Give and Give and Give

In the past couple of days I've picked almost 5 gallons of tomatoes from our plants. It had apparently been too long since the last time I picked some because there were a bunch of tomatoes that had split and fallen off the vines to become one with the ground. It's impressive to me how much food you can get from just a single plant!

I'm making more sauce to can. And this time I'm going to make some Tikka Masala that doesnt' have dairy or garlic so my honeypot can eat some too.

I really like that photo up there. It looks so country with the wood floor and bowl.

Letting it Slip

My dad always used to respond to my comments about time passing faster and faster with this: "You wait until you're my age."

Several weeks ago I reconnected with an old high school friend using facebook. Yeah, I used to steer away from those social networking type of websites, but I'm starting to understand their appeal. Anyway, next thing I know, several weeks have passed and I still haven't responded.

This weekend my honey and I went to Tahoe with some friends and stayed with my mother-in-law in her new house. It's got a great view and even better decks. I like that house. The boys went mountain biking and I stayed home and read with the yummy mountain air. Pix here. I might actually get to ski on a semi-regular basis now that we can combine visiting her with skiing.

In other news, I finally bottled my experimental Ginger Beer. I was quite rushed though because I was getting picked up for the previously mentioned trip to Tahoe.

The plant starts that I started a couple weeks ago are doing great! I'm so excited to get my garden going for the next round of food.

I bought a violin a couple days ago too. My honey recently purchased a guitar and has been playing it tons. He plays in a band called Macaroni and the Cheese and wants me to join the band too. So I went out and got one. We'll see how it goes.

This past weekend we had breakfast at this new place. It's only a couple blocks from our house and it's another new breakfast spot! I love this! Our neighborhood is changing so much. It's getting better and better. If only we could afford to live there one one income..

Soldering

I'm so lucky to have my honey to fix my electronics. He's soldering the sound out of my laptop right now. It's a very exciting moment.

I'm also excited about all the plants I'm starting right now. Some fava beans, spinach, asian greens, and some others. I'm working towards growing more edibles around here. I think there's something to eating food grown nearby.

Warning, the following is horribly not PC, but it's really freakin funny. Massively entertaining. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Busy Day

Today was an active day. Here's what I did.
-had breakfast with my honey
-clear out the walkway of overgrown plants
-swept the sidewalk on both sides of our house
-replaced my office desk with a table and got everything set up again
-made chocolate chip cookies
-cooked dinner
I also canned some red sauce last night, and canned some tikka masala as well.

My honey put our new toilet in the upstairs bathroom, played his guitar, and other things too.

House bound

My honeypot put the toilet into our new bathroom. It's pretty exciting. He also cleaned a ton. This is also pretty exciting.

I just finished reading the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I really like reading the book but it wasn't nearly as great as the other sci fi I've been reading lately. The next one for me is "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny.

Our tomatoes have grown so much. I really didn't think they would grow like this. We've eaten a bunch and it looks like we're going to get a bunch more.

I recently built a new computer for myself. I've been spending lots of time trying to get everything moved over. It's a long process. My new computer is so fast. I can't believe how slow my old one was. It's better that I didn't know. I wasted most of yesterday fighting with apache php5 and mysql. At the end of last night, I had gotten it all to play nice.

Flowers

Here's a picture of one of my favorite flowers in our garden right now. Check out those great reds and yellows.

Tomato Plants Planted

We've had this section of yard that's been laying fallow as I've been getting rid of all the residual vine in that section. We could have planted it a while ago, but I just haven't made the time.

A couple weeks ago Sarah's neighbor gave me 5 tomato starts that she's not going to use. And today I went to the farmer's market and picked up two more tomato starts, albeit different kinds.

Having those tomato starts sitting there all unhappy in their tiny little plastic containers motivated me to get them in the ground. So I dug out these holes and added good soil and these plants. I hope they do okay. I've never really grown tomatoes in clay soil before.

In this picture the tomato plants are on the bottom right side. You can see how crazy our non-food garden is doing too. All this, and we're not even watering this year due to the drought.

Kitty in a Cage

What do you think of this kitty's access to the outdoors? It's pretty strange, isn't it?

This cage seems a little wrong to me. I guess it's safe. And it was on the second floor, so they won't be interacting with any other animals through the bars. Okay, I changed my mind. It's not so bad. It's way better than not letting your cat out at all. That's just wrong. Would you be happy if you never got to see the outdoors again but could smell it on the shoes of your owners? Me neither.

My honeypot and I went on this fantastic long walk. He brought his camera along and took a bunch of interesting pictures. I saw this and requested a photograph.

We've been thinking through home improvements over this fantastic break, and we've come up with quite a few. My favorite so far is fixing the slope of the back room (formerly a porch) and putting a balcony on top of it (on the second floor). That would be nice because it would give us a great outside space where we could see amazing sunsets with some privacy.

Also, does anybody know about bamboo? The blue variety specifically. I think I'm going to fill up all the big pots I have with blue bamboo and make a live bamboo wall around our side yard. It'll make our small outside space nicer to no see the neighbor's house. What do you think about this idea?

Another Day in Paradise

This past week or so has been basic hell at my work. And I don't mean due to unreasonable work loads, unreasonable management, or unreasonable expectations. No, this past week was unlucky engineering hell. So many things went wrong that you'd think we were cursed or something. Maybe we collectively have enough disbelief in god that we were put through the wrath of hell as punishment. I'm not really sure. But as my boss said "things are really falling apart." That might be an understatement.

Collectively, in the past week the following things occurred.

We lost 2 development servers, including our source control, bug management software, wiki and other resources running from these machines. Of course we had backups and we were able to reassembly our development lives on another machine. But that took many, many hours and we weren't complete recovered several days later when, BAM!, it happened again. The second time it happened was the last day we had to work before a very large deadline.

To those of you less technical, this situation is the equivalent of being a good driver and blowing out three tires on the same wheel, each occurring about 20 minutes after the previous one had been replaced. It's bad and unlucky. It's probably statistically worst than unlucky. It's down right weird.

We had another situation that I won't get into here, that essentially caused all of our account permissions to be changed in such a drastic way that I couldn't get on the servers I needed to be on to do my work. This caused a large waste of time for all of our developers as we waited and worked towards resolution.

We had a huge deadline late last night and I got up especially early (before 7am) to get to work early so I could possibly not work all night long. I was there for 12 hours before I could do any work because of the second development server that was lost, which I already mentioned above. 12 freakin hours!! Then finally, about dinner time, we were back in business for work. It sucked. The worst thing about it was knowing this huge deadline was so near, and not being able to work towards it. I worked until about 2AM until I was so tired that I wasn't programming well anymore.

Then, lucky me (but not my other co-workers) I was so tired that I slept in this morning and showed up to work about noon. This being just mere minutes before the internet at our office was repaired, because it had been down all morning. So, most people in our office couldn't work. Did I mention that our phone system is also on the internet? There were no phones either. It was a rough day for the whole office.

And! The cream on the cake was that while we had no internet in our office, Google maps changed their API which resulted in the maps on our live website to break. But, we didn't have any internet so it was near impossible to fix. It was fixed by breaking every programming rule in the book. We edited live code on live web servers. Scary. Did I mention how scary that is yet? Well, sometimes you got to do what you got to do.

There are a couple more happenings that belong in this pile of unbelievable bad luck, but the mundane details aren't really worth your time. All you need to know is that I might be cursed so pary to god before you see me next.

In other news, the yard that we're working on clearing out the vines from is doing well. In no time at all we'll be able to build some food gardening beds and start growing our own food. I'm looking forward to that. Also, this past weekend punkinpie and I got together and prototyped custom homemade blinds for our living room windows. I did the sewing and he did the wood working and it came out really cool. Did I mention that their top down bottom up ones?

Nesting, Feng Shui, Coziness and Vacation

This past long weekend has been a much needed holiday. I did a whole lot of nothing and more of things that I wanted to do to make my life more enjoyable. The most notable to me was moving our stereo out of this low to the ground piece of furniture that couldn't quite hold all of our music. The result of this former placement was that it was difficult to find cds to play and also just hard to interact with the stereo because I had to crouch down. It was preventing me from playing music; like what I'm listening to right now. I suppose a good way to sum it up is this: Our stereo setup had bad feng shui, and now it doesn't anymore! I think it's pretty likely that I'll be dancing again to my 'oldies' once again. (Oldies to those kids born in the 90's. Do you realize that the first class that was born in the 90's will be entering cal in the fall?)

Another thing I did was cover our couches with this nice material I bought at my absolute favorite fabric store. This includes the other states I've lived in. That has helped make our living room a great place .. to live.

In other news, our roommate is moving out and we've decided to not replace him (for now). It's a pretty big chunk of money to be losing, but I think I'm ready to just have our own house and not have that third party anymore. He was a good enough roommate, but I didn't really enjoy living with him. I think our astrological charts just didn't match so well. I'm looking forward to and glad to have our house to ourselves. He'll be out by the 1st.

Our garden is going crazy right now. There's tons of flowers and colors. It's pretty nice. I had planned on taking a bunch of pictures and doing a picture blog type of thing, but I never got around to those pictures.

The last thing to mention is that I wrote a journal entry tonight. I used to journal all the time, but haven't really been doing that as much in the past several years. Well, I sat down and did it again. There's something about having to slow down my thoughts enough to write complete sentences and then maintain that thought for more content in the next sentence. It made me realize how rarely I write now. Everything I do is typing, like right now. I do have to say that writing is almost therapeutic.

Good night, Ya'll!