Busy Bees

Here's a nice shot my lavender. I'm pretty sure it is Provence Lavender. The bees and butterflies love it.



You can also see some of my newer plants: in the middle right is Purple Pygmy Agastache, to the far right is Lilac Frost Spiderwort, and in the back is my monster Black-Eyed Susan.

Using remodel boxes: 101

The tabs go outside the wall, dummy. This is even more annoying because I've used remodel electrical boxes many times before. I just wasn't paying attention.



On the other side of the hole there, you can see my sandstone basement walls. Let me tell you how much fun it is to stud them out for drywall. Not very.

Blast from the Past: Front Flower Beds

Here is what the front looked like in 2002, shortly after I moved in:



Here is what it looks like today (most of this work was actually done in 2003):



I ripped out the evergreen (which was not a dwarf variety and was growing into and killing the shrubs) and replaced it with a weeping cherry tree. Ripped out the rusty stakes and wire mesh that the PO had used as a fence and put in a basic surround of landscape blocks. These still need to be capped. You can see in the current picture that I'm working on a small bamboo fence, though this has kinda' been put on hold. I ripped out the lilac and replace it with, um, a lilac. In my defense, the old one was pretty ugly. It had been pruned into a misshapen wreck and didn't really bloom much anymore. The jungle looking area along the side of the house is a combination of Forsythia and Black-Eyed Susan. The yellow along the front is Coreopsis. Some other things that I have growing:

(Spring) Grape Hyacinth, Dwarf Iris, Hyacinth, Crocus, Daffodils, Tulips, some kind of white daffodil looking thing that I planted and then didn't save the tag for, Forget-Me-Not
(Summer) Gladiolus, Lavender, Spiderwort, Phlox, Day Lilly, Stargazer Lilly
(Fall) Ribbon Grass

One of the best looking flower right now is the Stargazer Lilly:



I've got a good bit of worked planned for this fall and next spring. The Coreopsis needs to be moved, because it ended up being too tall for a front row plant. Day Lillies (which are currently hidden behind one of the shrubs) need to get moved out to the front so they get more sun. Spiderwort needs to be moved or thrown away (I didn't actually plant the stuff, it just appeared there). And I still have a small section of flower bed in the alley that needs to be completely re-done.

Bad things happen to good people

Today, "Diane" was telling me that she and her husband just bought a boat. "Marv" is going to christen it this weekend by taking out three of his friends. Between the four of them, one is getting married, one is getting divorced, one is buying a house and one is turning 33. I suggested that she send a chaperon, because it sounded like some kind suicide pact to me.

Hopefully, the boat will come through it okay. I'd like to try water skiing again. This time, I am most certainly going to stand up straight and lean back, so that I don't end up with a sore back for two fucking months.

Happy Father's Day

I've had an itch to do some landscaping lately, but don't really have any appropriate projects here to work on. So, I ended up getting my dad some trees for Father''s Day. Here you see "The Orchard": three apple trees and three peach trees.



Down along the pond is a RedBud that my mom picked out. I have some vague plans to help them build some kind of sitting area along the pond; the RedBud is the start to that.

The Garden II

The garden is kicking butt. Much progress has been made in only three weeks. I've already got a few cucumbers, one of which should be ready very soon. Some cherry tomatoes should also be ready soon. And the ''Fourth of July'' just set a few tomatoes. Nothing set on the earliest flowers, which is annoying. The peppers got off to a rocky start, due to the birds, but are making a good effort.



I've also got some cherries which I think are about ready to harvest. I would have had more, but the tree really needed pruning and, unfortunately, the branches that needed pruned had most of the cherries on them. Next year I should have more cherries than any one person can eat, though.

Poorly designed rating system

I found the following at Target the other day:



First, it hardly seems necessary to rate something for "indoor use". Everything from prom dresses to tractors are rated for "indoor use", as long as you are talking about the right kind of indoors. Even things like jumbo jets and ICBM missiles are used indoors, if only temporarily. Off the top of my head, I can thing of very few examples of things that you would never conceivably use indoors. Things like the space shuttle or an ocean liner. Or a fucking rain gauge.

I'm a horrible uncle

Just so my mom isn't the only one with an embarrassing story on here...

While up at my parents' house last week, I used the bathroom in a particularly heinous way and, apparently, forgot to flush. A few minutes later, my sister comes running out screaming, "Oh my god, who pooped in the bathroom and didn't flush? I'm traumatized!"

I confessed, which for some reason made it even more horrifying to her. Just then, Faith walked in the front door. Now, kids are good for two things, as far as I can tell: being really cute and taking the blame for stuff they didn't do. So, I immediately tried to shift the blame.

"Faith, did you go potty in the toilet and forget to flush?"
"No."
"Faith, I think you are telling a fib. Did you forget to flush?"

At this point, she looks up at her mom with a really contrite look on her face, and says in her most pathetic voice, "I'm really sorry, mommy. I didn't mean to."

And then I felt like a big jerk. Err, but not so big of a jerk that I didn't continue blaming her for it.

When "Kids say the darndest things!" attacks... repeatedly

I met my parents after work to go Father's Day shopping, and they brought Faith along. While I'm looking through the gardening section, my mom takes Faith inside to use the restroom. As they are walking back across the parking lot, Faith screams over to me, "Uncle Bobb! Gramma farted!"
"Shhhh!"
"Well, you did."
"It's not nice to talk about it."
"Well, you are the one who did it."

Thankfully, there weren't many people around, and most of them either didn't hear or did a pretty good job of pretending not to hear. One woman got a pretty good chuckle out of it, though.

On Provigil, and the perils of leaving home without it

Oh, it sucks. I was exhausted all day.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to express my impressions of Provigil. Which, by the way, is pronounce "pro vig' il" (as in, it promotes vigilance) and not "pro' vi gil" as I initially guessed. In a word, it's pretty damn good.

When I finally decided to go the "sleep doctor" I was sleeping anywhere from 8-10 hours per day, on average. That was a normal night's sleep and one or two naps during the week, sleep in on weekends. Even getting that much sleep, I was still generally very tired. And if I had to go a few nights with only getting 6 hours of sleep, forget about it. I would basically just shut down. My MSLT* score was about 10 minutes, which is apparently the cutoff for someone that might require treatment.

After starting the Provigil, I''m feeling significantly better. Sleeping a much more reasonable 7-8 hours per night, rarely feel the need for a nap. Still sleeping in on weekends, but really, who doesn''t? The effects of the drug are sort of weird, basically somewhere between not being tired and being somewhat tired but easily able to ignore it and still concentrate.

* Multiple Sleep Latency Test -- Basically a measure of how quickly you fall asleep when taking a nap during the day.

The best what?

A few weeks ago, the kids and I had a sleepover at my parents' house. I was setting up the tent and Faith was "helping". The tent is a normal looking dome tent, with flexible poles that hold it in shape. Unlike a normal tent though, where the poles are directly attached to the tent and the weather sheet is draped over top, with my tent the poles are actually attached to the weather sheet and the tent structure is suspended inside with several little hooks.

I had gotten the weather sheet setup and was attempting to get the tent snapped inside. This normally a pretty easy process, but the unstaked corners kept moving around and unhooking. Finally, I asked Faith to hold the one corner hook to keep it from slipping out, while I did the other side. It slipped out anyway and she starting trying to put it back in. I started to go over to do it, but she wouldn't let me.

"No," she said. "I''m going to do it myself. Because I'm the best hooker ever."

The Garden

This year I planted:

(Front Row) Sweet Banana Pepper (x3)
(2nd Row) ''Giant Marconi'' Sweet Pepper (x2), ''The Big Early'' Red Bell Pepper
(3rd Row) ''Sweet Slice'' Cucumber (x2)
(4th Row) ''Early Girl'' Tomato, ''Better Boy'' Tomato
(Back Row) ''Tami-G Hybrid'' Grape Tomato, ''Fourth of July'' Tomato, ''Roma'' Tomato

Here it is shortly after I planted it:



The damn birds attacked it with a vengeance (hence the cages). The Sweet Banana Peppers bore the brunt of it. The one in the front left was literally just a stem with one leaf before I realized what was happening and put up the cages.

Math, not so good at it...

Who Loves Bo Bice?

Apparently, Dave and Jenny do.

Ladybugs to the rescue!

I noticed that some of the leaves on the cherry tree were starting to curl and die. The obvious culprit, aphids (at least as far as I can tell):



I thought that I was going to have to spray them, so I started doing some research on what would be most effective and whether there were any alternatives to pesticides. It turns out that ladybugs (and ladybug larvae) are voracious predators of aphids. I remembered seeing some other bugs on the leaves, so I went back out and took another picture:



Score, ladybug larva! Literally within days, the aphids were gone. Ladybugs are one of the best bugs you can have in your garden. They don't eat plants, but attack all kinds of other insects that do eat plants. If you don't seem to have any around your garden, you might want to consider buying a shipment of larvae and releasing them.