librarygrrrl.net

We have babies! Nine little tomato seedlings are poking their heads out of the dirt in our mini-greenhouse in the kitchen. I anticipate 3 more in the next day, and then we’ll repeat the process with the ones we planted later in about 10 days.

Not sure how long it takes for our peppers to germinate, but we’re waiting anxiously on those too.

I haven’t taken photos yet. I should probably do that this afternoon.

(Lack of recent updating due to being nailed with a nasty, N-A-S-T-Y bug almost all of last week. Thanks, god-daughters, for passing your stomach flu on to me and Amy.)

Librarygrrrl and I decided we needed to mulch this year. We also needed some loam to finish off our garden plot we created. Thursday, before the expected wet Friday weather, I had a WHOLE BUNCH of mulch and loam delivered. Two cubic yards of loam and 6 cubic yards of black mulch from Landscape Depot in Framingham, MA.

Although my back has been angry at me, and I knew my PT would be angry with me, I started to shovel…and shovel…and shovel! I moved about 1/3 of the loam into the garden area and moved on to the mulch pile. I had a method to my madness. I first shoveled all the mulch or loam that had not landed on my carefully laid tarps. And then I worked the pile in such a way that when the rains came, we could cover the remaining piles. After 5+ hours of shoveling, over half of the mulch was also laid around the house. I wish I took pictures of the initial delivery. Many neighbors stopped to comment on the size of the thing! One, who has worked in delivery of such material, was confident that it was quite a large 6 cubic yards. Needless to say, my math was either way off or he was right. The mulch more than adequately covered the areas I had measured, and we still had almost half of the mulch left.

When librarygrrrl called me to pick her up from work at (surprise, surprise) the library, I literally collapsed in a pile trying to pick up a shovel. Oops, guess my back was angry at me.

Friday, the missus took the day off from work while I substitute taught. Much to my surprise, when I came home - the MULCH WAS GONE! She had finished off the pile AND folded the tarp - and for those of you who have had to fold those huge tarps, that’s no small task. The yard looks smashing and I’m sure the little picture-taker will snap some photos soon.

In the meantime, the main point of my message is to wish little sleeping beauty a wonderful, glorious and truly HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

As I’m sure you can garner from reading this blog, I mostly play hockey in my non-work time. But in case you’re wondering, sometimes I do other things too.

Before I get to those other things, hockey. A bunch of us got a call last Monday saying, “Hey! There’s a tournament in town this weekend and we need another team. Want to play?” So of course we did. We ended up playing with different people in all 4 games. We won our first game, lost the two middle games, and in a hard battle, ended up losing the consolation game. That said, we achieved our three goals for the tournament: we had fun, we played hard, and no one got (seriously) hurt.

And now, the other things I sometimes do.

Two weeks ago I went to Amy’s soccer game and took about 400 photos (of which only 3 or 4 were really good, but about 40 were somewhat non-crappy.)

That’s Amy diving for the ball there. Lucky goalies get to touch the ball with their hands. If I could hang out in the net and touch the soccer ball with my hands I’d consider playing. As it is, all that running around and only using feet to control the ball? Not my thing.

We also garden and play in the yard a fair amount. Today after work, for example, we tore out half of the bamboo-like plant that we just realized was killing our incredibly gorgeous, super-old lilac. (Is it bad to admit that I didn’t know we had a lilac on our property? Probably, since we’ve lived here for 2 years now. I just assumed it was our neighbors’.)

We also got seeds for our garden from Seed Savers.

Top row: Bloody Butcher tomatoes, Moonglow tomatoes, Tarahumara White sunflowers
Middle row: Dragon carrots, tango lettuce, Wenk’s Yellow Hots peppers
Bottom row: Red Swan beans, Amish snap peas

The perennials are in full bloom!

And of course, I’m eternally amused and entertained by Maggie and Otter.

And lest I forget, I want to say hello to Chanda, who made Steph call me so I’d update this blog.  Thanks a ton - you inspired me to pull photos off my camera and get them onto Flickr, which is the main reason why I haven’t written lately.