Gardening update. Moby Dick. A tiny update on the children. New bike.

Welp. Our tomato crop is blighted or something. Maybe they got too much rain, or the aphids did more damage than I thought. In any event, half of them are now composting. The others look like they’re hanging on for now, but we put together 3 new tomato plants in deck containers as a hedge (ha, ha) against a total in-the-ground loss. Of the two peppers, one looks pretty good. The other looks a little anemic. The yellow squash is already blooming and setting little 2″ baby squashes. The zukes have seriously bushed out, but no blooms as yet.

To our herb plantation, I added lavender and mint. The mint is in a container, that it might not take over the yard, which it will if given half a chance. The kids got used to having a patch of it near the deck of our old house, and I’d been looking for it off-and-on for a few weeks. Lowes finally had some, so I brought it home. We’re drying a few of these in the kitchen to see how that goes: thyme, rosemary and oregano. They smell pretty good at any rate.

The compost heap seems to be slowing down a litte, which is good. I think the brown and green ratio is getting a little more manageable. The whole thing has certainly shrunk down considerably, which is a good sign. It doesn’t reek (as much) either, which is another good sign.

Over last weekend, we stopped by a local nursery and went all moon-eyed over some of their stock. Rather than just plant stuff pell-mell thoughout the yard, we’ve asked one of their guys to come over and give us a little help with some planning. There are things that we’d love to have (gardenias, for one), and I’ve read some mixed reviews on them for our zone. Ditto for azaleas. Pachysandra, my favorite evergreen groundcover needs more shade than I think we can offer it,  E. wants a garden entirely of the color blue, and so on, and so on, in my best Yul Brynner voice: et CETera, et CETera, et CETera.

What I hope to get out of this little visit is: plant this, not that. That will die here. The fee is pretty modest, and it’s easily worth it so that we don’t torment any more hibiscus bushes.

I’ve put Moby Dick aside for a bit to re-read King Lear. Someone on a message board I frequent dropped a reference to Lear the other day and I was reminded of how much I’d forgotten about it.

The constant asides from Melville on the minutiae of the whaling industry were interesting at first, but OK, yeah, I get it, please get back to the action already. I really don’t want another detailed exploration of The Natural History Of  Cetaceans From Pliny To The Present Day.

Am I missing some sort of point? Probably. I’m about halfway through and loathe to shelf it after this long.We wound up our scouting year, our oldest girl swept her gymnastics meet, two of the children are still off on adventure and the the babies abide. Work continues apace.

I’m being fitted for a new road bike – a Specialized Allez -  tomorrow after work and can hardly wait. I took it on a test spin over the weekend and was gobstruck by it’s relative lightness compared to the hybrid. The change in posture will take some getting used to, as will the shifters. But tomorrow can’t come soon enough!

Friday

…and the end of another busy week. At some point I may cease to point that out; all my weeks are busy these days. I was all over town like fertilizer this week, which included a trip to Memphis to do some client support during their maintenance window which, sadly, was from midnight to 5 AM. I rolled back to the hotel, went back to the room and passed out for a few hours. Got up, hit the road in time to join a 10AM conference call, drive for a few more hours and join up with my account manager, change into a company shirt and visit yet another client. I begged off the trip to Birmingham this morning, joining by phone instead.

This is basically how all of my weeks go. Client visits, conference calls, livemeetings and web-xes, demos, evaluations and occasional schmoozing. I wake up and it’s Monday. I wake up again and it’s Friday. It’s not a bad deal at all. I also have a bunch of training lined up for late July and August. It might be a good idea to know something about the products for which I consult.

I picked up a couple of books for vacation reading: Desolation Island by Patrick O’Brian (book 5 of the Aubrey-Maturin novels) and Sharpe’s Tiger, the first book in the Richard Sharpe series, which came highly recommended by a customer. E is still reading Mansfield Park. Netflix brought us BSG and Meet the Fockers. I think V for Vendetta is up next.

Other things going on: we bought a big ol’ pool for the backyard from Wally World. It’s basically I giant bag with an inflatable collar. You fill the collar with air, the bag with water and you’re Ready To Swim in 30 Minutes! Well, not quite. It took about 12 hours to fill the thing up and that water was darn cold for a day or two. This thing even came with a pump/filter/skimmer system and we have to regularly treat the water lest it become sort of…you know…funky with microbes, algae and whatnot. Among other things, it’s given us a supreme bit of leverage over the children. Not finished helping clean up? Still not quite done with school? Well, if you want to go swimming later…This should last us until fall, with any luck. Still riding my bike in the mornings, if I can. I’ve gone up to a 20 mile loop, which I can knock out in just under 2 hours. If my schedule permits it, I try to do this first thing in the morning. If time is tight, I shave off a few miles or just use the stationary upstairs. Today would have been my day to do it, but I had some early morning calls and still felt like doo-doo from yesterday’s 24-hour work/driving session.

That’s about it, I think. Kids are just about done with school for this year, the grass is getting tall and it’s getting hotter every day ’round these parts. But the fireflies have come out, we’ve grilled a couple of times, and Bluebell spotted a hummingbird the other day near the butterfly bush. There’s still some homemade peach ice cream in the freezer and the frogs are out at night. A rabbit has taken up residence in the back yard and doesn’t seem to mind the children a bit. He (she?) galumphs around the yard generally ignoring them unless they get within 10 feet of him. In the hottest part of the day, he sometimes stretches out in the shade under the trampoline. He’s pretty cool, actually. Like a pet you don’t have to feed, or even name.

So summer seems to have  landed, and not a moment too soon if you ask me.

Books and Bikes

So we finished Journey to the Center of the Earth last night with a final two-chapter push. We will probably start Tom Sawyer next, with Howard Pyle’s The Story of the Champions of the Round Table on deck. The latest issue of First Things showed up, so Jane will have to wait for a few days.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading on radonneuring, which is a sort of non-competitive long-distance cycling race, done in road-rally style. Riders are issued cards and expected to check in at various points along the way, the goal being to finish the race before the allotted time has passed. You essentially compete against yourself and your last best time.

Some of these races are real long – up to 600K. I think that with another year of training, I could probably do a 100K race, and maybe even 200K. We’ll have to see. I’m not sure if my current ride is best suited to this sort of thing, so I’m already daydreaming ahead to my next bike, which will most certainly have to be more of a road-style than the hybrid I’m riding now. Naturally, I fully intend to keep the hybrid, since it’s very well suited for tooling around town, assuming one learns to avoid the small curbs and suchlike.

The heart of Autumn

As dyed in blood the streaming vines appear,
While long and low the wind about them grieves:
The heart of Autumn must have broken here,
And poured its treasure out upon the leaves.

“Woodbines in October,” by Charlotte Fiske Bates (via Bartleby)

Busy weekend.

Friday night: vegetarian pizzas with homemade dough. Good stuff. Followed it up with The Protector, which was OK but not great. Nice pacing and some nifty stunt work, though.

I put in 25 miles on Saturday morning, then came back to find a tray of hot sticky buns cooling in the kitchen. Oh well. They were delicious with coffee. Afterwards we drove out to a local festival dedicated to….country ham. It was interesting, and we bought some skin-on country bacon while listening to a yodeler yodel. The sun came out and it started to warm up, so we headed home and lounged around while waiting for dinner to finish. Dinner: Crock-pot ham with a Coke glaze, homemade anadama bread, mashed potatoes, and cucumber salad. The bread recipe came with our machine and included oats in addition to the cornmeal. It was delicious. Followed it with Emma, which wasn’t bad at all.

Sunday Mass was followed by a trek out to the local botanical gardens. Even late in the summer, they were glorious and I hope to have some pictures posted shortly. We came away with a list of items we’d like to see planted in our yard, though we’ll probably have to do without the statuary and reflecting pools. Pity.

Feast of St. Matthew. Backstory. Books and film.

As Jesus passed by,
he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.
He said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him.
While he was at table in his house,
many tax collectors and sinners came
and sat with Jesus and his disciples.
The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples,
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
He heard this and said,
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
Go and learn the meaning of the words,
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

Mt 9:9-13

Want to hear the funny backstory to my cycling accident? I wasn’t even on a work-out ride. Last week, the Make Weekend Project was the Foxhole Radio, a sort of improvised radio that works without batteries, similar to a crystal radio set. With a minimal parts list and no soldering required, I figured it was within my realm of expertise. You need to use an earphone with it, but it can’t be one of those little beige freebie ones that used to come with every radio ever sold. It has to be a piezoelectric earphone (of the high impedance variety). I don’t have anything like this rattling around the house so I consulted Google Maps, and found that a Radio Shack was located only about 4 miles away.

In a burst of eco-smugness, I decided to ride my bike to the store, pick up the earpiece and some insulated wire (for the coil) and return well within an hour. Except, of course, I never made it to the store.

The next night, Saturday, was a homeschool potluck picnic, and it wasn’t long before I was relating the story to one of the other dads. At the end of my tale, he asked where I had the accident, and where I was heading. When I told him, he shook his head.

“There hasn’t been a Radio Shack over there for some time. It’s a Dollar General now.”

Strike one.

A few days later, I stopped at a mall on the way home to check with their Radio Shack. They had the wire, but not the earpiece. I tried a second mall and ‘Shack. Same.

Strike two.

I went home and queried the RS website, figuring that even if the part wasn’t available in the store, it surely must be available via mail order. Nope. Not in their inventory at all.

Strike three. Sit down.

So not only did I not make it to the store, there was no store at all. And even if I had, they wouldn’t have had the part I sought. Lovely. Somewhere in all of this, there’s a lesson. It could be a meditation on the journey, rather than the destination, or perhaps God was telling me something about my presumed abilities. Or maybe the lesson is simply “call ahead for availability first.”

In any case, the project is here and I ordered some of the crystal earpieces from Tubes and More. When they get here, I’ll put this radio together. And just for spite, I’ll only use my bad arm to assemble it.

Books and whatnot: Jonathan Strange started to get a little dull, but is picking up some speed now. Touchstone also did a nice little review, presumably for the recent paperback release of the book. I’ve not finished it, but my verdict thus far is that it could have seriously benefited from some editing. 800+ pages is a fairly ambitious first novel. It’s good, but the pace sometimes starts to plod a little for my tastes. Also, no matter how hard one tries to write in a period style, the modern sensibilities of the author creep in and start to distract a little.  At the halfway point, however, I’d still give it 4/5 stars.

Ezmerelda just finished Alexander McCall Smith’s Tears of the Giraffe, which is the second novel in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. She liked it, and I’ll probably start it before too much longer. She started reading through a Wodehouse collection. I’m looking forward to that one, too.

For movies this weekend, we have The Prestige and Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Beware the one-armed man…

Blogging may be light for a little while as I’ve lost the use of one arm and hand. I had my first cycling accident yesterday and am now intimate with new terms such as “road rash”. I may (or may not) have fractured something in one arm, so the bump-n-scrape place splinted and slung me just in case, then told me to follow up with an orthopedist in a week. It was my own fault for riding too close alongside a raised lip of concrete which caught the front tire and sent me sprawling along the sidewalk.

Thanks to a helmet (which I now must replace), I walked away from it largely uninjured.

I bolded that for emphasis. Show it to everyone you know. I hit my head hard enough to bruise my temple from the inside of the helmet. I would have otherwise have been in seriously bad shape.

I feel fine otherwise, though this may be due in no small part to the hydrocodone and naproxin.

Anyway, the real shame is that I was going to do another 25 mile ride today and the weather is magnificent. Oh well. Poop happens.

Perhaps I can press Ezmerelda into service as an amaneusis.

Saturday Ride

…posted on Monday, because I was too tired/forgot until now: 25 miles in 1:36. The original plan was for 20 miles, but I took a wrong turn and ended up having to backtrack a little. Overcast, not much wind. Terrain was pretty forgiving, and the scenery was delightful as usual.

Break like the wind

Today’s ride: 16 miles, 59 minutes. YEAH!

Monday recap

Friday: homemade macaroni and cheese, followed by Drunken Master. Reactions to the movie: meh. The macaroni and cheese was great.

Saturday: a trip to Costco, that we might spend our refund-check-thingie and stock up on all the things we won’t be buying after our membership expires. I went to the bike shop and begged for deliverance from constant punctures. There is none to be had, so I bought some new tubes and ogled/caressed a $12,000, limited-edition all-composite bicycle that belongs to the store owner. The advice I got on punctures was to ride closer to the line (and not so near the middle of the shoulder). This seems a little counterintuitive – with a nice, wide shoulder you’d sort of want to be as far from the whizzing traffic as possible. Ah, but that’s where all the gravel, glass, nails and staples end up. I was further advised to keep my tires at their maximum pressure and we looked through a catalog of puncture-resistant products that might fit my wheels. We’ll see. For Sunday’s ride, I stayed closer to the line and the road surface did feel quite a bit cleaner. Our movie for this evening was Stranger Than Fiction, which we both thoroughly enjoyed.

Sunday: Mass, then lazing around and reading, followed by take out dinner from Jacque Dans La Boîte.

Pancho and Bluebell are tearing through the Harry Potter books – he’s halfway through number 1 and she’s running roughshod over 3. I’m nearly done with Gormenghast and am liking it very much.

Finally, here’s something to clip-and-save: a calendar of produce – what’s in season by month.

Gormenghast, sourdough, and smoothie recipes

So I’m shelving Shakespeare for now. The Two Gentlemen of Verona just isn’t grabbing me at the moment, and my blitzkrieg detour through HP7 has me in the mood for more fantasy. I’ve resume reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. I read Titus Groan last year some time, and found it to be one of those books that was somehow unsettling on completion, but which nevertheless sort of remained in the back of my mind for some time afterwards. Peake has a marvelous way with imagery, to say nothing of his character names (which owe much to his devotion to Dickens). What’s not to like about a book featuring one Irma Prunesquallor? Excerpt:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

More, including a dramatis personae, here.

Lurking on metafilter recently, I saw someone recommending Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which has intrigued me since I first saw it in the bookstore. Maybe after Peake.

Yesterday, Ezmerelda and all the little hobbits went a-visiting another homeschooling family in the area and came back with stories about the acreage, horses and – mirabile dictu – a batch of sourdough starter. My previous attempt at sourdough was not so successful, even though it’s supposed to be largely idiot-proof. Make of that what you will. We fed the starter and it’s now in our fridge, hopefully growing into a yeasty monster.

Recent rains seem to have brought the frogs back – I heard them as I was driving home from the grocery store late last night. I’ve also seen some, er, rather flat ones in the road near the house, so I’ve been keeping my eyes open when driving around in the dark.

I’ve cut back on riding a wee bit, more out of time considerations than anything else – I go in the mornings at sunrise, and have been running around after getting home to get ready for work. Route is holding steady at just under 16 miles (I’d recently upped it to 18). Still seeing critters: a dozen or more deer the other day, including two large bucks with impressive racks. Flock of turkeys: 3 adults and 13 little ones, and the usual collection of buntings, goldfinches, bluebirds and kingbirds.  Also huge clouds of gnats. Bleah.

Here’s my breakfast smoothie recipe, for no real good reason.

• 1 – 1 1/2 cup of fruit (we’ve been buying mixed frozen berries at the store)
• 1 cup of vanilla yogurt
• 1 banana
• 1 package of Carnation Instant Breakfast
• Milk for consistency/texture

Pulverize and drink. We use a Sunbeam hand-mixer which works quite well. Since Ezmerelda is still nursing, she has to watch her dairy intake – her smoothies substitute orange juice for milk. I’ve been pricing soy protein mixes and some of the other nutritional supplements at the store. The instant breakfast mix always seems to come out cheapest, and it’s tasty, though it probably has more sugar than is necessary. There are also some interesting suggestions here, a few of which I’ll probably try.

Not the tuna one, though. Oofah.