This morning I pulled out the Costco bottles of vitamins from the bathroom cabinet to refill my travel sized pill container as I'd run out of vitamins at work (I take them at lunch, with food). The rattling of the fish oil gelcaps in the container to try to break them up brought the big orange cat running. He shoved his way into the bathroom and did his best to let me know he was going to die without a vitamin at that exact moment.

In fact, this cats desire for fish oil was so great that he sat in front of that cabinet for 10 minutes straight, willing it to open with his mind. He would come out after enticement, but then headed right back in to continue his vigil. All this from the cat that's distracted from food by a fist held at head level for him to rub on.

This cat occasionally gets the vitamins, but lately he's been using them more as toys than food. He'll play with them, batting the little caplets all around floor and chewing at them until they finally burst and he eats the whole thing up. But recent attemps have halted when the gelcap got too gummy to be a good toy and he's been abandoning the little nearly-invisible things all around the house. This wouldn't be so bad if they weren't inevitably getting stepped on and leaving stinky fish oil patches everywhere.

But this morning, I decided that his dedication to the vigil meant he might actually eat the whole thing. In fact, it was really the only way to get him out of the bathroom. He did the batting thing for long enough that I gave up watching and made the morning coffee. When I was done, I found him licking his chops like he does after eating. I'm hoping this means that he ate the thing instead of leaving an invisible present for me to find while barefoot.

I've been reading Uncluterrer, 43Folders and Lifehacker for a while even though most of their posts just don't apply. I manage to pick up tidbits from each of these sources that are useful that actually work out and I do a little dance of joy for each one.

Lately I've been on a sustainable/simple life kick that's been augmented by my desire to reduce our footprint on this world. Disposable cleansing products are so much simpler to deal with and both I and my husband hate doing chores and cleaning. But I was able to grab a tip one of those sites that mentioned getting only dishwasher-safe items for the kitchen and run with it. I found some glass rectangular containers at Costco and we're replaced all our plastic stuff with those.

So far, this has seriously reduced our chore time. The dishwasher runs more often, but the kitchen stays cleaner and I'm less frustrated with dirty counters. The dishwasher is more efficient than us at cleaning stuff too, so it's been a huge boon. It's cut down on my housegnome requirements greatly.

It's very hard to work on a computer with dilated pupils.

We had very mixed success with the leafy greens this year. I think part of that was not knowing the light of the new garden plot very well and part of it was the spectacular fail of watering on my part. But for the greens that actually came up, it was an interesting lot.

The arugula came up spectacularly. All 20 row feet produced plants and they are still alive even now. We managed to harvest it in a way that meant the same plants kept producing new leaves all summer long. Giant arugula salads were regular, as was sauteed arugula. We’ll definitely keep this much next year, and may even expand it a little bit.

We managed to get a few plants of the Swiss and Rainbow chard to come up. Not many, maybe half a dozen or so, but quite enough to keep us in greens all summer. With the way they produce and our culling techniques, 20 row feet next year would be overkill, assuming the watering gets sorted. We’ll also definitely need more recipes for eating it as sauteed chard gets old after a while.

The New Zealand spinach was a complete dud. It was supposed to be a variety of plant that would give us spinach without bolting in the late summer, but our summers are hardly long enough for it to grow at all. Of the 2 plants, we took no leaves for food. The plants themselves looked like weeds to start and ended looking just like deadly nightshade. I pulled them with rubber gloves, and they went into the trash. I don’t need any nightshade in my compost, thanks.

And last, the herbs. We ended up with 2 basil plants, sprouting in September. There were about 5 leaves between them. It was definitely a watering problem, but the location will be good for next year. Full sun seems to be good for productivity.

I can’t wait to start pulling lists of things for next year. There’s so much extra room in the garden it’s not even funny.

Originally published at my blog. You can comment here or there.

I need a project manager for my life. There's so much stuff to do and balancing the money, time and people is making me crazy. Maybe I just need a simpler way to get this stuff into my brain or a list that's actually useful. Anyone have suggestions?

I made the mistake yesterday of reading The Nations Recession Stories. There was all of one story in there that made me sympathetic to the writers plight. I can't tell if this makes me a cold-hearted corporate drone, or just someone that's lived more than 25 years.

Seriously, there's just no way that I'm going to feel sorry for someone who didn't get a job in the field that they studied. No one I know has a job anything related to their degree. If there's one thing I learned in college, it's that a degree is just an indicator of a willingness to learn and work, nothing more.

My recession story? It takes place in 1998. And then again in 2001. And now. For the first 2, I was unemployed. Now I'm lucky enough to have a job, in large part because I sucked it up during the last 2 and went where the work was. Marketable skills are good to have, and the boom times are the times to take advantage of the training offered by employers.

I understand where these young people were coming from. They honestly thought that things would be easy when they got out of college. I get that, I was in the same boat. What makes me crazy is that they're not willing to bend, to be flexible enough to get through this and then move on when things get better. I guess they just don't teach survival skills in school.

Stephen Fry is fairly eloquent on why the Catholic Church is not a force for good. He also makes the distinction between the Church and the people in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvDz9_5me74&feature=player_embedded

It's officially the time of year when I start counting down to the solstice. The rain is getting repetitive (every day for 2 weeks makes it ooooold) and it's dark when I leave AND get back home. I can't wait for the days to start getting longer again. I'm being patient, I swear. But the countdown does actually help me remember that there's an end in sight.

Of course, the cats agree with me - they want to go out and it's not allowed in the dark. So the early morning poking/wakeup call still happens, but there's no outside time with it and as a result we're all crabby by the end of the work day. The worst part of this whole mess is that it makes it that much harder to get up and do the fun things. I swear I would turn into a recluse if I didn't have tons of interesting things happening around town all the time.

When looking for beans to plant this year, I was late to the party and had no idea what I wanted. Honestly, I think this led to a large portion of the mistakes this year, but learning from success unusual, so I’m counting this as a teaching year. Sounds better that way.

My main criteria when looking for plants was that they not require any extra hardware. We didn’t have the budget for it, and bush plants were easy enough to come by. Little did I know that there was a good reason for that. I grabbed the Venture beans because they were a bush type that should work well in our climate and the Xupars because they looked interesting. Yes, that was science and planning.

Both sets came up pretty strong and produced beans all summer from a single planting. They also kept producing well into October, which was great as our CSA box stopped giving us beans about August. We love those little guys steamed and in stir fries, we’re huge fans of the young crisp bean.

Late September was when I figured out that we won’t be planting the Ventures again. While they’re prolific and great young, it’s a shelling bean. If they go too long, they’re hard and flavorless when used in our preferred methods of cooking. They really need to just be left alone at that point until you’re ready to shell and dry them. And while my husband loves cooking chili, there’s no way I could stand shelling that many beans. One of us would die if that ever happened.

So next year, I’ll be looking for another bush bean, something that stays small and tender like the Xupars did. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

Oh, and if you want to try a Xupar, go to a good Chinese food restaurant and order the beans in black bean sauce. And save me some.

Originally published at my blog. You can comment here or there.

Building out this garden has had a very interested set of unintended consequences. Fortunately, they’ve almost all been good. But I would have never guessed at their diversity or breadth.

The first big one was fencing the yard. While an big expense, we planned for it and managed to get everything done in one long weekend by someone else. I cannot stress enough how much the someone else part of it was integral to getting this done. The compost structure we put in place 2 summers ago is still in progress because we ran out of steam after getting the 8 holes dug and the posts placed. Living on the side of a mountain means that the number and size of rocks in the dirt is prohibitive to post holing successfully.

This newly fenced area has also had a huge impact on the cats. They’re more fit since they’re going outside and they have larger running spaces. Of course, this means with these two that I must also be running, but racing a cat is hilarious so I indulge them (it also makes my husband laugh). This extra space has also reduced the amount that they fight over turf, with more interesting things to do, and the need to clean their cat boxes. Of course, the latter means we find odd deposits out in the yard, but that’s a small price to pay.

It’s even giving us someplace to put the ladybugs that plague the house and have them do something useful instead of just little the light fixtures with their corpses. I get to throw them out into the garden or drop them on the seedlings in the house. It’s fun carrying them around as long as they don’t freak out and leave something behind.

And oh, the canning and preserving. But that’s a post all its own, the complexity there and the brain cycles behind it are really something.

Originally published at my blog. You can comment here or there.

The biggest lesson this year was around tomatos. I did so many things wrong, it’s almost impossible to count them. Nearly every step along the way, I made a mistake. Most were recoverable, but it meant that we ended up with a crop of about a dozen tomatos from 16 plants. This is a miserable failure, but still cheaper than buying them at the store.

For next year, I will be trying the following:

1. Use grow lights for the seedlings. The sun here in the early months of spring just doesn’t cut it.
2. Harden the tomatoes in the unattached garage. I skipped this step, or shortened it too much. The plants were frost-burned in their first week, but recovered.
3. Buy cages. Even the bush tomatoes need cages. They fell all over the ground, leaving the fruit in easy reach of the slugs.
4. Water with an automated system. The ad-hoc watering I did meant that the fruit cracked. Not pretty, but still edible.
5. Be around for the end of the season. This year, we went on vacation. But then, I expected the fruit to ripen before we were scheduled to go. I was only a month off. Ha!
6. Force the fruit to ripen. If I do this one plant at a time, I should be able to handle the amount of fruit. Then again, it takes 3 pounds of fruit to start a sauce, so all at once would be fine. Better than expecting the fruit to ripen on its own.
7. Be prepared for green tomatoes with recipes. Try some recipes out before the last minute so they can be ready to go.

I must remember to consult this list in the spring so that I get it right next year. Fresh tomatoes are too spectacular to let them go to waste.

Originally published at my blog. You can comment here or there.

So the Albuterol helped with my breathing fail, but it wasn't a good long term solution. Needing an inhaler every 4 hours gets old really quick, even if I did finally get the technique down and am now a champ and breathing in little particles of goop.

So I called the doctor back and now I'm on antibiotics. I have no idea what this illness is or how I got it, but I'm thankful that these are working. Oh, and that I don't have the flu that's sweeping the office. This is the worst illness year I've ever seen, especially given all the precautions people are taking to avoid swine flu. It's just silly when they put hand sanitizer in the conference rooms.

I'm hoping that the antibiotics kick this out and I don't have to go back to the doc next week. This is really eating into my slacking time.

Autumn is in full swing here – the winds have picked up and its pouring down cold rain every day. That means that I’m starting to work on putting the garden to bed for the winter. It’s easy to pull the dead plants, but harder to gauge how long some of the others will last. And of course I didn’t think about this when plotting the space, so putting down the straw will be a haphazard affair. At least it will keep the weeds down over the winter and be mulch in the spring.

The good news is that we’re still getting food from the garden. The chard is producing and the broccoli and leeks that I planted as seedlings haven’t died yet. They may not survive much longer, depending on how cool it gets and how quickly it does so, but there’s hope yet. Not much, but some.

At some point, I hope to get out a summary of each plant we tried this year. Some, such as the zucchini, were amazing and easy. Others, like the herbs, failed for water. And still others totally bombed out. Can I just say that New Zealand spinach looks like nightshade? We ate none of that, or at least, I think that’s what was growing.

I’m already dreaming of seeds and sprouts for next year. We’ll definitely get the water situation sorted before it comes time to plant. I’ll even have a better system for starting seedlings, if I have my way.

Originally published at my blog. You can comment here or there.

On the way home from vacation, I caught a cold. The timing was bad (meetings + massive email + trying not to sneeze is no fun), but other than that it was no big deal. A couple of days of rest, lots of fluids and it went away without requiring any cold medicine at all.

But it left behind a friend.

It's now 3 weeks later and I still have bronchitis. I finally went to the doctor yesterday because I was tired of the spontaneous coughing for no good reason. He confirmed that I don't have swine flu ( I never felt bad enough to worry about that) and that my bronchitis was in fact a problem. Three prescriptions in hand, I left his office.

The first thing we're trying in cough syrup with codeine (I'm not taking this. Codeine hates me,) and an inhaler to stop the bronchial spasms. This is where the fail comes in. The doctor also gave me an inhaler to calm the muscle spasms. I cannot use this thing. I've never used an inhaler before, so I have terrible technique. But the worst part is that my throat closes up when I spray the mist. I have never been able to use any throat spray, and this is no exception.

I can now tell you that Albuterol tastes like Ben Gay smells. Also, the ability to breathe normally isn't something I appreciate day-to-day, but the utter fail of the last couple of weeks has put it high on my treasured list.

Took lots of pictures. I rode a horse that wanted to trot or bite me, wore my formal outfit, snorkelled without dying and caught a cold a day after we got back. It was spectacular. Now we're planning the next one. It's so nice to take a vacation where you only unpack once and eat as much as you want. Don't get me wrong, I loved Bequia too, but the sampler vacation is fun.

...yet. I've been on vacation and then came back to something like 1500 emails and a ton of exploding work. I'm trying to hire someone to cover the holes I'm not filling and overflowing with ideas for posts. First on the list though is captioning the dang pictures so that I can tell you all about them. Cruises are awesome.*

* I could do without the tendency to catch a cold on the way home though.

We’ve been picking peas and beans off the same plants in small quantities, just enough for a meal, all summer. We’ve had arugula and some chard pop up and been completely disappointed by the New Zealand spinach. It looks way too much like the nightshade we grow to risk harvesting any.

The joy of the garden this month has been zucchini. The small ones are great grilled, sauteed, roasted or any other form you can think of. Sometimes you can end up with too much of a good thing though.

I missed harvest on 2 zucchini by two days. At that point they were way to big to eat, so I just let them go until I had a weekend and the ingredients to make zucchini bread. By the time I harvested those 2 squash, they were 13″ and a whopping 19″ long.

So last Sunday I spent all day baking bread. I went through 15 pounds of sugar and 10 pounds of flour. I used nearly 3 pounds of walnuts and almost all of the appliances I’ve accumulated since I moved out on my own. If I hadn’t had a giant mixer or electric food processor, someone would have died. As it was, I had to hand shred all the zucchini (after discarding seeds) because my food processor is a pansy and doesn’t grate or slice.

But I made it. 12 hours and twenty two loaves later, I was done. And now the freezer is full of summer goodies that we’ll continue to enjoy all winter long.

Originally published at my blog. You can comment here or there.

I made jam over the weekend. Peach jam, with peaches my parents grow. This was my first ever attempt at hot water bath canning, but after the class last weekend, I wasn't really that worried about it. It seems with a few small precautions and a known good recipe, its actually pretty hard to screw it up.

I turned out 5 separate batches, which took all freaking day. Seriously, all day. Some of that was unnecessary down time - I waited an hour during my first batch for a wide mouthed funnel to be delivered (I forgot mine at home) and there was some fussing around while I figured out timing and such. But by the 5th batch, I had it down. The most frustrating part was that the batches were relatively small at 8 half pint jars per batch. They were forced into that by the amount of pectin required and a limitation on the canner of how many jars it could handle. If I'd had a bigger stove that would hold 2 canners at a time, it would have taken far less time. So a 6 burner stove is now on the wish list for the new, improved kitchen (whenever that becomes a reality).

Overall, though, I'd definitely do this again. Maybe do some stretching firs ,as hauling that canner + water + jars + jam was freaking heavy, but it was awesome. And I have 40 jars of jam that I know exactly what the ingredients are and where they came from. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they taste fantastic also.

There’s a good reason that I haven’t updated on the fish tank in a while. There hasn’t been much progress to speak of, only setbacks. We got the lighting attached to a temporary hood so that the plants wouldn’t die from lack of light. I works perfectly and my AHSupply lighting puts out a ton of light. I wasn’t quite sure hat bulbs to get, so I ended up with a mix of 6700 and 10Ks. From a color perspective, I think the 10Ks are too blue and won’t be getting them again. 6700s are designed to be more along the lines of natural lighting and the color spectrum definitely shows that.

But after this minor victory, the tank went sideways on me. It started a minor algae bloom which turned into a major bloom with hair algae. That stuff is nasty and nearly impossible to get rid of. The best advice I could find was to starve it out by feeding the plants (which require more complex nutrients than algae) and turning off the light. Also, pull it out manually.

Well, the whole point of a giant tank is that I don’t have to do this manual labor stuff. The bigger they are, the better they tolerate adverse conditions. So I started looking for little critters and other conditions that would help. I found a place that said that ghost shrimp eat hair algae, which turns out to be true. The best part is that some of them are even smart enough to avoid the goldfish and have been munching on algae like crazy and helping keep the tank clean. The other thing I found was chemistry.

Turns out that I live an an area with super-soft water. As in it’s a miracle that plants grow here because the water is so soft. It doesn’t have enough mineral content to properly buffer the tank and keep the pH or the carbon content in line. I found some suggestions for getting the pH under control, but the low hardness and buffering capacity was going to continue to cause this hair algae explosion. So I added some baking soda and poof, problem goes away. There are little strings of algae in there now, but nothing like the jungle before.

Following other aquarists advise, I bought some cuttlebone for a long term solution. That’s supposed to help with the hardness and buffering issues. I’m aslo planning to buy a CO2 system at some point, but those suckers are expesive.

Originally published at my blog. You can comment here or there.

If you do (or if you like your mail being delivered 6 days a week instead of 5), read about the PO's attempts to close up to 66% of their offices.