Crossroads of the West (?)

Back in Salt Lake City for a few days, and have hit most all of the highlights: Squatters , Uinta , Desert Edge, Sage's Cafe, and a new favorite for espresso, Two Creek Coffee House. The website for Two Creek sucks, but the espresso is fantastic.

I skied two days at Alta, which were both great for different reasons. The first day had empty slopes and good snow, with a biting wind, but hey, it was Alta. The second day was after a ten inch overnight snowfall, and so the trails were thick, with great off-trail and tree-skiing.

Flying out tonight, and then back to work for a day before the xmas holiday.

It's surely a sign of a diseased mind, but I'm actually missing icebiking in Anchoragua. What the hell is wrong with me?

Snow

KSKA was repoting this morning that two to four inches of snow fell overnight in Anchorage. I call bullshit: at least six fell on my driveway. Or maybe sixteen.

It wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't had to drive to the airport at 6am. Or if we could get the car out of the driveway. Or if it wasn't on top of a layer of ice, where it acts like an oil based lubricant. Or if I didn't have laryngitis. Boo.

Raining leaves

A couple of videos I took on October 2 in the back yard.

Xgiving

or should I say Happy Native American Genocide Day?

To celebrate the holiday, I think I'm going to go skiing.

mmmm... beer.

Inferno Ale from the Lost Abbey. The glass on the left is without yeast sediment, the glass ont he right after swirling the yeast sediment at the bottom of the bottle.

Another Dinosaur Comic about cycling

Another great comic from Dinosaur Comics at qwantz.com :















Yesterday I was nearly hit three times while riding my bike to work. Two were my favorite type of motorist: the kind who nearly nails you, and then glares or screams at you, like it's your fault.

I then had a very nice shift, and came outside to twenty degree temperatures and a missing valve stem in my front tire. Yes, that's right: the tip that threads down into the valve stem was missing. (Don't ask why I had a European style, two piece presta valve on my winter commuting bike in Alaska.)

Now, the presta valve started out the day intact and got me the ten miles to work, with stops at the post office and REI on the way. And this is the type of thing that, when the stem tip goes missing, it won't be a slow leak: it'll be a loud, gushing and rapid release of air. So when I showed up at work and locked up the bike, and it was riding fine, it basically had to still have an intact valve stem tip, properly threaded in. Leading me to the conclusion that [you fill in the blank...]

Fortunately, I carry an extra tube with me, and work was still open, so I didn't have to change the tire in the cold and semi-dark. Side note: despite their other virtues, the Nokian studded tires, for all their other virtues, are a serious pain in the ass to get the bead seated in the rim.

Of bicycles, and ice...

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live."
—-Mark Twain, Taming the Bicycle, May 10, 1884

"Every time I tried to steal a look at a pretty girl, or any other kind of scenery, that single moment of inattention gave the bicycle the chance it had been waiting for, and I went over the front of it and struck the ground on my head or my back before I had time to realise that something was happening."
--Mark Twain, Chapters from my Autobiography, Chapter 20

I don't even have Twain's excuse: pretty girls and scenery are in short supply in the dark, at midnight, on my ride home.

A new evening in America

I was driving back from the auto parts store tonight: I had to buy a small engine spark plug for our generator in case the electricity goes out again, as it has four times since July.

NPR, by way of KSKA 91.1, called the election for Barack Obama.

There was a deep yellow, three quarter moon in the southern sky above the Turnagain Arm (a.k.a., the Cook Inlet, a.k.a., the Pacific Ocean. Yes, I'm actually justa little bit closer to being able to see Russia from my doorstep.)

I've made snide, or cynical, or sad jokes for years after elections, riffing off of that scummy rotten bastard president's Morning in America theme. I thought, and hope, that this is a new kind of night, and can be a new kind of day in America.

I'm watching our next president walk out on the stage in Grant Park to give an acceptance speech. I listened a half hour ago to McCain give a mostly gracious speech conceding the election. I listened to his supporters in attendance in Phoenix booing Barack Obama's name.

In 1992, I danced and cheered and celebrated after knocking on doors, walking streets, standing on corners, and making calls for Bill Clinton. I stood in a ballroom celebrating Clinton/Gore 92 California's victory. The time that came after wasn't different: NAFTA, Don't Ask Don't Tell, Welfare to Work, Defense of Marriage Act, and so on, and so on.

Barack Obama just said in his speech "this time must be different." I agree wholeheartedly.

I have hope. I really do. I know that a better world is possible.

Now let's see Barack Obama make a better world. I look forward to it.

Why Alaska is doing fine

No, it's not because tomorrow Tina Fey stands a very real chance of being on the ticket that carries the whopping three Electoral College votes that Alaska has to offer.

It's because we're the only expanding state according to economy.com:

Uhhh, yeah. Everything is great.

It's cold. It's snowing.

My bike is at the shop, with a leaking seal in the rock shox. Boo.

I made a pretty wicked soup last night from the CSA materials, with potatoes, beets, carrots, zucchini, and onions.

So tomorrow. Yes. Well. We either make our collective bed for another four years, or we don't. Here in Alaska, we either re-elect one convicted felon, and another who is just a CH this side of indictment, both of whom are stunt doubles for Cal Worthington commercials, or we don't.

Good thing SNL makes it feel all better.

Autumn is here

It's a bright, crisp, sunny day with blue skies. Yesterday on my bike ride to work I saw Denali. All this, and it's a whopping 41 degrees. Weird trade-off.

Here's another online comic I've been enjoying, Pictures for Sad Children:

Yesterday I powerwashed a roof and helped with some GFI installations, then went to my other job for an incredibly low-tip shift (three hours on the floor yielded $10 in tips, after tipping out. Ugh.)

My Super Sweet 100s in the big pot inside are producing like mad, but all the tomatoes are cracking (probably due to inconsistent watering.) Outside, things are beginning to die off. I'm probably going to harvest the red cabbage tomorrow, and make some kimchi. I have some red scallions from the CSA that will be great with it.

Alaska politics update

Since people seem so keenly interested in Alaska politics now that Tina Fey is running for vice president, I thought I'd give a shout out to the state senator for my district, Lesil McGuire. Her last major spin through the news was related to her husband Tom Anderson, who is serving a prison term for VECO related corruption.

Now McGuire is back in the news for her own actions, namely being taken off of an Alaska Airlines flight by police for being disruptive and drunk. Don't ask me why a South Carolina newspaper has the longest and best version of the AP story: maybe the Daiy News was trying to conserve letters again.

From the archives: Shoes on the Green



I get in trouble if I give too much detail on these, but the couple people who know what this image is don't need the detail anyway...

Dueling clouds

These photos don't do it any kind of justice, but: I was just looking out the window, and there was one set of full, high up clouds blowing slowly north, and another, thinner set blowing south/southeast. Kinda cool, kinda creepy.


I first thought the lower clouds could have actually been fog, but then I thought, "isn't fog just a kind of cloud?" Fortunately, wikipedia, which is Never Wrong(TM), confirmed my understanding of fog as simply a type of cloud, that happens to touch the earth's surface.


At least these images show what the view to the east looks like before the leaves start to change and fall in earnest.

No soybeans or wheat glutens were harmed in the making of this blogpost

Tonight's dinner (in addition to grilled crookneck squash and green peppers) which looks frighteningly like tuna steaks and baby back ribs (maybe more so in person.)

It took me getting older:

to learn to appreciate comics all over again. My brother B never stopped appreciating comics. He turned me on to Pearls Before Swine by Stephen Pastis at http://www.comics.com/comics/pearls/, which I like a lot, especially when it involves Utah. Tragically, the very commcerical operation of comics.com doesn't let you search by keyword without paying them $34.95. Un-uh. As a grand and righteous protest, I've decided to not hyperlink their pages. SO THERE!

Speaking of protest, recently I've been immensely enjoying xkcd by Randall Munroe:

And today I bumped in to Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North at qwantz.com, and immediately started laughing out loud. Here is the comic I first found, and just about peed myself:



There are good links on both of these to other comics the artists enjoy, which I'm slowly working my way through, and have very high hopes for.

More [boring] garden pictures

Can you tell that I don't really want to do work today?

Here's the cabbage: they have huge leaves, but are only starting to produce actual cabbage. I'm tempted to tear out some of the broccoli to reduce the competition, which are only producing tiny side shoots now, but I love broccoli so damn much that it's very difficult to image tearing them out.


More of the same, in a different bed: huge red cabbage plants, and medium broccoli.


A tree-like fennel plant, and some broccoli. That's a "Super Fantastic" tomato plant in the middle, which is finally starting to thrive, but I still seriously doubt will produce tomatoes. I really need to get around to building the greenhouse.




And here's one of the many moose that love to tear out bites of lettuce and spit them back, which led me to build my latest silly garden implement out of scrap wood:

This cage is on hinges, and covers the bed with the lettuce, broccoli, and spring onions in it. Yes, yes, I know that a moose who actually wanted to eat the greens could easily defeat this, but it's sort of like using The Club to improve the security in your car: the real hope is that the extra 15 seconds it'll take the car thief to steal your car, as opposed to the next car on the block, will deter them.

Our compost bin is next to the bed, rounding out the "build random shit out of scrap" collection.

Bah: enough politics! Or... not.

In case that last post didn't adequately indicate my feelings about the criminal we call senator, you'll be glad to know that Indictment IPA ("bitter for a few, but delicious for most!") is coming along just fine. I'm currently dry hopping it with two ounces of Simcoe in secondary, and expect to keg it in the next few days.

Confidential to our dirty old uncle: you're kinda creepy.

You know, the kind of uncle that you don't like the kids to spend too much time with. You're not really sure he's a perp, but he's mean, and he yells, and you just don't really trust him to be unsupervised with children. Or CEOs of major oilfield services companies.

That's right: our most recent politician to be indicted for federal crimes was on Talk of Alaska on KSKA public radio this morning. The mp3 isn't up on the Talk of Alaska website yet but lemme tell you, it was a doosie. Host Steve Heimel did a bizarrely effective job of running interference for the crooked bastard, and the "ground rules" were that Ted would refuse to talk about the most important thing in his political life, and indeed, arguably the most important thing in the political life of Alaska right now: the fact that he's facing trial in federal court after being indicted on seven criminal counts of failing to report the bribes he has taken over many years from such luminaries as VECO CEO Bill Allen.

But with about half of the callers questioning Ted on the indictment, our angry uncle just couldn't help but yell at them. Loudly. And repeatedly. And sighing loudly and dramatically when callers started out with a question that was apparently not going to be pro-Ted.

Bizarrely, Ted repeatedly insisted that the motions his lawyers filed for him don't necessarily reflect his views, that he hasn't read the motions, that he doesn't know their content, etc. This while he also talked about how he's a lawyer, and has been practicing law for more than 40 years. Oops! He's not actually an active attorney . This might seem like a trivial distinction, but it means he's not allowed to practice law. And no, he's not in active status in the DC bar, either. it'll be fun to see which bar initiates disciplinary proceedings first after he's convicted.

He did, of course, get his share of fawning admirers calling in, who would basically follow the senator to hell. (Unknown yet whether they'll follow him to federal prison.) One guy seemed to have tuned away from the Rush Limbaugh show just long enough to call in and blast all the liberals who have it out for Ted.

Ted didn't do very well with the two or three relatively neutral/undecided callers, at least one of whom really seemed to want to hear something reassuring from him about the indictments, so she could vote for him.

Ted repeatedly insisted that in his traveling all over the state in the last month, this is the first time anyone has asked him about the indictments. He stated after the first two callers that questioned him that it was two more people than have questioned him in the last month. Gosh, Ted: do you think it's because you SCREAM at people who question you, and when you're standing around with bodyguards, it's a little intimidating to question you? Ted literally threatened one caller, saying (I'm paraphrasing here, it's near the end of the show) "I'm ready to go any time..." The caller very evenly responded that he was talking to him now, and he'd like answers to his questions.

Ted also repeatedly talked about how he has to disclose all the gifts he takes, and how everyone knows what he takes. While he was audibly bitter about this, he seemed to possess no sense of irony. Ummm, Ted? You're about to be tried for LYING ON THESE DISCLOSURE FORMS. (Double confidential political advice to Ted: it's probably bad strategy to defend your ethics by reminding people about mandatory disclosures, especially when you make them sound so burdensome.)

I have to hand it to the slippery, corrupt hothead, though: it was a deft political sleight of hand when someone called from Point Lay, Alaska, a village of about 247 on the North Slope. The caller was concerned about seismic explorations for offshore drilling disrupting fishing. Ted talked about how he has always stood up for fishing and sealife harvesting, but hemmed, lightly coughed, and waited for Heimel to switch to another caller when the first caller clarified that it was seismic sounder ships up there for oil exploitation that were the problem. Moral of the story: when someone who you initially think is a political ally is actually complaining that your pro-drilling, pro-mineral exploitation policies are destroying his way of life, just quiet down and wait for the storm to pass. Nice one, Ted!

Ted concluded the show with a weird, vaguely threatening (towards Heimel/KSKA) comment about how he'll have to consider why this is the first time he has had people question him about the indictments.

All in all, it was a crazy show to listen to: alternately beautiful and hideous, comical and creepy. Some might say this summarizes a lot about Alaska. In any event, let's just say that I wouldn't ask this particular uncle to babysit your kids. Unless your kid needs a new Range Rover.

What kind of burrito would Lenin eat?



I know this isn't an original photo or framing of the famed Lenin statue in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, as other have pointed out. I just find it amusing.

Distractions

I guess cleaning out the boxes isn't really holding my attention, hence the third blog post today. Here's a list of Forbes magazine's America's 15 Hard-Drinking Cities , based on three criteria: Residents who had at least one drink in the last 30 days, Men who had more than two drinks per day, or women one drink, and Residents who had five or more drinks on one occasion.

The article I've linked above is annoying, as you have to scroll through the cities to view all of them and their relative statistics, so here is the main article. I've repeated the list below, with an *asterisk in front of every city I've been to, and a **double asterisk if I've drank there.

• 1. ** Austin, TX
  
• 2. ** Milwaukee, WI
  
• 3. ** San Francisco, CA
  
• 4. * Providence, RI
  
• 5. ** Chicago, IL
  
• (tie) 8. ** Seattle, WA
  
• (tie) 8. ** Cleveland, OH
  
• (tie) 8. ** St. Louis, MO
  
• 9. ** Boston, MA
  
• 10. * Cincinnati, OH
  
• 11. * Pittsburgh, PA
  
• 12. Virginia Beach, VA
  
• 13. ** Portland, OR
  
• 14. * Jacksonville, FL
  
• 15. ** Detroit, MI
  

I'm feeling pretty good about the top ten, though it looks like I need to go drink in Providence. It's interesting to me that this list includes so many places where I wouldn't particularly care to live (Milwaukee, Providence, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Detroit), and similarly, so many towns that are pretty unhappy places. It's reminiscent of my 2004 post about football, baseball, and the geography of hope.

A few more observations: note how concentrated the cities are in the northeastern U.S. in this google map, and how twelve of the fifteen cities are very humid, and another two are known for heavy rainfall. Do we really wonder what makes people drink?

Another major world power waging another war: boo.

Lorraine Schneider put it very well with her 1967 poster:

My big pile o' big boxes o' shit, OR: Can you get sick from homebrewing?

I'm spending this rainy Saturday afternoon the same way I spent Friday night: going through boxes of old papers and shit. While I'm getting much, much better at it, I have long had this bad habit of hanging on to old pieces of random papers, receipts, and so on.

J hates it. She calls them "*****'s pile". Occasionally these piles get thrown into a box, labeled with a year, and tossed carelessly into a closet, garage, or the middle of the living room. The great thing about these boxes is that many of them have been consolidated multiple times over the years, so some of them have scraps of paper from college, and high school. That's right: I have letters and notes and other goodies dating to the late 1980s.

For about the last six months, J has been employing what I would call the passive stick approach: she was hoping that leaving the pile of twelve or so boxes in a big stack in the living room would cause me to do something about them. Ha! I just ignore them, and we both treat the pile like a weird piece of pomo furniture, and so there they have sat for half a year. Recently J switched to what I'll term the active carrot approach, asking me what schedule I'd agree to to go through the boxes (preferably discarding most of their contents) and what prize I wanted for each box. I negotiated a two boxes per month schedule, and J has to personally go get a keg filled and bring it back for every box I do. Pretty sweet, huh?

I may or may not do multiple posts with the little gems I'm coming across. Here's today's gem, relating to the oft-asked question "can you get sick from homebrew?" Now, some nitwits online insist that you absolutely cannot get seriously ill from homebrewing. I don't have a definitive answer to the question, but let's be serious here: you clearly COULD get seriously ill from homebrewing. I mean, you could adhere strictly to Rule #1 (never brew sober), get super drunk while brewing, dig around in the kitchen for some cheap gravity booster (aka table sugar), and accidentally toss two pounds of dish detergent into your boil instead of sugar. C'mon: it's white and powdery and smells nice, right?

I digress. The first time I ever helped with an all grain batch was in October 1999, with A & T, who taught me how to homebrew. Our first attempt at all grain in T's newly constructed system was a barleywine. (Why not go all the way?) While mashing, we racked the previous weekend's extract + specialty grain APA (american pale ale) to secondary, and drew off a healthy sample to measure gravity and taste. By healthy I mean that we actually drew off three samples: T had a very small amount in a small glass (maybe a couple ounces), A had about double that (perhaps a third of a pint glass), and I, being a glutton with poor judgment, had most of a full wheat beer glass of the beer. It was delicious: probably the third or fourth time T had brewed this excellent APA, and all indications were that this would be yet another excellent batch.

Important context: for sanitizing equipment, including the plastic racking tube and plastic hoses, we were using rubbing alcohol. And not the low grade 70% rubbing alcohol you normally use for standard household applications. No, if a little is good, then surely a lot is better, so we were using 99% rubbing alcohol, which is about as close to rocket fuel as you can buy at CVS. Turns out the cheap vinyl thinwall tubing is no match for this crazy shit, and the rubbing alcohol stuff tends to degrade the tubing. Which leads to barely visible cracks. Which harbor bacteria. You can see where this is going, no?

In any event, we go on brewing, making what would ultimately turn out to be an outstanding all grain barleywine, that I'd come to refer to as "Diarrhea Barleywine" or "Hospital Barleywine." See, T (consuming the smallest amount) ended up having a slightly upset stomach, A (consuming the medium amount) had a seriously upset stomach and really didn't feel good. I was a stupid pig, consumed the largest amount, and beginning around midnight that night, spent most of the night on the toilet. I'll spare you, kind reader, the really gory details, but let's say it was convenient that I was able to sit on the toilet, and simultaneously lean over and have my head over the bathtub. Oh, my poor housemates. I called the student health center in the morning and talked to my primary care physician, who upon learning that I'd had approximately thirty distinct batches of diarrhea, and vomited approximately twenty or thirty times and was now puking up clear bile, told me to not come anywhere near the student health center, but instead proceed directly to New England Baptist hospital, do not pass go.

This being my second year of law school, I was feeling awfully low on cash, and had a T pass, so of course I took the #39 bus to as close to the hospital as possible. Oh, my poor fellow passengers. I then walked up the hill from Huntington Avenue to New England Baptist, which is an average to steep hill, and under normal circumstances should take around three to five minutes to walk up. I think it took me about twenty minutes, as I had to stop several times to keep from collapsing, and vomit up bile in the gutter. I rolled in to the outpatient urgent care clinic, who took one look at me and sent me to a bed while they drew blood samples and took stool samples. In short order, my body chemistry tests came back totally out of whack, and they decided to admit me for severe dehydration.

I spent two nights and three days with constant IV rehydration running, on a floor with people who were actually genuinely ill. The nursing staff, understandably, was nice to me but didn't spend a whole lot of energy on me, and I had to buzz every time the IV fluid ran out, setting off an alarm on the IV unit that is only ear-splitting when you're within feet of it. By the second day I felt strong enough to get up and go to the bathroom myself without assistance, and by the end of the third day I actually made it down to the gift shop to buy myself a book. Sure, I had plenty of reading to do for my law school classes, but instead I read two Stephen King novels in an evening.

ANYWAY... here's some fun documentary evidence I came across while going through one of my boxes o' shit:

This is a copy of the room bill. It's a very, very good thing that Massachusetts law requires all full time students to have health insurance, and so (most? all?) schools provide it as part of your tuition and fees.


And here's a separate bill for three physician visits.



There's a potential variable, though: we ate at a somewhat sketchy Mexican restaurant in Saugus on Saturday evening. This is a copy of the receipt.


And finally, just for fun, here's the weird drawing on the back of that receipt. I can't explain it. I actually can't tell if I drew it, or T did. It looks like something I'd draw, but T is a way better artist than me, so if you think it's good, credit it to T.

The moral of the story? Homebrewing may or may not occasionally get you sick.

p.s. A note on image quality and privacy: just in case you're one of those people with nothing better to do than try to mine images and word documents online to undo edits, and see personal information, I wouldn't bother with these: except for the funny face, they're all scans of screen images.

Notes about police and dissent

Check out this youtube video of a uniformed NYPD police officer violently attacking a cyclist peacefully participating in a Critical Mass bike ride. Then read the various lies the officer told in a sworn statement, detailed in this New York Times article.

In case you think this NYPD brutality of Critical Mass cyclists was an isolated incident, next watch " this youtube video, then start clicking through all of the similar videos that are linked through these pages.

Think about this the next time you hear about the police, and police brutality, and are wondering who to believe, or are inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the police. From professional and personal experience, I quit giving any such benefit a long time ago.

a new toy...
...
....

Per the request of my sister, who apparently only visits my blog once a month or so...

Images from our trip to Oahu... a month and a half ago. Ahem!

A stairway on the hike up to the top of Diamond Head crater, at Diamond Head State Monument.


This is the view from the top of the Diamond Head hike, looking south to the ocean.


The Aloha Tower.


Kamehameha the Great Statue. It's outside of the Judiciary History Center, which has a smallish but good museum staffed by very kind and very bored volunteers, and the world's most sensitive metal detector to get inside.


Kamehameha the Great with a tree growing out of his head.


A whomping willow (a.k.a. banyan tree) on the grounds of Iolani Palace.


Obligatory pictures of the the USS Arizona Monument. I know I'm likely to take some flak for this, but it is perhaps the most overrated tourist attraction on earth after Wall Drug and South of the Border. I mean, seriously, the World's Largest Ball of Twine beats the hell out of this. The museum is actually quite good, if crammed and small.

We waited for several hours (we arrived at 9:10am, and got tickets for the 11:40am trip.) The required movie was deeply mediocre, and the memorial itself was amazingly uninteresting and undynamic once you actually get out to it. The memorial itself was definitely the most boring National Park Service unit I've ever been to.

A couple tips in case you decide to ignore my advice and go anyway: the supposedly heightened security measures are a joke. If you can fit it in your pocket, you can get it in. Also, some of the guidebooks, including Frommer's, claim you have to wear closed-toed shoes. Nope: nobody (including the rentacops at the main entrance, the docents/volunteers that take your ticket for the movie and boat ride to the memorial, the US Navy sailors that run the boat shuttles to the memorial, and the National Park Service ranger at the memorial itself) enforces it, and we saw dozens of people wearing flip-flops and sandals on the boat and at the memorial.


More of the USS Arizona.

J looking at the bubbling oil.


A close-up of the bubbling oil.


A distant view of the hotel/resort, the Marriott Ko Olina Beach Club, that I'm very glad we had points to pay for. It was nice enough (except for the rude fuckers in the room next to us for the first half of our stay, who played loud music late into the night, and regularly smoked in the room and on the patio despite very, very clear resort rules against it) but way out on the southwest side of the island. The restaurants are predictably overpriced and uninteresting, though there is a Safeway and strip mall with a dozen or so restaurant choices about two and a half miles away in Kapolei.

We did a nice drive around the entire island, and took some pictures of the North Shore, but for some weird reason I can't find them now. I guess they could still be on the camera, though it was before the trip to Diamond Head. Hmmm. Dunno.

Probably the highlight of the trip was the three hour afternoon snorkeling trip on the Ko Olina Cat.

More garden pics

Okay, it's a little lame, as these are actually about two weeks old, and the cabbage and broccoli in particular are roaring. Maybe I'll take some more pictures today, in between installing a wall-hung table in the kitchen, mowing the lawn, thinning the lettuce, and so on.


This is the lettuce, spinach, and broccoli bed. Lettuce mix is in the top left corner, spinach on the left in the middle of the bed, and broccoli in the bottom right. All were grown from seed.


This is about halfway through thinning the spinach. Unfortunately, the thinned spinach tasted pretty much like eating grass in elementary school. I have higher hopes for the end product, which is tearing along post-thin.


And this is the bed in the driveway circle. Clockwise, from top left corner: broccoli, rosemary, fennel, green peppers, broccoli, tomato.

Okay -- back to everything else I have to do.

Vegetable gardening in Anchorage is:

a bit of a challenge.

Cool spring temperatures have made the outside sad, and the and are struggling as well. The and are starting to creep up, though, and of course the is rocking and rolling, as are the and , which I need to go thin and transplant now.