So I let the daily blogging thing go by the wayside. Winters – or, more accurately, waiting for spring to really get rolling – are a bit boring on the ranch. I probably should have been painting more, or working more on the neverending to-do list, but the fatigue factor really got to me. Now that I’m on some supplements to get my B levels back up, I feel a whole lot better, and more like my old self. Still not taking iron supps, though, and I’m definitely not eating any liver, so that’s still a work in progress.
But progress there is: all of the first round of flats, except two, have been transplanted: tomatoes and peppers, mostly. The other two flats have onions (plus one lonely little datil pepper that isn’t going to make it, like the other dozen that never bothered to germinate) and herbs (plus artichokes to replace the ones zapped by the severe freeze we had). I’ve also sown shelling peas, snap (green) beans, peanuts, three kinds of cucumbers, okra, carrots, spinach, and sweet potatoes, along with various herbs and flowers for the bees. Out back in the chicken yard, where we had composted some things over the past year and where the chickens had scratched around, I put in lima beans (ugh), sunflowers, and corn. Yes, corn. It is my personal windmill here on the ranch, and I have another variety I’d like to put in somewhere, too.
Yesterday we got over an inch and a half of rain, as measured by our very own weather station. Before the rains started, I had transplanted out a flat, and gave it up when the big thunder started rolling across the sky. It was only around 10 AM that it started storming, but it lasted almost all day. Much needed rain, although we’re still very short of normal.
Today, more sweet potatoes put in, the other flats put out, as much newspaper and hay put down as my back could stand, and two more flats started and put under the lights in the barn: paisano tomatoes for sauce, sweet basil, purple basil, and two types of tobacco for mom. Got another canvas started, added to one of the earlier ones that is now dry, dealt with an asshole who thinks we should have known to remove his account when he never bothered to let us know, bitching about the invoice the system generated – hey, my superpower of ESP still has not kicked in from the radiation, and no others have appeared either. That’s a bummer.
Several trees my mom swore were dead were just a little dead, and are now upgraded to alive, leafing and budding out. The peas, cukes, and okra have all started to poke their heads up. The snap beans are probably a week or so away from beginning to flower. We’ve had asparagus spears popping up for the past couple of weeks. It’s time to start prepping the spots the beehives will be in: two in the rear, one up front.
Tonight: seafood feast by request, as my sister is visiting from Illinois. Another attempt to view Jupiter and its moons before it slips away beyond our viewing period as the days get longer. Starting another canvas while the others dry a bit. Starting the reworking of our tutorials for our users, since our control panel has changed since the first round. Doing end of quarter stuff for the business. Relaxing. Maybe.
Dentist yesterday – two more rebuilt teeth to give them a little more life. Eye doc today – to check the clouding in one eye, and to learn that one of the major problems is that the right eye is too damn good at 20/15 while the left is at 20/20, and the left is my dominate eye. ENT next week – to deal with ice pick pain in one ear, rampant spasms, and a cough I can’t shake. I can think of very few months over the last few years where I haven’t visited some doctor’s office for something or other. There’s a bit of consistency to it all, I must say, even though some visits (dentist, ENT) can be moderately to very painful given the stress on my jaws from trying to open widely enough so they can get in there and do what needs to be done. I’m hoping to have more and more doc-free months as we go along, really. There are too many things that need to be done around here.
What’s most sad about this is that it has to be explained at all. Either people have gotten moronic over the years or it’s just more noticeable now that we’re in the Internet age.
In other news, a ton of weeding done in the back garden: five and a half rows done before my back decided it was time to stop. But there may be sowing of seed yet today after a little break.
Not the guard dog(s), no, even though they’re not much in the way of guarding anything. It’s typical for me to hear something outside before they do – but then again, it’s typical for me to hear something before anyone, so that isn’t terribly surprising.
The temp is changing. Fast. It was 80 here today, and with the possible exception of the horseshit aroma wafting in from the south since one of the redneck neighbors got a horse after a blissful year or so of not having one, an absolutely beautiful day. It would be perfect for weeding out the remnants of crap from some beds and starting the coolish weather seeds (peas, spinach) if it were not for my back still giving me fits. And here is my rant about my (GP) doctor’s office: I had blood work done and some xrays done, and I have no idea what any of them say. They haven’t called, and trying to call them results in a busy signal or the leaving of a message that is not returned. I’d like to think that means there’s nothing earth-shattering in the results, but I’d still like to know. It won’t change my less than patient attitude about my own health, but it would remove something form the todo list. Anyone who has seen my todo lists knows just how important that is.
In other news, I watched the latest Doomsday Preppers, and two of the three people they profiled just seem insane. One guy keeping his kids out of school to teach them how to interpret bird calls and drink from moss (his disappointment about one of his sons not sharing his enthusiasm for the end of the world is palpable) and one woman who has no life (she even admitted this) because she’s convinced the government is going to declare martial law any day now. Obviously, I didn’t expect the people they were likely to showcase to be too many steps about the conspiracy theory level, but living in constant dread of martial law, here? Please.
Last night at the GOP debate (part eleventy-two), the audience booed birth control. I suggest they all be given a delightful parting gift of a child to adopt.
This morning I headed to the doctor for an appointment scheduled to talk about the near-constant fatigue I’ve been feeling lately. I’m sleeping a lot more than I usually do, too – usually, it’s 4-5 hours, but lately it’s been 8-9. Those who know me know these things are highly abnormal.
It turned into a discussion of that and discussion about my back, which is not getting better as quickly as I want it to.
And all of that discussion turned into multiple blood workups (five vials worth), a trip to have a couple of xrays (which involved a rather excruciating flat xray plus two painful positioned xrays), and a trip to pick up the prescriptions he’d called in for me (one of which, being an opiate derivative, is making me sick as a dog).
To top all of that off, we had an issue with one of the servers today, but got it back on track and things were fine. Until someone at the NOC decided to run a particular operation on a mounted (active) filesystem, completely ignoring the giant warning that tells you running this on a mounted filesystem can cause irreparable damage. Sure enough, that’s exactly what it did, hosing the server and requiring a trip to the NOC to grab the backups so we could restore those sites to another server and start rebuilding the now dead, unbootable server.
As long as I was there, I was going to set up a new server for someone, rebuild the torpedoed server, and set up one for someone else who wants a larger server. Oh, and add another KVM unit so we can connect via console to even more servers remotely. None of that happened, as my stomach had emptied by then and the drugs were making me ill. Fortunately, one of my peeps was able to finish the restores I had started so I could pack up and get out of there.
And now, here I am, having some milk to get something in my stomach while checking on things so I can grab some sleep.
I’ve been watching the Doomsday Preppers show on National Geographic, and then the other night stumbled across Meet the Preppers: My Pink Gun on (of all networks) Animal Planet. The latter seems to be all about scaring the crap out of the kids, to the point of staging a kidnapping in a park of two of the kids. The people who are one hundred percent wrapped up in looking at everything as a disaster, or potential disaster – the show on NatGeo, for instance, had a couple who claimed to spend the equivalent of a fulltime job canning and putting up supplies each week – I have to ask: what about actually living the life that’s here right now? I’m all for being prepared, even though I discount some of the whacked out scenarios some of these people come up with, but I’m also a big believer in balance, and I have no intention of going down the rabbit hole and making it all I ever do. That’s no way to live, to me.
Something that serves no purpose whatsoever, designed merely to humiliate women and further degrade their control over their own bodies. Ironic that people who constantly harp about “too much government” have no problem with things like this, having the government step right in and dictate medical procedures. This ranks right up there in this war against women with the nutty debate over contraception (hint: YOU’RE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THIS ISSUE), and the supremely odious implication that there isn’t such a thing as “too much rape” in the armed forces, or by extension, that apparently all male members of the armed forces are rapists. Luckily, Jon Stewart had a field day with that latter piece of nonsense, so there’s no need for me to point out the obvious, other than to wonder just why Republicans seem to hate women so much.
