Bailey

Meet Bailey, our chocolate gift for Valentines!

Winter, and All We Need

Here's a little mid-winter update on what has (mostly hasn't) been happening in the garden, what I want to plant for the Spring, and a simple fact of life itself...

I pulled up the cauliflower not because I harvested and ate it all, but because it began to flower and stank my fridge up. A couple of pounds of cauliflower in a big gallon Ziploc went pretty much entirely to waste, and the rest never even made it out of the garden. I will have to remember to grow desirable vegetables from now on. Not all was completely wasted as the plants and un-eaten heads found their way to the bottom of the leaf bin - which brings me to the next topic.

The compost I have been preparing since July is looking really nice, and I stopped adding new things to it (diverting new compost into the leaf bin) on the 1st of the year to allow it to be more thoroughly composted for this spring's garden. I look forward to adding the compost to my gardens here in a few weeks before I plant. I will be sure to post some pictures of that.

As far as what I will be growing... I know I want to grow a lot of corn, squash, peas, and cucumbers this spring, and I think I might plant a few tomatoes, but not as much as I did this past fall. I also want to plant okra because it's easy and it's the only thing that will keep growing after the summer heat sets. I am going to try something called "Three Sisters" which is a method of companion-planting successfully used by the Native Americans. I will post a detailed narrative of the experiment.

Abbey and I went to Ganado to visit her grandparents during the holidays and I saw how her Pa Pa was growing an entire patch of garlic (I planted mine mid-September and nothing had sprouted at that point). He said that every single clove sprouted as I looked down the rows and rows of it. Apparently all I needed to do was water it really good once a week - plants like water - go figure. The cloves I planted in September finally came up around Christmas after laying dormant for three months in the dirt! After all the fertilizer and mulch and waiting, all it wanted was some water. Good thing garlic likes the cool weather, as mine is having quite a delayed growing season. All it needed was water to sprout...

The chemical reactions and miracle for life lay waiting, only needing some H2O.

I guess all we need sometimes is all we need. truly truly...

Travis Forney RN

Wow, that was the hardest exam of my life! The NCLEX is a "computer adaptive test" which means it figures out your competency level and weaknesses and continuously raises the bar throughout the test based on your performance. I walked into the testing center with an air of confidence, most of which was obliterated by the computer (which decided to take me all the way to question 139 before quitting). I had to remember everything from pre-menopausal teaching to celiac disease dietary restrictions, APGAR scoring, drugs and their antidotes, the list goes on. The worst part is waiting the 48 hours before you find out the results... forget trying to enjoy a meal or a movie or a good night's sleep during this time. At 48 hours to the second (0800 this morning for me) the test-taker can look online for their results. What a relief it truly is too see such a simple word.

pass

Take that computer!

How awesome it was to get this result as I began my second day at University Hospital, where I will work as an RN in the trauma center. Wow, praise the Lord.

Authorized to Test

Well, It happened today. I received my authorization to take the NCLEX-RN exam and have been scheduled to take it on January the 6th! It's kinda important, so l am going to get back to studying my butt off. Everyone have a happy and restful holiday season!

Pulled up the Tomatoes

Finally finding enough time to work in the garden this weekend, I decided to pull up the tomatoes. They were really looking bad, and Abbey said the smaller ones were not tasting very good anymore. So now I have a ton of green ones, which will be slowly turning red over the next few weeks (hopefully).

Here is my largest cauliflower, 

Broccoli heads are getting bigger!

And, as always Gideon is helping.

Turning the Last Page

I wrote this while I was thinking about the relationship that is formed between a good book and it's reader. You know that feeling you get when you finally finish a good book?

Turning the Last Page

Your pages turn with anticipation,

your characters are colors in my mind,

you're crafted by soul, and linger in heart.

And with such joy I leap from page to page!

Watching them rise and fall like a slow breath.

Soon discovering what we have become, 

as your last page turns and rests silently.

Now closed, you lay in my lap. It's a curse,

to read you for the first time only once.

With innocent ignorance, I wish I 

could slowly read through your pages again!

I wish to be taken by you for the 

first time once more, along your unknown paths, 

without knowing beforehand your beauty.

To read not knowing how much you loved me, 

even before you became the slightest 

thought in my head, innocent though it was.

It is a worse curse though, to not know you. 

And now, looking forward, what a joy it 

truly is, for my heart to have a home!

Photolog 11/24/2008

Gideon helped me make rounds in the garden today!

Well, you can tell the cold nights have been hitting my tomatoes and okra - they look all brown and crunchy. I am waiting for the last of the tomatoes to turn red and I am letting one of the okra pods go to seed for the spring batch. Just from a single pod there will be way more okra seeds than I could plant in one season, so if anyone is interested...

Broccoli is putting out some heads!

Cilantro likes cooler weather, and it's really hard not to pick and eat at it. I'll give it another week!

Healing from Poison Oak and Radiohead

At least for now I'm not itching anymore!

My dermatologist PA hooked me up some oral and topical steroid meds to help me endure the next week. I am already seeing a difference after only a day, and already plan to go climbing again this weekend (at Enchanted Rock, NOT Reimer's Ranch!)

ALSO:

Radiohead performed a show in Japan where they had 12 cameras recording them at all times. follow the link below to create your own personal video of 15 Step. The view is kinda grainy while you make the vid, but when you play it back it's pretty clear. Awesome! I hope they put up some more songs in the future!

http://www.wowow.co.jp/music/radiohead/special/

The Poison Oak at Reimers Ranch

DON'T DO IT!

I went climbing last weekend for the first time since May, and I was disappointed with my performance. Back in Colorado Shaun and I were climbing routes that were 5.10-5.11 difficulty every day. Last Saturday I could barely break 5.8, and wore myself out trying to get past the crux move on a 5.9. To add some serious injury to that insult I discovered a rash beginning to form on my left arm Monday morning...

I went rock climbing at Reimers Ranch and all I got was Poison Oak. (For all the climbers who are looking to climb out at Reimers who ended up here because of a search engine: the poison oak I got into is to the right of the bee cave, you can't miss it.)

Of all the plants that I will highlight in this blog, these are the only ones I officially hate with a passion. I know, I know, hating a plant sounds a little ridiculous, so maybe a better way to say it is to say that I would rather they didn't exist at all, or I wouldn't shed a tear at their extinction. The plant belongs to the genus Toxicodendron, and is known to the unfortunate outdoorsman as poison oak. It has an oil (called urushiol) that binds to the surface proteins on your skin cells. Your body then recognizes the cells as foreign invaders and this causes an auto-immune reaction. Over the next two weeks your body goes through a miserable civil war between your epidermis and a T-Cell mediated immune response. The war does not end until your immune response is done completely metabolizing the urushiol along with any cell it ever touched. SUCK.

Up close and personal with my favorite plant in the whole world.

Poison Oak and I have a bit of a history together, so I knew it right when I saw it. I recognized it growing out of the route we were climbing and yet I climbed on. I assumed I would stay out of it for some reason... STUPID. Apparently I mashed my left elbow down into it real good at some point. From there I scratched the urushiol underneath the fingernails of my right hand, and from there I spread it to the rest of my body (save only one special place PRAISE THE LORD!). It's just about everywhere by now, both arms, both legs, my torso, my head and neck, my left foot, and inside my belly button (can't really explain that one). The thing about urushiol is that the places that receive the highest dose get a rash first, and the places that got a lesser dose continue to pop up all over during the course of the first week. This leads one to believe that they are still spreading it, when in reality all the spreading was done before you took your first shower. 

Sounds terrible huh... it gets worse. This crap gets way worse... I'm talking longevity.

The worst part is that the urushiol will stay on objects it came in contact with, like the climbing rope and all my gear for example. So now I must give everything a good scrubbing with a soapy water/ rubbing alcohol mixture and hope that it's gone (there is only one way to find out). Also, I must make the decision to never, ever, use Shaun's rope again as it was practically dragged through the stuff. A new rope is 200 bucks.

So not only did I not climb well, I am absolutely miserable for the time being. I am going to make an appointment on Monday so I can get some high-strength corticosteroid pills/cream. Till then it's a Benadryl every four hours and an Aveeno bath before bed. The itching is so bad, I have to practically put myself in a Benadryl-induced coma just to sleep more than four hours at night.

Still, it could be a whole lot worse... I could be sitting in some ashes scraping myself with a piece of broken pottery. No matter how bad life gets we can always tell ourselves that Job had it worse. Abbey has been really gracious with me and my uncomfortable impatience this week, and that alone has allowed me to keep my sanity.

"Curse God and die" she tells him.

Photolog 10/31/2008: Halloween

Well, the weather has been pretty close to perfect for my fall garden. The days have been warm but not too warm, and the nights have been cold but not too cold. In this turbulent political season my veggies are growing great, my garden quietly existing in peace as Joe The Plumber talks about the impending annihilation of Israel. I am sooo happy to not have a TV, but somehow I still hear about this crap!

More importantly, it was Shady's birthday on Friday and we had all kinds of fun carving out a pumpkin and playing with her new toy.

Happy Birthday Shady!

Shady's new toy is a Dora the Explorer fishing pole, and let's just say that Gideon thinks it's his birthday too.

Here's a pic of Gideon chasing a lure in the backyard.