My Boring Life
I have, again, entered a couple photos of Apollo in the TMINFO Calendar contest. A couple years ago we managed to get one of his photos in it, so I’m trying again this year.
You don’t need to register to vote, and you can reload the page and vote again, up to 5 times, for each photo (and any other photo you see in the contest that catches your eye).
Photo 1 (click this link to vote)
And Photo 2 (again, click this link to vote)
Tomatoes were running about $3/basket (those little green baskets they pack fruit and vegi’s into)
Cucumbers were $0.75/each
Zucchini were $1/each for more normal sized ones
Jalapenos were also about $3/basket
Garlic varied, but call it $1/head
I didn’t see any melons or lettuce or radishes and didn’t want to interrupt to ask since I wasn’t buying. Forgot to check carrots.
Or, the pizza sauce that we were buying before we started making our own runs $1.99/16ounces
So, based on what I’ve picked out of the garden so far (though I haven’t been as OCD as I could have about keeping track):
Cucumbers, about $15
Zucchini, about $16
Jalapenos and other hot peppers, about $6
Garlic, about $30
Tomatoes, about $72 (!) or about $47.76 in tomato sauce
Here’re the pictures of the garden wilt I was talking about:
The Sugar Baby watermelons-
You’ll have to trust me that the green in the first picture is all weeds, mostly clover. The Sugar Baby watermelon vines are almost completely dead at this point, with only a couple vines holding on.
The one set of affected pumpkin vines-
And the affected Blazing Star flowers-
So far, other than the “normal” tomato wilt affecting the Black Plum tomatoes I’ve not seen any signs of it anywhere else, I’m hoping the semi regular treatments with neem oil are preventing it from spreading. But this is the first year I’ve had a serious problem with it too. Anyone have any ideas as to what it is, what the cause is, and/or how to prevent it next year? I ran across a product called “Root Shield” thats supposed to help prevent several varieties of wilt (including the normal tomato wilts) and I’m seriously considering picking some up for next year’s garden……
I made my first batch of hot pepper jelly this week. Right on schedule. Except the ingredient list was a little different this year.
Normally I weigh out just short of a pound of red ripe Jalapenos, toss in a single red ripe Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper or ripe Habanero (or just do a full pound of Jalapenos, depending on what we have in the garden), and go from there.
This year the hot pepper growth pattern has been screwy. The Jalapeno plants are half the size they normally are, and though they’re producing nicely they aren’t as loaded as normal. However the Hot Wax plants are huge and loaded (normally they’re smaller than the Jalapenos and less loaded).
So I was getting ready to make jelly and realized I had 1/2pound of Jalapenos, and 1/2pound of Hot Wax peppers, and a single ripe Habanero pepper. So I shrugged and made jelly out of that combination.
I will occasionally eat the tiniest little bit of the pure Jalapeno jelly. But this batch is way out of my league. Even Husband choked on it when he had his first taste. Its a little hot!
I also pulled three cantaloupes out of the garden, a couple more Sugar Baby watermelons, the first harvest of Rattail Radishes, three more zucchini, another two colanders full of tomatoes….
I’ve held off posting about this, cause it made me so frustrated…..
When we bought our house there was approx 20ft of mature daylilies growing on our side of the road side ditch. A question to the seller confirmed that although the town mowed the ditch here they didn’t care about our side of it, even though legally they could.
Over the last couple years I’ve been adding to that line of daylilies. That area is a pain to keep trimmed and the mature lilies do an awesome job at keeping down the weeds on the ditch-side. Resulting in about 40ft of daylilies on my side of the roadside ditch.
A week ago, last Monday, I came home from work to discover that the town had been through and mowed the ditch. Which was fine and normal. Except that this time they’d also used an extended arm mower to mow the first 2-3feet on my side of the ditch.
To say I was peeved would be putting it mildly. But I took a deep breath and reminded myself that they have the legal right to do it.
Tuesday morning I called up the town’s Highway Dept Supervisor to ask if they were supposed to be mowing on my side of the ditch? The answer is apparently no! They’re only supposed to be mowing on that side of the ditch if its a visibility problem, such as at an intersection. So I advised the supervisor of what had happened, and that in addition to taking down my daylilies they’d also taken the cap off of the water shut-off. He promised to have a word with the mower driver, and that the town would be out to replace the cap on the shut-off. Though they haven’t been out yet and I may need to call him again.
On my way to work that Tuesday I paid extra attention to the roadside of the rest of the road. I’m hoping the supervisor got a few more phone calls. There are daylilies missing in several places along the property owners’ side of the ditch. And in one case, one homeowner had planted daylilies to edge his driveway and the first 3 feet of daylilies along both sides of the driveway are now stubs. I’m thinking that someone doesn’t know what daylilies are……
The good news is that, at least on my property, the mower was mostly a couple inches above the dirt level, and so there’s a couple inches stub of at least some of the daylily plants, and so all of those plants should survive the experience. However there are several places where the mower clearly hit dirt. Plus I can’t find stubs for many of the newer plantings (he even mowed down the metal stakes I was using the mark them!), so I’m not sure how they’ll do. Regardless though they likely won’t come back as full as they were, as it takes time for that sort of growth to appear.
A week later and the whole strip like still looks murdered and dead. Though I’m sure the weeds will be shortly taking advantage *sigh*……..
In the wake of discovering that my ankles weren’t going to be adapting to concrete floors I picked up a pair of soft ankle braces to take the place of the ace wraps I’d been using to give my ankles support. The braces weren’t anything fancy. $10 each at the local pharmacy. But they helped, a lot, and weren’t horribly uncomfortable to wear while I was at work.
This past Thursday, part way through the day, my feet apparently swelled up and the braces became uncomfortable to wear, so I ended up not wearing them for the last couple hours of the work day. Things didn’t hurt to badly. So yesterday, Friday, since I was only working a 5hr shift I decided to try the day without them. I never did figure out what caused my feet to swell and I wanted to see how bad the shorter shift would hurt without the braces.
Wasn’t to bad. Made it through the 5hrs with no braces with not much additional pain, though I could tell my knees were going to be more sore than usual.
Till I left work.
1/2hr drive home and both ankles and knees stiffened up drastically and getting out of the car at home was, well, interesting. Staggered into the house, greeted the dogs, and collapsed with my feet up.
It is now Saturday morning, I leave for today’s work shift in an hour. My ankles are still very stiff and painful despite some careful stretching exercises. My knees are better, but not as good as normal.
Crap.
Obviously ankle support isn’t optional for any reasonable length work shift. For the moment I’m just going to pick up a 2nd pair of the cheap braces in the larger size for the next time my feet swell. But I guess I’d better start looking for better ankles supports too…..
So, I’ve been ignoring the compost pile this year. Its covered in weeds, and I’m sure the tree roots are enjoying it entirely. Its just been too busy a summer.
Yesterday afternoon I took the kitchen scraps out and noticed what looked like 4 or 5 tomato seedlings popping up out of it.
Then I looked closer.
And realized it wasn’t 4 or 5 little plants. What I was seeing was the ends of the branches of one HUGE tomato plant. The base stem a good inch in diameter.
I dug out my garden stakes and stood it upright. Curved as it is it comes up to my chin, if the stalk was straight it’d be over my head. Its got several flowers on it, and at least one baby tomato forming.
It gets, at most, a couple hours of dappled sunlight there. The spot itself is VERY wet…..
It’ll be interesting to see what it produces!
I promise I’ll make it to the farmers market eventually to price this all out!
Tomatoes! 2 more Purple Cherokee, the rest are black plums
The first batch of tomatoes made 1.5 quarts of sauce, this batch made 2.5 quarts. Course, we’ve eaten several handfuls of the plum tomatoes too.
8 more cucumbers.
3 Sugar Baby Watermelons, two of which were quite small, but they were sure tasty!
1 carrot. But there are two going to seed, which is screwy as heck, but a google search tells me that it’s not completely out of normal for carrots to seed in their first year. I’m letting them go mostly for curiosities sake.
There are now several Pumpkins “ripe enough” to be picked and finish ripening in storage, but since the weather’s gorgeous I’m letting them ripen on the vine. I’m not counting them towards totals till I pick them.
I’ll likely be picking hot peppers this weekend, as the Jalapenos are starting to turn red and so are a couple of the Hot Wax peppers.
Just realized I never counted the lettuce or radishes I picked earlier in the season. I’ll have to guestimate off of memory.
Sunflowers are blooming. So far they’ve all been the same variety, I planted 4 varieties total, including one variety of fancy dark colored flowers, hope I get at least a few of those this year!
If you ever wanted to know what lettuce allowed to go to flower looks like:
Thats a Purple Romaine in case you’re curious.
Flushed a tiny tiny baby rabbit (like, barely old enough to be out of the nest tiny) out of the garden while picking watermelon on Wednesday. Looked like he was using the vines for cover more than for food, but I re-treated the garden with the deer and bunny repellent just to be on the safe side. He was a cutie though, glad I didn’t have the dogs with me!
I’ve got a weird wilt/leaf die off happening. In both Sugar Baby Watermelon tires, one pumpkin tire, and I noticed yesterday that now some of the Blazing Star flowers look like they’re succumbing. I’ll have to get pictures. Took me a bit to figure out what was going on. I initially took it for a fertilization or water problem. And maybe it is, but that doesn’t completely explain it. Treated all affected areas (and several other tires that looked like maybes) with a heavy coat of diluted neem oil in hopes of stopping the problem.
The plum tomatoes are definitely being hit with wilt too, but that’s not abnormal for tomatoes, especially considering the weather. I didn’t treat them with neem, no way to avoid the ripening fruits, and I don’t want to have to worry about washing the neem off.
No more sign of the nest of stinging insects I found last week. I was able to finish weeding that tire safely. Here’s hoping the permethrin can go stale on the shelf now and I won’t need it again! I discovered that apparently some people with arthritis find relief from pain by using bee stings. I can promise you that I won’t be trying it. I spent almost three full days on a max dose of benedryl because the hand closest to the sting (the sting was on my lower right arm) became extremely painful to use. There was essentially no external swelling from the sting after the first 8hrs, but something was clearly going on internally. I haven’t felt joint pain like that since the time the doctor prescribed me Levaquin for a respiratory infection! Gives me a better appreciation for how much worse my joints could be…..
Started pots of the Purple Sprouting Broccoli that I’m going to try over-wintering this year. I’ll plant them out end of August/beginning of September -ish depending on the weather. Then I have to figure out how to protect them from the extreme cold lows we get in the winter. I’m thinking a plastic teepee type setup ought to work.
I’m a little frustrated so bear with me.
Back in 2012 we had solar panels installed. Arista Power, out of Rochester NY, was the installer. Admittedly likely not who we’d have chosen had we done the picking, solely due to the fact that there are closer installers, but we were getting the panels done via a Solarize program and weren’t given a choice. Despite that fact the install was done smoothly and we were quite happy with the whole process and the installing company. Everyone was professional, great to work with, courteous of us and our dogs, and the equipment has functioned perfectly since.
I had a brief contact with Arista’s Installation Coordinator a year ago (March 2014), a check up on the system and to find out how much power it had produced.
Monday, July 20th, 2015, Monday of last week, I received a letter from NY state advising us that we were being audited for claiming the solar system on our taxes. Not a particularly huge surprise, the system had resulted in a huge refund for us that year. But frustrating since it was 3yrs after the fact. Especially since I’d swear I included all of the requested paperwork with our taxes. But I sat down and started digging through files to find stuff. Found most of it, but came up short on a couple pieces, one of which turned out to be mis-filed and I eventually found it. The other piece I needed is proof of how much we paid the installers. A phone call to the auditor’s office confirmed that an invoice from the installer showing that we paid X amount on X date would be sufficient.
In the week and a half since then I have emailed Arista, both via the individual email address I had from when the install was done, and via the “contact us” on their web page. I’ve left three voicemails, one on the voicemail of each of the two people I had contact with as part of the install and one on in the general mailbox. I tracked down the names of their executive team and sent emails to what should be their email address (one of which bounced, but the others appear to have gone through no problem).
I have received zero response.
This morning I filled out the “I want a quote” form, we’ll see if that nets me anything.
I realize this is their busy season, but in this day and age email and voicemail can be checked from any location (and I know from chatting with both the sales guy and the install guy that they DO check them from anywhere). Even if they don’t have a secretary to man the front desk and handle basics in the office, and I can’t imagine they don’t have someone in the office to handle that sort of stuff.
My next step is to send a signature required return receipt letter to them, to see what that nets me. And I’m seriously considering driving out there.
In the mean time we’re making progress on tracking down proof of payment ourselves. Turns out part of the problem is that we had a different bank account then, which has since been closed. I think we can track down the info ourselves just fine.
But this whole process is not giving me warm fuzzies about what’ll happen if we ever need repair work done. Or if we have to replace the roof/shingles on the house for that matter, which will happen eventually, we’d need the installer to come out and remove the panels, and then put them back on after the roof is done. And though I’m sure that any decent solar installer could manage the process I’d certainly prefer to have the original folks handling it.
Edit: The CEO finally contacted me Friday July 31st. Now to see if they can produce the paperwork I need!
Windows Defender was the cause of the problem. I don’t even remember turning it ON, and I’d have sworn I turned it off. So I’m pretty pissed.
So here’s your headsup. If you’re having trouble connecting USB devices, or SD cards, etc, to your computer, disable Windows Defender completely!