Dave's Cave

One of my big complaints about home canning is that I have to do it inside in the summer. Electric hotplates don't heat up enough, and most outdoor gas burners get too hot with too little control, or they can't handle the weight.

I went to see Maya Angelou speak at Evergreen the other night. For a 78 year old with bad knees, that lady still has a lot of kick in her. I've heard several civil rights activists speak over the years, and I have to say that there is no comparison. There is a reason that this woman is so loved.

Laurie and I went to see the show Fine Times At Our House with Joe McHugh, Paula McHugh and Forrest Newton at Evergreen last night. The show was great, and the price was right, $10 for Laurie and free for me with my student ID.

It was a combination of old-time music, storytelling by the fiddle player (Joe McHugh) and paintings (Paula McHugh). I was having trouble imagining how they would work the paintings into it, but it worked out really well. Paula did her series of painting based on the titles of some of the old-time fiddle tunes.

What is the point to Amish Friendship Bread?

You make a sourdough starter, mix and feed it for 8 days, then you make a frigging quickbread with it?!?!

Not to mention, the one we got recently seemed like a rather disgusting idea if we had followed the directions from the start. White flour, milk mixed in to the starter, add pudding mix. Not very friendly if you ask me.

Animal products such as the milk and eggs should only be added right before the final mixing for the bread or cake, not in the starter.

I've been attending The Evergreen State College for a year now, and I finally became an admitted student today!

I'm sure that sounds odd, but they allow you to attend up to 8 credits worth of classes a quarter as an unadmitted student. The reason that I didn't apply for admission earlier has to do with the admission policy that you have to be in good standing at your previous school. Well, 25 years ago I attended the local Junior College and achieved the distinction of making it to academic probation. Oops.

During the break between fall and winter quarters, I had high hopes of getting in a lot of work on my new websites, as well as some of the old ones.

Of course, immediately after school was out, the plan was to just crash for a few days, and I accomplished that with no problems whatsoever. I didn't even want to go snowshoeing with Laurie.

When the Pineapple Express hit us in November, it dumped 18 inches of rain on Mt. Rainier in just 36 hours, and the damage has kept the park closed ever since. So Laurie had to find an area to go up near the northwest corner of the park, where she could walk in till there was enough snow on the ground.

Our quest for a good local gym continues. Today we stopped by the Lacey Athletic Club which just opened. It was disappointing to say the least.

As soon as we walked in we noticed that all the cardio equipment was by one company, Star Trac. Neither of us are huge fans of the Star Trac cardio line; they just don't fit us all that well. At our last gym, no one ever rode the star-trac bikes because of their bad fit.

We had our first hard frost of the season last night, it looks like it dropped down to around 29 degrees. The weather service is saying that it will be down to about 26 tomorrow morning.

The chile plants that weren't under a tunnel have been pulled up and aging in the garage for a couple of weeks now, and the tomatoes and tomatillos have been looking pretty sad as well.

This year I got low tunnels over 2 of the chile beds, and it looks like most of them survived last night, but I kinda doubt that I will be as lucky tonight if it makes it down to 26.

I'm not complaining about the frost though, for the last 2 years, the first killing frost was in September.

Laurie's friend Cheryl and her daughter Kaeli are moving up to Tacoma from Portland! Cheryl just accepted a job as a small public library director in North Tacoma, so they will be moving up here by the end of August.

Two years ago at Christmas, Cheryl adopted Kaeli in China and Laurie went along as Cheryl's support person. We've gone down there as often as we could, but we still feel like we are missing too much of her growing up.

Kaeli just turned three in early July when we got her a sleeping bag and a pillow for camping. We were going to try and arrange a camping trip with them sometime this summer or fall, and now it looks like we will have a lot more opportunities to test out that sleeping bag. There is no doubt in my mind that she is going to love camping out, and later on become quite a little backpacker. Before her second birthday she was laready going for walks in parks of over a mile.

We just got a card from the City of Lacey Water Utility in the mail that really has me baffled (well, not really). they now have an odd/even outdoor watering schedule going through the summer months.

This really isn't all that strange, many communities around the country implement something similar during droughts. The thing is that we aren't in a drought! We actually had above average precipitation this year and there is still a deeper than average snowpack.

What has me confused, is that that really annoying development to the south of us had to get approval from the water district, verifying that they had enough water to serve all those new houses. In fact, just along Marvin Road there are probably over 5,000 houses in the various developments out there. All these had to be approved by the water district!

Well, I finally got all my tomatoes, chiles and eggplant all in the ground, and only a couple of weeks late.

I had far more plants germinate and survive than I had expected, so I had to finish up a couple of planting beds. Between Laurie's dad dying and a whole lot of rainly days, those beds just didn''t het done in time.

And now that the beds are in, I need to build the low tunnels over them and put in the drip lines. I also have to cut up another roll of remesh to make another batch of tomato cages. Oh yeah, there is still plenty of weeding left to do as well.

I have a real love hat relationship with spring. All the buds coming out, and the green appearing on the trees is beautiful. The part I hate is the allergies!

Here in the Pacific Northwest the vile, evil Scotch Broom is now blooming, and I'm having trouble breathing. But I don't have it all that bad compared to Laurie, it is just about impossible for her to breath, and she has tried just about every treatment there is.

The funny thing is that there are actually people that claim that it is not Scotch Broom that cause the allergies, because some allergy specialist back in the 50s declared that the pollen was too large to cause the problems. They claim that it's the grass or ash or alder or some other thing. Here's the problem with that theory, Scotch broom grows in a wider variety of locations than any of those other things. There isn't much grass in a redwood forest, but I get the same response when the Scotch Broom is blooming there, as when it is blooming in the meadow down the road.

The Olympia Farmers Market opened for the season today, and I was unable to resist!

Of course, it's too early in the season to have a huge selection of produce, but a lot of the spring starts are out, and there is always Stewart's Meats to load up on my sausage.

did start some of my own broccoli this year, but the mice got into the starts and dug up the seeds, so I picked up two 6-packs of really nice looking plants from one of the organic growers. As always, I had to go with at least one pack of Packman Broccoli, as that is the one that made me discover that I actually like home grown broccoli. And for the second 6-pack I went with one that has red tinged heads.

Back in early January, our dog Sammy developed a cough that wasn't going away like most dog coughs usually do, so I brought him to the vet. Of course, I was expecting a report of upper resiratory infection or even pnemonia, but I was shocked into speachlessness by a diagnosis of an advanced heart murmur and congestive heart failure.

Of course, I had no real idea what congestive heart failure (CHF) was, but any time you have the words "heart" and "failure" next to each other, it cannot be a good thing.

My simple layman's understanding of this is that the heart valve does not close properly, allowing the blood to go back into the heart. This requires the heart to pump harder, making it bigger and stronger, which actually makes it harder for the valve to work properly. This somehow leads to a problem of the body retaining fluids, especially in the lungs, which was what was leading to the cough.

The drupal module to catch comment spam caught a posting this morning. Very cool.

I'll be more impressed when I start getting a lot more comments as well as spam comments.

Just to increase my fun playing with it, I also entered the IP address into the Troll module with a one month ban. It came from a DSL line in Germany, so I am thinking about sending an abuse report to them to see if they pull that user's account.

It looks like we lost another tree due to the wind today. This one is a little mor annoying than the snags that we have lost, as this one is a live douglass fir that was helping block some of the sun coming through my computer room window in the evening.

Unlike the snag that snapped it's trunk about 3 feet up, this one lifted out it's rootball. Oddly enough, it was less than a foot away from a much larger snag that didn't go over.

We woke up this moring to the sound of the wind blowing hard, but when I checked wunderground a couple hours later they said that the winds were 5 mph, gusting to 8. Interesting. Now that the rain has come, and the wind has dropped down to a gentle breeze, wunderground is telling me that the wind is at 10, gusting to 11.

How stupid does a mouse have to be to decide that a house with 3 cts and a dog would be a good place to live? Not only that, but it repeatedly saw them when running between two holes under the kitchen cabinets.

Well, it learned last night that it may not be a good place to live, but it iscertainly a good place to die. There was just a tail and some guts left on the floor.

I'm guessing that itcame in under the dishwasher from the crawlspace, so today's plan is to look into getting some sort of screen over those crawlspace vents.

It is really quite funny following some of the lists that discuss Peak Oil. Maybe 1 in 20 of the members are interested in considering the real implications, and the other 95% are mostly the doom and gloom sort that jump from one potential catastrophe to the next. Y2K did not pan out for them, so now they are jumping on the Peak Oil bandwagon. Many of them are actually cheering for the downfall of civilization.

Just like with Y2K, there are a hell of a lot of potential outcomes, and while the one they are hoping for is certainly a possibility, I wouldn't bet on it. Not only do we have all the technology that we had available before the oil age, we have improved on a lot of it. Here in the Northwest we don't burn oil to generate our electricity, we get it from the turbines in the dams.

When Laurie was at school yesterday, she found out that 24 Hour Fitness was opening a Sport Club at our exit off of I-5!

Mind you, I'm not exactly in love with the company, they have a lot of policies that drive me nuts, but I like gyms that are open 24/7. The one we belong to now is in downtown Lacey in an office building. It does the minimum job that we require of it, but it has no pool, no spa, the aerobics room is about 15 feet square and they bought all their weight machines from one vendor.

Today, I have a huge list of little things that I need to get done, but on the top of that list is to figure out what seeds I need to order, and get at least one of the orders in.

Last year I took way too long and totally missed the February planting date for my broccoli starts. Hell, I even ended up starting my tomatoes and chiles later than I wanted. I really want to avoid having that happen again.

I also want to try some different vendors than last year, just for the fun and variety of it. Last year it was pinetree Garden Seeds, Tough Love Chile Company and Totally Tomatoes. I also picked up some seeds locally from Territorial Seed, which is a catalog outfit down in Oregon that is stocked by several of the stores up here.