Powerless to resist

So, I don’t watch much TV.  I used to.  I used to watch crazy amounts of TV.  That mostly came of having a roommate who was OBSESSED with television.  She loved it and she got engrossed in shows and scheduled her week around what was on.  When I lived with her, it was easy to catch her fervor and I will admit to spending hours camped in front of an “I Love the 80s” marathon.  Then, I moved to my house in downtown Charleston and I kept putting off getting my cable hooked up and then…well…I just didn’t miss it anymore.  One day I went, wait…I don’t miss TV!  And lo, from that point on I never had cable in Charleston.  I did occasionally watch TV and by occasionally I mean THE WORLD WILL STOP WHEN SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE IS ON!  And I also watched a LOT of CSI thanks to my roommate Leezle who had every single blessed episode in convenient DVD format.  Miracle of Miracles! 

Now we do have cable now, but it is mostly used to watch the Weather Channel and CNN and Stewart/Colbert.  And we are certainly guilty of watching Dirty Jobs for hours on end and nothing makes me happier than watching Bear Grylls naked rump cavorting in arctic rivers or climbing into recently-skinned cadavers of camels (though his isn’t usually naked then).  (Wait…you do know who Bear Grylls is, right?  Host of Man Vs. Wild, which is the much hotterbetter version of Survivor Man?  Well, Bear Grylls is just about my favorite person alive.  He is Welsh and dashing and charming and does ridiculously dangerous things in the name of Television.  Thanks to him, I now know what to do in the event that I find myself stuck in the middle of a glacier [glass-ier as he pronounces it].  The answer: Get the hell out!)

Here’s Bear:

Rowwrrrr right?

(oh, except sometimes he drinks his own pee, which isn’t so hot)

JESUS CHRIST!  I have a point here people and that is: I don’t watch much TV.  So, therefore, I find myself susceptible to to getting sucked in by shows that are called: DATELINE: People Who Should Be Dead But Miraculously Aren’t!  Dum dum daaaaaah! Watch as we show you videos of people dying the die of death!  But then they didn’t!  Certain death, we tell you!  And yet not!  Amazing!

It was a complete accident that I stumbled into watching this show.  I was sucked in my the Olympic swimming trials that I was only going to watch for just a minute while I cleaned.  It was background noise!  And yet, an hour later I found myself sitting on the floor in front of the TV scarcely able to breathe as I fell prey to the exuberance of sportscasters.   I can’t help it.  I find Rowdy Gaines to be mesmerizing.

Let me tell you, Internet, those people certainly know how to catch you off guard and force you to keep watching.  I challenge anyone to turn away from “Up next!  Watch this AMAZING video of a plane disintegrating as it crashes into the sea and then hear from the survivors!  These five morons jumped off a bridge and lived!  Proof positive that Darwin was WRONG!  And then:  Watch as a pack of hyenas rip a woman apart and eat her organs and then hear her side of the story!  Coming up next!  Don’t go away!

So this was a show about the top 10 certain death videos that people managed to live through.  They were pretty amazing, I’ll give them that.  There was a plane bursting into flame and exploding on the tarmac, and guy jumping out of an airplane to go skydiving then getting caught upside down on the underside of the plane and hanging there while the plane landed, slamming him into the ground at whatever speed those little planes fly.  The one about the airplane crash landing in the ocean was really amazing and horrifying.   Hmmm…I’m seeing a theme here:  Airplanes will kill yo’ ass!  Well, expect that these people lived.  Ok…airplanes will almost kill yo’ ass and then also leave you with severe emotional scarring.

I did eventually turn it off at number 4 when the semi-Asian host said “People risk their lives everyday to save strangers, but would you do it for a dog?”  Nope!  And off goes the TV.  It had finally broken its hold.

Piggy face

Today is one of those days when I desperately want to punch myself in the face for not bringing my camera. 

My train got in this morning 10 minutes early, which is unheard of and cause for great and joyous celebration, so I decided to take my sometimes walk through Chinatown.  I turned a corner next to one of the 1400 Chinese bakeries that reside in a single square block (ancient magic!) only to almost collide with a man who had the entire carcass of a dead pig thrown over his shoulder.   It didn’t have it’s innards, but it did have hooves, a face complete with lolling tounge, and it’s little curliecue tail.  It almost touched me and I lept back in horror as the man grinned and laughed at me and then said something in incomprehensible chinese.  I clutched my withered heart and gasped and tried to smile though I’m sure I only managed a pained grimace as I stumbled away from him.  It was a completely shocking thing to see at 7:24 in the AM.  No, hell, that would be completely shocking to see at anytime of the day!

Two posts in two days!

In other news:  The sky has fallen.

I realized that I TOTALLY have something I could be posting about and I have completely forgotten: my garden! (Or, really more accurately, my “garden”)

It currently consists of, in two raised beds:

1.About 9 million onions (the seedlings were so cheap at the farmers market that I couldn’t resist.  Also, I didn’t realize that there were so many in a 6-pack and I couldn’t bear not to plant them all) (Aside to my father, and my mother if she gets the reference:  I got white onions AND back-up yellow onions, so that I had something to tie onto my belt loop in case the white ones ran out on account of the war).

2. Carrots.  And then some more carrots.  And also, then, a few more carrots.

3. Four sweet pepper plants.

4.  Six pole bean plants which are growing so fast I think they may kill me in my sleep.

5.  And yet more carrots.  Really, I went a little overboard with this.

6.  Two shallots THAT WILL NOT SPROUT AND IT IS MAKING ME CRAZY.

7.  Two quinoa plants, which was really silly on my part for several reasons.  One, because they are a grain and I am only growing two plants due to lack of space.  Two.  That is like growing 2 individual stalks of wheat.  And two, quinoa grows in the Andes and does best when it gets 8-10 TOTAL inches of water during the entire growing season.  They are currently two inches tall and we have gotten about 14 inches of rain the last two weeks.  They should be a big ol rotten mess in about two months.

8.  Four broccoli plants (they actually aren’t in the beds yet since they need to be transplanted as seedlings in late July and they are happily sprouting on my window seal right now.

9.  Ditto for four Brussels Sprouts.

(Wow…holy shit that is a lot of stuff in two 3 X 4 raised beds)

And in various and sundry pots scattered around the raised beds:

1. Six tomato plants in five pots: Two Brandywines (which are pink!), Two Sungolds (which are yellow!), a Black Russian (which is purpley-black!) and one Early Girl (which is…red.  Yawn.  And also a LYING LIARS with the name.  That plant is the only one out of the bunch which isn’t flowering and my Sun Golds actually have the eensiest little fruits on them.)  Now this is an awful lot of tomatoes, especially for someone who hates tomatoes (ME) and can hardly abide them in any form, be they processed beyond recognition into ketchup or in their entire, vomit inducing form.  Y’all, I am trying SO HARD to like tomatoes and every year I think to myself “THIS WILL BE THE YEAR OF TOMATOES!” so fingers crossed!  If nothing else, they are thrilling to grow and the smell of tomato plants in the smell of summer to me.

2. Four more green beans (of the vine o’ death variety) because in my opinion, you can never have too many green beans to asphyxiate you in your sleep.

3. A big pot of Jerusalem Artichokes that my CSA gave me. 

4.  Two winter squash plants that I’m probably over my head with.  They are already out of control and they are only 3 weeks old.  I feel like these plants are like a Great Dane puppy that I got on a whim because I thought to myself “But look how cute and little he is!  He won’t get THAT big!” and now weights 900 pounds and accidentally crushed a toddler.  I’m probably going to need to sneak these into a little glen behind my house and let them go to town because holy beejeezus do these grow fast!

5.  And a rapidly failing pot of leeks.  Well, they were an experiment anyway.  I guess my Welsh blood doesn’t run THAT true. 

 

So!  Not bad, huh?  I’ll have to get into the Saga of the Potato Plants another time, especially since there was a very emotional development last night that I’m not quite able to face, yet.   There was…weed wackage.  It was a massacre.

Oh my god, and the whole reason that I started this post was so that I could link to a wonderful website I found called Homegrown Evolution, which is a couple who grows all sorts of wonderful stuff in their California yard.  They even raise chickens, which makes me so jealous.  I just love chickens and wish we could keep them.  Somehow I doubt our condo association would be ok with that ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY KEEP KILLING MY POTATO PLANTS.   BASTARDS!  Imagine if they ran over my chickens with a weed whacker.  Now THAT would be a massacre.  I’d have to sic my green beans on them.   Anyway!  Homegrown Evolution.  I wish they were my best friends.

 

 

 

HA! And you thought I was dead!

I know, right?  You thought this blog was dead.  Don’t feel too badly, I kinda thought it was too.  What’s really obnoxious about this whole thing is that it drives me CRAZY when people who are usually occasionally frequent-ish bloggers stop writing.  (As an aside, how much do I hate the term “bloggers?”)  I am the first person to huff and roll my eyes when I click on a site and the last time it was updated was a month prior.  And look what I’ve done!  Today makes it one month and one day since I’ve written a whit.

My bad!

Not that I have anything at all to say, I just wanted to check in and let you know that I haven’t been hit by a train or crushed in a mass of Celtic-infused hysteria.

Let’s do a very brief rundown of what I’ve been doing lately, shall we:

1.  I got a promotion at work!  Hurrah!  However, said promotion is in conjunction with me training my replacement.  Who they haven’t hired yet.  So I am doing two jobs at the moment.  Slightly frazzling.

2.  Pete is in Alaska for 13 days.  Currently he is on day 5 and, much to my shock, I actually miss him quite a bit.  I do not however miss making a complete mess of the house and playing computer games for hours at a time.

3.  When I’m not playing computer games, I’ve been picking peas.  Pounds and pounds of peas.  Our CSA has probably 300-400 feet of peas, and I’ve been a-pickin’.  My back is sore and my shoulders are sunburned and I couldn’t be happier.  I’m going back tomorrow evening to do it some more.

Let me try and come up with something interesting to say, which I will translate for you:  See y’all in a month!

(No, no.  I jest.  I hope.)