No boys allowed

Hum de dum.

It's been a chilly rainy week and Donna kicked me out of the house tonight for her girls-only card game night. I guess there's toenail painting and pillow fights and stuff. All the pets are girls so of course they got to stay. Alas, I wasn't even allowed to stay long enough for dinner. So why not come into school and work on my thesis for a while...

...but of course that can only last a couple of hours so late at night.

Ho hum.

Stopped at the library earlier for some books to take to Long Island next week. The two I really wanted weren't available ("Affluenza" and "Fire and Ice: Canada, the United States and the myth of converging values"), so I requested them for later.

Instead picked up "Time", a book on the history of time measurement; "Longitudes", which I think is about the invention of the first accurate chronometer for use in navigation; and the WPA guide to New York (that's gonna be cool!).

La de da.

The beans, cukes, and tomatillos are all getting a mottled yellowing pattern on their leaves, with greenish yellow margins. Last fertilizer I used had no N, looks kinda like N deficiency, so fertilized with balanced mix this time around. Might be the shift from 70s to 50s as well.

Pumpkins are getting BIG! Two of them so far. A greenish mottled pattern, similar to the round zukes - only much bigger. Golden nugget winter squash is flowering and fruiting all over on its 8 foot+ vines, fruits are smaller than the pumpkin and turning yellow already. Raspberries still coming in strong, strawberries all rotting and slug-eaten because the patch has not been weeded well. Black-eyed susans FINALLY blooming, a few of them, this week - but very tall flower stems. Ditto the shasta daisies.

Leeks are getting thicker. Basil is finally big, sage is big, rosemaries going OK, thyme is bushy but not tall, oregano is a bushy mass, cilantro seeds (coriander) are a big surprise and ripening well. Prairie dawn rose still flowering two at a time; pretty but not very showy. Foxglove bloomed late last week, dianthus blooms are faded a bit, delphinium looks ratty and went to seed, forget-me-nots completely infested with chickweed disguising itself among the dense plants, tiny pepper fruits appeared, no red tomoatoes yet, peas not very happy along the garage wall - neither are beans, lavender is getting a little larger and hopefully can pot up for winter, planter boxes of alyssum and nastsurtium are huge and bushy and flower-laden and a big success. Constantly deadheading nasturtium, fucshia, begonia and canary bird vine to keep them blooming until end of summer - that's a lot of work.

De de dee de dee.

You know, you'd think that a Yahoo search for '+reek +yeti +dude' would only pop up references to one particular document, but then you'd be wrong.

Sigh, ho hum.

Last weekend collected lots of blueberries on a rainy, abbreviated trip to our favorite patch near Denali Park, about 3.5 hours north of here. Normally a long weekend trip but things are busy lately, so we only stayed one night. Berries seemed bigger than last year. We got 2 full gallons this year in 4 hours (7 person-hours) for 4 cups/person-hour. Pretty efficient. This early in the season we can afford to high-grade the berries, and only collect them from the taller stems with denser berry concentrations, often just bending the stem over a container and gently sliding the berries off by hand. Faster than grubbing around low-to-ground plants or deep inside the bushes or picking one berry at a time. We cheated a little by staying at The Perch, a nice cabin resort type place. Usual campsite, with its beautiful views and relative quiet, did not look too appetizing in mud and pouring rain (and it didn't help that someone left trash all over recently, and part of a moose carcass left right on the trail from last year's hunting season).

OK, to home.