The Renfair approacheth, just in time for a sanity check.

What the...it's JUNE already??!! Where did the spring go?

Oh, right. I've been busy gardening, weeding, planting and other dirty yard work. And getting medieval on the gopher colony in my yard. How does one get medieval on a gopher? I'm glad you asked.

Their mounds, as they appear, are opened and flooded with my trusty +3 (to gopher slaying) garden hose. I wish I could use boiling oil, but that stuff's not cheap. I've poured out buckets of the foul-smelling pepper powder barrier, to no avail. The traps (as much as they look like medieval torture devices) have failed to trap even one gopher. Lately, I've been wandering around the backyard at night like a village idiot, trampling their tunnels and stomping the earth to drive them out. There must be an entire underground city under my house, and they just keep sending up reinforcements...or maybe they're zombie gophers and just can't be killed...

Thankfully, a close friend called yesterday and broke me from my reverie.

Her: "Want to go to the Renaissance Fair? Opening weekend? It's two for one..."
Me: "RenFair already? What month is it?"
Her: "June."
Me: "Wow, somehow I'm still in May."
Her: "Do you have fresh dirt under your fingernails?"
Me: "What? Uh....yeah...why?"
Her: "You need an intervention, you know."
Me: " WHAT?"
Her: "Remember your other life? The one with the costumes? The fencing? How long has it been since you've even BEEN to the Renfair?"
Me: "Uhh, three or four years?"
Her: "And you call yourself an anachronist? Pah."
Me: "Touché."
Her: "We're going in costume. You ARE wearing one. And I'll drive. You have no excuse."
Me: "But-"
Her: "Your garden will be FINE without you for a whole eight hours."

Today I can write about this and laugh. Yesterday I was stressed at how much I think I still have to do outside with more planting, building trellises, cages, and supports, setting up row covers and of course keeping the zombie gophers at bay, and then I realized I really REALLY need this excursion as a sanity check. I never knew I could catch obsessive compulsive disorder from gardening.

Star Wars - Organic Food Parody

The first Star Wars movie came out OVER 30 YEARS AGO which means that the futuristicness of it should be current technology any time now...I mean, we've already got little robots that will clean up after us (hello Roomba) but where are the personal spaceships? Real light sabers? Wookies?

Real technology inspired by the films has been slow coming, but there have been numerous parodies, with the first being Hardware Wars. That little gem was one of the reasons I fell in love with the parody genre. As a child I learned that yes, you can make fun of something, and not only not get in trouble, but people laugh and want more. If I ever saw a perfect career path, that was it...

So, 30 years later, it takes a pretty funny Star Wars parody to get my jaded attention. Being a gardener and all, and having made the switch away from most processed foods in the last couple of years, I love the message behind this one:




ChewBroccoli. Heh.

May the Farm be with you!!!!

My zucchinis let me show you them!

So, my old digital camera, being plagued with a recurring memory stick error up until a couple of hours ago, would not relinquish its bounty of images to me. This device needs replacing very badly, as the percussive maintenance I have discovered that fixes the problem briefly will likely only work for so long.

Here, contained in this slideshow, is what I expect to be the swansong of my trusty Sony Cybershot F707; the saga of my garden. These images start around the end of April and end July 6th. For a few moments today, it seemed to work perfectly - I wasn't going to waste the opportunity that the camera Gods have granted me!

If you click on the little 'speech bubble' in the lower left of the slide viewer, you can read my comments.

Towards more earthy pursuits

Where have I been these long weeks? Not writing much, that's for sure. The DIY bug bit me hard after our *homebrew project.

This project is much larger than brewing, though. Aleksy and I have moved dirt, tilled soil, built frames, and gotten very dirty in the process of transforming our previously weedy, junky backyard into a series of raised beds for vegetable gardening. I've also changed from having a black thumb to something near miraculous: these plants are all thriving.

The transformation is not unlike the one this house went through when we moved in a year ago. Here is proof that I'm not just wasting time on World of Warcraft:


















(*If you were wondering about the Imperial Stout, it seems to have gotten contaminated with something early on that spoiled the whole thing. Sadness. I think we'll go back to the first kit anyway, that Nut Brown Ale was good!)