Oh, my stars and garters!

Salad every day

I am going to grow lettuce every winter until I am dead. It's the only vegetable I have consistently had good luck with.

The winter bed filled out impressively after the long, slow rains we had in late fall and then pretty much exploded this week after a huge storm dumped five inches of rain at our house and spun up an F1 tornado a mile and a half from here.*

Even in dry years when I have to water by hand, we get more than enough for salads. Since our hard freezes rarely last more than a day or two, if that, I just throw some plastic sheets and a big comforter over the whole mess and it sails right through. We'll eat off this until it gets really warm, when it'll get bitter and go to seed.

Half the beets are ready too, but I think I can leave them in the ground until I want to use them.

*It was an incredible storm with nonstop intense lightning, rain, and thunder that went on for hours, almost all night. Eric said the only time he was really concerned was when the wind whipped the plants on the porch every which way just before it started raining up, but it sorted itself out after a few seconds. Luckily no one was hurt, so I'll remember it fondly as one of the longest and most interesting storms I have ever seen.

Dorks in New York!

 

 

 

 

 

Dog fog

I was out walking the dog this evening when a gust of what I thought smelled like shitty weed blew over the sidewalk. Then came another, and then it was unmistakable. Only when we entered a big cloud of it did I see the guy sitting at the bus stop, brazenly exhaling a huge puff of smoke.

Willa did her usual bounce-and-wiggle greeting, and then she kinda went nuts, or at least more nuts than usual.

"Yeah, I think she smells it," the guy said, and I rolled my eyes, because who on the entire block couldn't? Willa really started pouring it on then, wagging, lunging, and whining while twirling around on the end of her leash.

"Yeah! I think she likes it," the guy said, and I started laughing because holy shit, dog, calm down. She really did seem to like it, unless she's just one of those dogs who gets super excited when she sees stoners at bus stops. 

"Hey, you want me to get her high?" the guy said as I dragged her away.

"No, thanks," I said over my shoulder.

"Ok. Bye."

"Bye."

Everyone did say getting a dog would make it easier to meet people.

Oh, My Stars and Garters! presents: Winter beauty tips, timing edition

Pristine machine

I got a new (refurbished, but close enough) laptop today. I had been ignoring the decline of my old one for months. Then one night last week I realized I was working, or trying to, on a machine with a dead battery, a power cord that only connected when it was draped just so over the left side of the screen, broken right shift, right arrow, and enter keys, a cursor that about once a week jumped randomly around the page, the inability to run iTunes, and a tendency to just hang there and think and think and think before it had an epiphany and did everything all at once so 20 windows opened, pop pop pop, and what the hell was I doing in the first place, and is there really a purpose to this life?

I spent most of tonight loading software, setting preferences, and playing around in Windows 7, which I'm happy to finally use. For one thing, I now have the ability to write in longhand with my penpad. I was even going to write a whole post that way, but while it read and predicted a lot of my scrawl admirably, it also kept barfing up words like "bed" for "yeah" and "sargasso" for I don't even know what.

Then, if you can believe it, it wouldn't let me write "fuck"; it was all "buck," "tuck," "luck," and I was all "NO I SAID FUCK!" and it was like "NOT SAD FORT;".

After about five minutes and lots of block printing, I finally got it to say "fuck." So it wasn't that the program refused to do it. It was as though it had wanted to think better of me.

I was going to post it because it was hilarious, but I unknowingly had the cursor in the URL field all that time, and that apparently is not an error you can recover from. All my laborious cussing disappeared forever. Luckily, I did grab a screenshot early in the process so you can see I am not making this up.

So Windows 7 is really nice! Although I was sad to see they made MS Paint fancier. Not fancy, but fancier.

Somehow that seems wrong to me, to have more brush choices in Paint, but what can you do in these modern times but hang on for the ride and try to keep up, right?

If you think you can do better, be my guest.

McKinney Falls State Park is inside Austin city limits and offers hiking, swimming, camping, fishing, and mountain biking. It features an interpretive nature trail and has a number of old buildings and some ruins. To get there take US 183 just south of the airport, then take McKinney Falls Parkway a few miles to the entrance. Christ.

It's been nice, but...

It just goes on so damn long, you know?

Last piece of cake? Anyone?

Oh, my.

Chalk full of cheer

This is my first attempt at chalkboard animation (you can see where I bumped the tripod toward the end; oh, well). It didn't take as long as I thought, so I also recorded a soundtrack with the trusty old nose flute and threw that on to, uh, brighten things up. (I'd maybe turn the volume down a touch before watching; it's a little grating horrible rough.)

That was fun. I want to do that again.

A very pointy Christmas

I'd wanted to do some outdoor holiday decorating this year, but when it came time this weekend to get out there and do it, I found I didn't really want to spend the time or the money.

Besides, while I have a critical eye and perfectionistic tendencies, I am also inept and lazy. This is a horrible combination, one that tends to make what should be a simple weekend project a multi-day march through hell on earth.

Yeah, screw that. I went to Target, dropped $25 on tinsel, balls, and solar-powered lights, spent 10 minutes winding it around my mailbox cactus bed, and said oh, hooray, we have outdoor decorations.

The idea isn't especially original--I've seen variations of this all over town--but I think it turned out super cute.