombie Strippers!  (the exclamation point is part of the title) What more could you possibly need to know?

Putting down roots in the community

/ Shane / Leave a comment

We got our garden plot today!  We had completely give up hope and bought a bunch of pots and stuff to garden on our back porch, and now it looks like we won’t need to after all.  Sara got an email this morning that said, “Be at the garden at 3” so it is a good thing she checked her work email!  And now we have a patch of land to call our own.  We are mostly planning on growing tomatoes, green peppers, green onions and beans, but we are also considering corn, cucumbers and carrots.  Any other ideas?  We already planted some herbs on our porch such as parsley, basil and cilantro.  I think it will be more convenient to have them close.  This is assuming of course that we can get anything to grow!  I am also excited to meet our “gardening neighbors” on each side who both have really nice and obviously well kept plots.

And the best part about it was that I found a $20 bill in an abandoned lot on the way back!  It was super dirty (obviously had been there for a long time) but this was a $20!  I’m lucky to find a nickle normally!  So, if you add that $20 to growing our own food, this garden is really making us self sufficient!

As far as Evie goes, she seems to be picking up new skills every day.  I mentioned her crawling and pulling up to stand already.  She figured out how to go up stairs, so we had to install a gate at the bottom of the stairs in addition to the one at the top.  When we are reading books she likes to turn the pages.  Also sometimes she randomly has to flip back and look at the cover as if to say, “What was this book again?  This is a good one, I’m going to remember it!”  For some reason she randomly started shaking her head no, but I don’t think she knows what that means.  I don’t know where she picked that one up, probably at day care.  I bet they are saying “no” a lot.  I’d say the most amazing thing is that she has learned to raise her arms up in the air when we say, “How big is Evie?  Soooo big!”  She really gets a kick out of that.  Oh yeah, also, just today, she learned to feed herself a puff.  For some reason she previously knew that if you held out a puff she should eat it, but when she had it she just played with it.  Then today she just sort of made the connection.

Now if only she would start eating and / or sleeping…