What's Growin'?

Other than a freakish few days in May, it's been on the cool side all spring. This weekend the people who control the weather are obviously attempting to simulate the conditions in Beijing: 90s, with afternoon thunderstorms.

If only they hadn't paid off the grass seed farmers. Add a little air pollution and the we could really be guaranteeing that we only send the most prepared to China.

Anyway, I digress. With the onset of summer, I thought I'd show what's in the ground. The May flower season seemed to be prolonged by the cool temperatures.


There were quite a few nice surprises as we peaked through the tulips and irises. The lonely bleeding heart really outdid itself this year. This is a completely maintenance free plant.
If memory serves, it dies back to the ground and disintegrates so fast and thoroughly that I don't even have
to remove any foliage at the end of the season.



L insists the clematis looks like a giant valentine heart this year, but I think she's just being sappy. We're going to have to replace this side porch real soon--I'm hoping to enclose it, but we'll definitely make every effort to preserve this vine.


As always, the best part of summer is yet to come. As much as I love the showy flowers, the real reason for all this is the veggies and herbs. This year we have 5 kinds of tomatoes in the ground, and three different chilis.



The tomatoes have been especially sad and slow to take hold, but they have all perked up with this week's heat. The cinnamon basil got hit hard by slugs--even with the aid of copper rings. A couple weeks ago I added beer traps though, and that seems to be helping alot. Now if we can just get the grass seed farmers to switch to food crops we can get that pollen count down.

The summer: and track lameness

On my way to dinner tonight I passed a guy heading west at 11th and Monroe on his cell phone, looking at the lame tourist map that they're handing out to the folks in town for the Olympic Trials. So I say: "Excuse me, do you need directions?"

'Nope, I know I'm going in the right direction. I was just surprised at how crummy this street got for a while.'

"Crummy" was the exact adjective used. You know how you can never think of a snappy comeback when you need one? What I came up with was: "Well, in a few blocks it's going to turn into strip malls." To which he replied: "Oh, so crummy, nice, then crummy."

So many other options:

"What's so crummy about 1920's Craftsman bungalows?"
"I'm sorry sir, we like to call that downtown."
"Hey: I live over there."

Of course, I could have just used the always appropriate: "Prick." But we were told to be extra nice to the visitors.

Just a test. Nothing to see here.

View Larger Map

A nice Endnote discovery

The ultimate in procrastination: I did a complete reformatting of my hard drive this weekend and reinstalled everything from scratch. With nary a call to technical support. (But honestly, my computer was crawling. Now it reboots in less than a minute.)

And now it's back to work. And I've discovered that EndNote will let me keep track of keywork terms of my own, and will automatically add new keywords from new citations as I work. If I go back now and then to clean up the term list, I'll gradually develop a nice controlled vocabulary. Deleting wonky, database assigned terms doesn't delete them from the actual references though--so nothing is lost through the term editing.

Finally warm

And not a moment too soon, as the outdoor party season starts, er, now.

3 hours left to the quarter. Lots of folks already walking around with parents. The library is officially dead: only 4 inveterate community folks walking around and a total of ten-ish students trying to finish up.

I've already gotten through the worst pile on my desk (the one that sits immediately to my left. The 'attend to me immediately' pile. The one that I picked a 2 month old 'please respond ASAP' memo off of this morning). I also sent thank you notes for all those who helped with my contract renewal for this year (it was a big one: now I only have to renew every 3 years instead of every 2. It's as close to tenure as I'll every get). And I moved a map case. It's amazing what can get done when people aren't constantly asking for help and I'm not constantly running off to meetings or class.

I'll try and update about What is actually Growing this weekend. There are a variety of spring flower photos to post, and slug traps to bait. But L keeps taking the yogurt to work and not bringing the containers back.

Time off

I am officially taking off from now until Sunday. This will make tomorrow the first day since at least May 3 that I haven't done anything work or school related. I hope it pours rain all day so I can sit around and read magazines after going to the farmers ' market.

Classes are over. I have 2.5 tasks remaining for finals week. Don't expect to hear from me tomorrow--I'm thinking about making it a technology free day.