AP photographer Dunham knows how to frame a shot:
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Worm Composter, Being the Doom-Filled Tale of a Birthday Present
So I got it in my head I wanted a worm composter, which is like a worm hotel into which you put your kitchen scraps and the hungry, industrious worms use them to produce compost (i.e. usable worm poop). Since I had a birthday approaching, I asked for a worm composter.
And Dave made this beauty for me...
The nifty, vented lid, designed to provide air without light...
The moveable trays with screening big enough for worms to migrate from a composted level to another level with new food scraps...
To prepare the first tray, I moistened my shredder paper and some craft paper...
We added some soil, which the worms use as grit to help them digest food scraps...
Then said food scraps...
Then we ordered the worms. They arrived just as the first tray had aged two weeks, as was recommended. We added roughly two pounds of lovely, wriggly worms and their shipping dirt to the first tray. We set the composter in a darkish, coolish area of our garage and wished the worms well.
Then summer arrived.
Did I mention the composter environment isn't supposed to get warmer than 80 F? And that when summer arrives in San Antonio, it does so with long days topping 90 degrees?
A short scene:
Interior, garage. Shan looks at floor around worm composter.
Shan (puzzled): Look.
Dave: What the--?
Shan: WORMS!
I'll spare you photos of the hundreds of curly, desiccated worms caught, much like the doomed of Pompeii, in the moments when their attempted escape turned to agonizing death.
We found a few survivors and deposited them in a pile of garden soil we're slowing using. But what to do with the composter? It was too pretty to toss out.
So Dave had the brilliant idea to use it to grow potatoes. As the plant grows, you're supposed to heap soil or mulch around the stem, giving the plant plenty of space to produce tubers. Using the composter, we would remove the screening from the upper trays and set them on, one by one, as the plant needs more soil. So we set up a plant to test it...
And Dave made two awesome tumbling composters and bolted them to our garage. See the bar through the center that they spin on? That makes for some fun, let me tell ya...
Garden Risotto
Quick pic - a tasty risotto Dave made using snap peas and green beans from our garden, and kale from the farmers' market . . .
Saturday, April 23, 2011
*psst* Ladybug...check out the peas...
Here's Uncle Silly in our garden...
Peas!...
Hi, teeny broccoli...
What do you think is in here?...
Teeny cauliflower, of course...
This Juliet tomato is shy...
This Mexican lime is not shy...
Some funny corkscrew grass...
Colorful new planters...
See the two stems at the bottom? This is a lemon tree and lime tree grafted together!...
Strawberry jam that Nanny Shanny made today...
Mmmmmmm, jammmmmm...
And here's a picture for Nana, because it reminds me of about 37,000 pictures of HER Nana, only with flowers. This is a black Krim tomato. Cool heirloom variety...
What do you want to grow this year?
Friday, April 22, 2011
Wake Up, Get Up
There's this shelf at my library that I haunt.
I stop in at least once a week. After I check the holds area for any books waiting for me, I make a beeline to this shelf -- the 640s of the Dewey system.
I've been obsessed with this particular Dewey decade since January and have kept my arm of the couch shoulder-deep in related books since then: farming, homesteading, householding, skill-hoarding, nesting. You may have noticed the new daily pie page called nest. Yeah, this is what that's about. I'm crazy about homemaking right now. There are several factors feeding into it (to be shared soon) (no, I'm not pregnant), and I can justify the obsession because most of what I'm learning is useful. Like, really useful, on a life-long scale.
Anyhoo, so I'm slurking around this shelf today and spot a book called The Experts' Guide to Doing Things Faster: 100 Ways to Make Life More Efficient. Now, thanks to the books I've gorged on since the New Year, I'm way more into doing things more slowly than I have before, getting more enjoyment from actions and people, and generally wringing the goodness from life with my bare hands. But efficiency is like catnip for me. When I was 10 and we were moving into a new house, Mom caught me going to the house from the moving truck empty-handed, and she said, "Don't waste a trip."
A seminal moment, y'all. It was logical and made the job go faster, and then it stuck with me forever. I still don't like to waste trips from one room to another or one office to another. And I bet that advice is in that Expert's Guide. So I picked it up, sensing a sneaky cat-mint high within its pages.
I scanned chapters on How to Clean House and How to Go Through Airport Security, each written by an apparent expert of the subject, and then this one caught my eye: How to Wake Up. I looked at the so-called expert and laughed: a firefighter. Of course.
His name's Zac Unger, and he's written a book called Working Fire: The Making of an Accidental Fireman. And he knows all about waking up. Which, to Zac, means getting up. Here's a taste:
Awesome. I'm so guilty of thinking I deserve more sleep, and lolling around in bed to prove it. Dave and I have this whole spooning routine in the morning, which, don't get me wrong, is nurturing and restful and generally great. But it's also an excuse to stay in bed longer. You know how I know? Because our routine involves two alarm clocks, and we're always in bed wayyyyy after the second one goes off.
So. I'll be working on Waking Up = Getting Up, or at least Waking Up = Followed Much Sooner by Getting Up, because I do love the spoon.
Check out the longer chapter excerpt on Unger's website -- practically the whole chapter -- they're short. Then try the Counting to One Thousand by Seventeens thing. I got to 51.
I stop in at least once a week. After I check the holds area for any books waiting for me, I make a beeline to this shelf -- the 640s of the Dewey system.
I've been obsessed with this particular Dewey decade since January and have kept my arm of the couch shoulder-deep in related books since then: farming, homesteading, householding, skill-hoarding, nesting. You may have noticed the new daily pie page called nest. Yeah, this is what that's about. I'm crazy about homemaking right now. There are several factors feeding into it (to be shared soon) (no, I'm not pregnant), and I can justify the obsession because most of what I'm learning is useful. Like, really useful, on a life-long scale.
Anyhoo, so I'm slurking around this shelf today and spot a book called The Experts' Guide to Doing Things Faster: 100 Ways to Make Life More Efficient. Now, thanks to the books I've gorged on since the New Year, I'm way more into doing things more slowly than I have before, getting more enjoyment from actions and people, and generally wringing the goodness from life with my bare hands. But efficiency is like catnip for me. When I was 10 and we were moving into a new house, Mom caught me going to the house from the moving truck empty-handed, and she said, "Don't waste a trip."
A seminal moment, y'all. It was logical and made the job go faster, and then it stuck with me forever. I still don't like to waste trips from one room to another or one office to another. And I bet that advice is in that Expert's Guide. So I picked it up, sensing a sneaky cat-mint high within its pages.
I scanned chapters on How to Clean House and How to Go Through Airport Security, each written by an apparent expert of the subject, and then this one caught my eye: How to Wake Up. I looked at the so-called expert and laughed: a firefighter. Of course.
His name's Zac Unger, and he's written a book called Working Fire: The Making of an Accidental Fireman. And he knows all about waking up. Which, to Zac, means getting up. Here's a taste:
"The reason you have trouble waking up is because you feel as though you deserve more sleep. You don't. There's nothing in the Constitution about lounging around in bed, and the snooze button is not your birthright. In my line of work an alarm is an alarm; it rings and I get up no matter how much sleep I've had so far that night. And you need to do the same thing. No more fooling yourself, no more bemoaning your sleepy fate. Maybe you only got four hours of sleep last night, but that's a problem you need to deal with on the nighttime end of things, not in the morning."
Awesome. I'm so guilty of thinking I deserve more sleep, and lolling around in bed to prove it. Dave and I have this whole spooning routine in the morning, which, don't get me wrong, is nurturing and restful and generally great. But it's also an excuse to stay in bed longer. You know how I know? Because our routine involves two alarm clocks, and we're always in bed wayyyyy after the second one goes off.
So. I'll be working on Waking Up = Getting Up, or at least Waking Up = Followed Much Sooner by Getting Up, because I do love the spoon.
Check out the longer chapter excerpt on Unger's website -- practically the whole chapter -- they're short. Then try the Counting to One Thousand by Seventeens thing. I got to 51.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Running: Back to It, With Goals
Finally ran again yesterday and felt great. I took 3 months off to heal the stress fracture, then another 2 for good measure (not because I was lazy -- totally not because of that). I ran for about 25 minutes, enjoying the latest episode of Two Gomers Run a Marathon: the Sub-5 Strive, and had no hint of pain in the tibia, so YAY.
Besides not wanting to slack any longer, two things pushed me out the door yesterday...
One: a cold front came in, giving me the cool, dry conditions I missed because I couldn't run this winter.
Two: I've registered for the 4th Annual San Antonio Los Chupacabras de la Noche 10K Trail Run in July. We ran it last year, and I loved it. This time I put myself in an appropriate starting corral -- important in this race because the trail is single track (narrow!), making it easy to get stuck behind slower runners.
So, back to it! Current goals are to reincorporate running into my every-other-day life in a low-key way, further strengthen my left shin, get toned, and have a blast at Chupacabra.
How 'bout you? Working on fitness right now?
Friday, April 1, 2011
Dave + Bamboo + Tomato Cage = Cool Lamp
Remember the Taiwanese lantern makers?
They left behind a bunch of bamboo strips -- the woody parts they split from the more flexible green sides they used -- and enough lantern-weaving knowledge in Dave to make him dangerous.
And because he's Dave (read: *awesome*), he immediately cemented his new knowledge into skill. He began weaving bamboo circles. Then, using a tomato cage as a frame, he applied the circles and wove them together...
Then, in a moment of serendipity, he discovered that one of our paper lamps, the twin to this one...
...fit perfectly inside his creation. Here it is, hanging in its new home, the reading room...
They left behind a bunch of bamboo strips -- the woody parts they split from the more flexible green sides they used -- and enough lantern-weaving knowledge in Dave to make him dangerous.
And because he's Dave (read: *awesome*), he immediately cemented his new knowledge into skill. He began weaving bamboo circles. Then, using a tomato cage as a frame, he applied the circles and wove them together...
Then, in a moment of serendipity, he discovered that one of our paper lamps, the twin to this one...
...fit perfectly inside his creation. Here it is, hanging in its new home, the reading room...
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