Monthly Archives: January 2012

Gardening, Homestead, Life in general

Girl (and a little man) power

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My sister and mom cleaned more stuff out of the garage today, toting it to the barn and arranging it. They also moved a bunch of dirt, a handful of pallets, and moved a triple stack of large stone pavers from one place to another. I was very impressed by their industry.

What was I doing? My “helper” (my nephew) and I were reconfiguring some of the 4×4 frames up in the front garden into 4×20 frames. Well, mostly, I was doing this, and my nephew was playing with the drill, or playing with the dog, or escaping to ride his tractor around the yard while yelling questions or commentary to me. Three – almost four – year olds do have short attention spans, much like the dogs, so it isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and he’s cute so there’s that. Having his “help” tends to slow down whatever is going on, but it’s good to have him around at this age, and enjoy him before he turns into a sullen teenager who would rather die than be caught hanging out with family.

In the end, the other team got much more done than we (I) did, but I did finish off that reconfiguration. One more down, and that’s good.

A check on the flats showed that the oregano has germinated quite nicely, and at least one of the stevia seeds has as well. Progress.

Gardening, Homestead

A rain of disappointment

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A sputtering, timid spit of rain is our net result from what began with such promise last night. Just a trace of the wet stuff, not enough to even register on the weather station’s gauge. The huge blob of clouds blew apart before reaching us. Since we have not as yet dug the trench to run irrigation back to the orchard area, that means wrangling hoses for me tomorrow in order to get the trees watered before they keel over from dehydration. On the plus side, no rain means I’m not hauling the four new servers to the NOC in a downpour.

Life in general

Why I don’t watch the local news

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Watching NCIS (and NCIS:LA), I always get some exposure to the local news and whatever they’re breathlessly hawking as something I should be interested in/terrified of enough to keep the channel tuned after these shows are over (hint: it will never be enough). Tonight’s poutrage involves some pedestrian crosswalk that apparently cost the city of Jacksonville a cool $200K. The news folks – whom of course I trust implicitly to design pedestrian walkways, or bridges, or multilevel structures that may need to hold hundreds of people at one time – want to tell me about the cheaper options. I’m tempted to watch to see if they offer up a solution of buying a couple of cans of spray paint from Home Depot and enlisting the services of some random homeless dude for ten bucks to lay down the lines. But I’m not going to.

Gardening

Waiting for rain

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We live (as I think I’ve mentioned) in the Bermuda Triangle of weather here. Common mythology says it rains every afternoon in Florida in the summer for a short while. In our corner of the county, the fronts and clouds and rain seem to break apart or skirt to the north or south of us, never quite reaching potential. There was a period last year where it didn’t rain for over a month here although it rained in areas around us. So when we look at the forecast, and it says 20% or 40% chance of rain for us, we plan on watering because the better chance is that it won’t rain on us. Things are looking up tonight and tomorrow, though: 60% tonight, 70% tomorrow. We may get lucky, and the trees back in the orchard will stop looking quite so sad and pathetic, and the garlic will be watered without me having to get the irrigation rerun on the reconfigured frames out front.

Two more flats started: habanero, jalapeno, two types of cayenne, tabasco, pepperoncino.  Next up: more onions for our short days here.

Life in general

When you think you’ve seen it all

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And by “all” I mean the incredible stupidity some people possess, someone comes along and says something even dumber. It’s astonishing – especially given the blogger’s own obvious heritage – that they could possibly say such racist, bigoted things, but I suppose it’s a case of “MY multiculturalism being better than YOURS” (click on the About link to see why this is so ironic). It’s also richly ironic that she’s whining about the works of classical composer, who by far are foreign. How fortunate for her that the composers or their governments didn’t decree that non-natives were forbidden to perform their works. Or, in the case of Handel specifically, that the British government did not deem him too “ethnic” and deny him citizenship. That someone took the time to count – and calculate – the percentage of “asians” in an orchestra, and then posit that perhaps certain instruments are “too physically demanding” for them is just astonishing says great number of things indeed. About the person doing so.

Gardening

First flat out

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I promised myself that this weekend would see at least one flat started in the (now clean) barn. Done: artichokes, lavender, stevia, and oregano went into this one. They’re settled in, the dome is on, and the lights are lowered to just above the top of the dome, set on a timer so I don’t have to remember to go out every evening to turn them off.

Last night while clicking around I found someone’s page about the exact, necessary steps to start pepper seeds. I agreed with some of the items, but disagreed with more, and closed it out, vowing to continue my method that according to this person should not work at all. The final seven plus pounds of peppers I took in just after the new year before the killing frost came tells me we must be on the right track.

More flats to come. Next weekend I’d like to start the tomatoes and peppers to get them going and be ready by March to get them out. I took a detour through the rear garden on my way back in, and despite what I’d hoped, the shelling peas did not survive the temperatures in the teens that we had. Those will need to come out, but that’s a good thing, as it means I can top those frames with some good topsoil and compost to have them ready for whatever will go in there next. Brassicas, I think. Today during football will be an ideal time to map out what goes where for spring planting.

Bees and beekeeping

Abuzz

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit about bees lately. At the moment, I’m mostly considering where I want to place the hives and when to start sowing the seeds of things I picked up specifically for them so that we may have something in bloom when the packages of bees finally arrive.

Some people go into full-on apocalypse mode – TEOTWAWKI – and talk humorously about defending against the zombie hordes, but in reading everything I possibly can about bees, it turns out zombification may be an issue amongst bees as well. I have to say I would not be as worried about zombie bees as the humanoid variety (no opposable thumbs!) but hopefully this won’t be an issue here for a very, very long time (if ever).

Cancer

Progress

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For those of us with trismus – mine from radiation and eating through a tube for nine months – oral issues are a huge and ongoing problem. For those of us with damaged salivary glands due to radiation, limited oral openings make necessary dental visits both excruciating and frustrating. Add to this the general annoyance of not being able to open the mouth, which creates issues with speech (and of course, missing part of the tongue does not help here), eating, and at times, breathing, and you have a bundle of problems that could very well make someone spiral into depression. It’s very hard to reverse trismus, according to Those In The Know, and there is no surgical repair for it – something that never fails to amaze me, given that there seem to be fixes for just about everything these days. My own dentist is quite skeptical that my extremely limited opening will improve, regardless of therapy.

However.

People who know me know that I just don’t give up that easily. Besides, as an athlete – former or not – I’m well aware that muscles not used will atrophy, and that surgeries (and radiation) will create massive scar tissue. I’m well aware that it takes ongoing, strenuous, and dedicated work to make such things better. That’s just what I’ve been doing.

I have a device called a Therabite, which I have been using as regularly as possible. I had to skip two days after a visit to my ENT, as his exam caused the corners of my mouth to split open (not his fault, he has to wiggle a finger in to feel my tongue), but other than that, I’ve been using it every day to try to passively stretch my jaws. The best measure of progress? I can now slide my thumb into my mouth, horizontally, up to the first knuckle, without the pad of my thumb touching my teeth, something I could not do previously. It may only be a matter of millimeters for me, but that’s the best that can be expected after six years past the end of treatment, and just under six from the point where I was able to have the feeding tube removed and eat via mouth again. One millimeter at a time.

If you’re a head and neck cancer patient, and you stumbled across this place via search, remember this: while I think the medical staff I had was absolutely terrific, I wish they had emphasized more the issues surrounding trismus and how vitally important it is to avoid or at least minimize the impact. If you, like me, are unable to eat by mouth, continue to open and close your mouth as if you were able. Do it as often as possible while going through treatment and while having the PEG in. Not having to worry about this one thing will pay off down the road, trust me. It will probably be painful. Do it anyway. You probably have pain meds from the doctor because of all the other painful issues that arise from treatment. Use them if you need them. Without practice, trismus will sneak up and be on you before you know it. And you don’t want that.