Being an eejit, it came as no surprise – or at least didn’t piss me off – to learn that I had misremembered the specs on SFG-style raised beds. Not four feet by four feet by 16 to 18 inches, but four by four by SIX TO EIGHT inches.

God dammit. Not 22 cubic feet of soil, eleven. Not four eight-foot 8’x8″x.5″, two. Et fucking cetera.

Oh well. Apparently a double-capacity bed is good for stuff you expect to need more than six inches of depth, carrots, corn mebbe, who knows what else.

As I write this hundreds – possibly thousands – of crows are chattering and squawking over space in our trees. I believe I will step out into the rain to hear the chorus. Atonal it may be, and crows such a successful urban creature that I will grow to hate them in time, but at the moment I do not. I root for them each time I see them climb the skies en masse, pursuing an hallucinated or real raptor or opportunistic gull.

The first bed is filled. I shot for a 1/3 each peat, compost, vermiculite deal, per Mel. I ended up with 4 ft vermiculite, 4.4 ft peat (which was a bitch to declod, it was hard and dense like rocks – therefore the peat might be more than 4.4 ft), and SEVEN feet of compost. The mix is still not black enough for my tastes, so I might add some more gook.

I was projecting 22 ft to fill the 4 x 4 x 1.5 bed, and that still seems right – 16 + 8 = 22, but what I have in it now was sold as 15.4 feet. So color me confused.

Oh, the bill for today’s dirt, NOT free like air, was $94. At this rate it will indeed be cheaper to just buy thedamn veggies at the store, and a sight faster besides.

I should note that I while I am committed to this process, I am HATING it. It’s much more physically pleasant in Seattle’s cool climate to perform the tasks associated with this process – measuring and cutting and digging and shit like that – than it was in the climate I was raised in.

My parents encouraged me to help them with their gardening and so forth, and I HATED every second of it. My awareness of that antipathy led me to avoid buying a house for years after I realized it was in my – and Viv’s – financial interest. Three years on, I have certainly confirmed that my antipatthy to homeownership is not reflective of adolescent rage or of Midwestern summer swelter – I still hate it the associated labor just as much as I did as a kid, and I certainly do not subscribe to the ‘safe as houses’ superstition.

I regularly awaken in fearful anxiety dreams associated with our mortgage. In essence, I genuinely do not believe that owning this house is in my economic, financial, or emotional interest.

Yet my rational analysis of my goals is at odds with this.

Returning to gardening, I have found – YES! – something else to hate. When I am engaged in heavy physical labor, I tend to be extremely goal focused, and become incredibly rageful at the least little goal diversion, such as rain, clay-dense peat, a cramped workspace, or other such quotidian challenges.

I don’t enjoy spending time with myself in this state, and there’s little doubt in my mind that my lifelong avoidance of, you know, sports, housework, and exercise is due to the painful self-loathing that these helpless, vicious rages generate. I’m told, of course, that the rest of humanity does not experience that murderous anger whenever their adrenals spin up, but do not believe a word of it.

You do not want to spend time with me, nor I you.

4×4 Kitchen Garden potential plans.

First bed built, not filled.

Back of the excel spreadsheet calculations forecast more-or-less $125 per bed construction costs. So far, before soil, I’m at $64. I estimated 24 cubic feet of soil for a 4x4x1.5 fill (4×4=16+(4×2=8)), at $3/cuft, $72+64 = 138. Looks like right now I’m coming in high.

Also, these prices seem TOTALLY OUTRAGEOUS.

After a week of struggle, correctly identifying crufted permissions applied in layers dating back to around 2000, when I first installed OS X on the home server, I concluded that a drive wipe and clean reinstall was the only way to sort things out.

This has proved partly true, in that permissions have been the cause of my pain and suffering, and partly untrue, in that the frustrations I have been experiencing with them can now be definitively attributed to the Mac OS X default user structure.

I am quite close to a resolution, however. I have been able to connect to my crufty MySQL databases via PHP. Perl is still complaining, but does appear to be trying to talk to the databases.

With luck, tomorrow, I can extract the data needed and start shifting miscellaneous stuff over to the hosted environment.

Oh happy day! My long-term home-based webserver appears to have sufferred a monumental drive failure and thus my weekend plans must be deferred in the service of data-recovery and transfer.

Joy!

Far too much to do today.

Dropped a pair of cat-pee carpets off for cleaning, an exercise in the defeat of yankee economics and a clear demonstration that end times are at hand for the US: it would have been cheaper to actually just buy new rugs.

I went forward with the cleaning as one of the rugs had sentimental value to me, having dumpstered it some decade past.

Clearly, I don’t understand, and may actively hate, my native culture’s system of economics.

Lately, having a forethoughtless moment hereabouts, I realized I was without any species of vermouth. The situation threatened to crimp my daily martini intake, which is the ethnically-prescribed one on arriving home from work.

Happily, I have found that a decent midrange sake does the job, and frankly, even improves upon the original.

1 oz sake
2 oz gin

Shake over cubes until you fear frostbite in your extremities. Decant over one, preferably Goya, pimento-stuffed green olive.

Telepixie appears to provide a free call reminder and scheduling service. I can call up to three numbers (you must verify them). Dunno if it’s ad supported or whatever.

dadgum DSL provider is currently providing a whole lotta NOTHING. Bastards.

Mix that into my flooding the kitchen and melting a pet-food lid in the dishwasher in order to provide the house with a pleasantly toxic burnt plastic smell and you have a lovely Sunday afternoon.

You know what would be cool?

It would be cool if there was some direct, intuitive way to share links with nearby laptop users. This need crops up all the time. Here’s a lil user narrative for all my UI homies out there in internet land, yo.

I’m at work, and someone mentions that Amy Winehouse is looking terrible lately, and I Google up a cellie vid of the shantoozie cooking up some rock (what a pity, tut tut) and agree yeah, man she looks terrible but then my friend mocks her shoes or whatever and I’m all there’s no shoes in this pic what are you lookin at and he’s all like there are too it’s over here on this site not that one fool and he IMs it to me or emails it or shouts the URL across the room including the gory dot com slash zero eight four three underscore alphanumeric stone age gibberish so incomprehensibly tolerated in this the twenty-first century of our lord.

Pity, really.

So here’s what I would like: the sending user highlights the URL in the address bar of the browser (or any other defined object in the OS, really, such as a file or whatnart). Then the sending user swipes their mouse in my general direction and releases the file, as if they were throwing it at me!

Up pops a message, center screen, alerting me that a nearby user has attempted to send me something (like an IM alert, probably, but with the option to make it force-forgrounded). I can accept or ignore (or even turn off the alerts) and if I accept the object does what it’s supposed to – a URL opens a new browser window, a file opens in the native app, a viral payload executes and sends all my passwords to the great file cabinet in the sky before wiping the boot drive. Everybody wins!

Sending digital items in this fashion would be called ‘tossing off.’ Soon, everyone will be tossing off in the bright and shining future of digital-gesture computer interaction!