greens in the salad.
greens in the stirfry.
new plants in the rockery.
fresh homegrrown tomatoes.
new neighbors, even.
Green Hell
The garden has finally, and definitively, tooken.
We have been eating fresh greens every day for about three weeks, which is great.
The first head appeared in the broccoli overnight. I have six plants in the box, two big ones and two tiny ones indoors. I imagine I’ll rotate these to the outdoors as we harvest.
Tomato cuttings all propagated successfully. Next week I will be shifting all the tomatoes outdoors and see if I need to buy more plants this year or not. I didn’t do any pruning on the two I kept from last year until it was clearly too late to be of much good, and the really hardy one, a beefsteak plant, now has some sort of mildew. The cherry plant is fighting the yards and yards of stem it has to push juice through and seems unlikely to last much longer.
Potatoes all sprouted, onions are fine, and the carrot seedlings are mostly OK, save for some residual critter-diggins issues. That crittur, as yet unidentified, is the proximate cause of this post.
I laid in some corn, waaay too early, and it was unclear to me that the seedlings would survive the snow and such we went through in April. As it happened, the seedlings mostly did fine with the snow, but the continued low temperatures more or less arrested all growth and beginning about three weeks ago, they began to die back. That was fine with me, I just shifted the runty sprouts about until I had consolidated some new planting room and added potatoes.
About a week after I noticed the critter diggins in the carrots, I noticed that the animal had started digging in next to each corn seedling as well. At first, I just packed the soil in, thinking that since the seed had sprouted there was no decent food for tiny fellas.
In the last week, I have come home to see two or three of these tender stalks literally nipped at the base of the plant. The combination of digging and nibbled stalks makes me think it’s either rats or squirrels. I haven’t seen a rat around the house for a couple years, but I see several small, generally cheerful, squirrels every day.
I’m still cogitating, but based on this weeks loss rate, I will not have any mature plants from this run at corn. I gather I can replant now and still get a crop, which is fine, but I’ll need to resolve the problem. I suppose I wouldn’t be as irritated if the crittur was actually eating the stalk, but nooo! It’s nip and nibble and off to the next stalk!
Straight to
On my way in to work this morning, I flipped away from NPR when they started repeating stories and scanned the dial until something caught my ear. A snippet from “Straight to Hell,” by the Clash, was looped behind another singer, and the sampling song immediately interested me for a variety of reasons. It turned out to be Paper Planes, a controversial song by MIA, which was released in February 2008.
The song refers to other Clash songs as well, notably in the children’s chorus heard occasionally in the tune (a nod to the Clash covering itself on Sandinista with the kids’ version of Career Opportunities). The song became more and more complex to hear when I realized that the key rythym points in the chorus were sampled and processed gunshots, with the sound of a pinging shell ejection acting as a hi hat. The tune hooked me solid and I turned it up as loud as I could.
The morning DJ at KEXP, “John-in-the-Morning,” is a respected indie programmer who knows his stuff and how to put a set together, and while his musical programming only occasionally works to hold my attention, when he chooses to appeal to my demographic, he excels. In this instance, he knocked it out of the park by providing a seamless, beatmatched transition directly from the end of Paper Planes straight into Straight to Hell, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. I actually exclaimed out loud, “No way!”
Singing in English in quotations as drove my car to the drummer man’s beat, I savored the thematic interplay of the songs. I joined in that chorus of the Amerasian blues. Two songs later Kanye came on and bored me to catatonia. As I drifted off to sleep in the freeway merge lane a passing semi awakened me, and I turned the radio off.
NOT GONE
I’m still here! My internet time has been going into things such as co-founding the Carmichael/Moenkhaus Society for the Appropriation of Hoosier Folklore.
Gone
A friend of a friend – of many, many friends, actually – died overnight, it seems. The departed is not Seattle local and to my knowledge, I never met him. But lots of people I love chose to love him too, and so I’m unhappy. Reflective, maybe. Moody.
WFHB is having the locals show – Frankie, Phil and Al played. Jim hosted. Now they are playing a song by someone I’ve never heard (Tinyfolk, it seems) called “Oh, I miss my Indiana” which appears to contain a Dale Lawrence lyrical reference and which appealed to my current melancholy.
Bunny!
RSS multiblog
ATTN LEAGUE:
My RSS project is approaching fruition. How’s this sound?
Y! Pipes RSS aggregation -> Leagueblog.
CRAZY INTERNET GRAPHIC.
Kentucky Frog Waller
1 teaspoon molasses
1 tablespoon hot water
2 oz Kentucky bourbon
Ice
4 oz club soda
a pinch of ground clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg
Stir molasses and hot water together to make an ad hoc simple syrup.
Add bourbon, swirl.
Hold up to light, and experience anxiety at the brown color, turbidity, and lack of transparency. If lucky, note slight greenish tinge.
Add ice.
Fill glass with club soda, and add pinches of spice.
Drink!
—
Inspired by an upper-south molasses cookie that I recall as a ‘lilypad’ and which I associate with a childhood visit to Mount Vernon. Which, I know, is in Virginia.
We ended up not being able to go to a friend’s Derby party, which bums me out a little, having donned the white linen and all. One hopes this might well make up for it.
It strikes me that this can also be made most profitably with rum. Note that the spices and liquors involved were all readily available staples of the day over 200 years ago. As you drink it, you may experience symptoms of time travel.
A whirl
AFP: Blast of tornados kills seven in US
Ah, geez, on the drive home ATC cited “twenty-five,” up from the above nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nineteen whirlwinds cited by AP. Every year, the same nightmares.
RSSism
On a hunt for some RSS trickery. The objective is to capture RSS data in such a way as to calso create archives of the data. It’s a hard Googleslog, as the functionality I’m after is in demand by SEO types and consequently there are a raft of “FOR ONLY $50 I WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO BUILD A NO_LABOR TRAFFIC MAGNET WEB SITE ON THE INTARWEB” baloney.
Here’s what I have come up with, for personal reference.
Magpie RSS seems to be the default tool used for any and all server-side RSS post processing activities.
Lilina is a server-side news aggregator. It’s pretty configurable but relies on an aging-out scheme to dispose of older news items. I haven’t found a way to actually write out persistent archives, but the default collection and presentation is based on time, so this might work.
SimplePie, like MagpieRSS, seems to be a popular RSS munger. However, there is a dearth of projects leveraging it. There is a comprehensive how-to in the now-closed support forum on snipping off a cold HTML archive.
The very closest I have gotten, however, is the maybe-too-simple RSSMinisite, which does exactly what I want, but which has some design flaws. It outputs each RSS item to a flat text file in a data archive, which is great, but the filenames are drawn from the ‘title’ element of the item directly, with no error checking. This leads to file overwrites. Restructuring the file-write to incorporate date-time stamps plus a partial title element would solve that problem, and adding a date-based subdirectory creation routine would solve any concerns about overpopulated directories, at least in the short term.
The true short term goal I’m after, though, is just a non-item-count limited RSS update list. For that, I think Lilina meets my needs sufficiently.
(UPDATE: Fixed Lilina link.)