- (https://b-ark.ca/ksKKwg)
I’m riding in the 2025 Enbridge Tour Alberta for Cancer, raising money for the Alberta Cancer Foundation, and have so far raised $2,744, exceeding my $2,500 goal and surpassing my 2024 effort!
Help me by donating here
And remember, by donating you earn a chance to win a pair of hand knitted socks!
To Holiday or Not To Holiday
So the weather is looking pretty darn fine, right now, and tomorrow, in theory, it’s supposed to be 24 and a mix of sun and cloud. It seems like a great day to take off. And yet… I’m torn.
You see, on a day like today (or perhaps tomorrow), my idea of a perfect afternoon is as follows:
- Load up bike with book and blanket.
- Cycle to grocery store and acquire supplies for sandwiches (ham and swiss preferred), along with fruit and beverage.
- Go to local park, say Hermitage, find a nice tree, and bask.
- Eat lunch.
- Read.
- Eventually go home.
That’s basically it. Quiet. Peaceful. A good book and some food. This is a perfect day for me.
The trouble is the weather. You see, a couple weeks ago I tried to execute this plan. I took a Friday off in anticipation of good weather, and was quite excited to get out and enjoy it. You can guess what actually happened. Cloudy. Dreary. Warm, but not fantastic. It was really quite a disappointment.
So the question is, do I tempt fate and try it again tomorrow? I really don’t know… I think I should, but I’m afraid of being disappointed again. Stupid Mother Nature… so fickle…
Yard Work Continued
Well, believe it or not, I achieved all of my necessary goals from yesterday. The garden got staked out, the rhubarb made it into the ground (though slightly the worse for wear, I think…), and the composter is now assembled with a bed of twigs in the bottom, ready to accept it’s first household waste! Which doesn’t sound nearly as awesome when I write it out like that…
Anyway, the rhubarb was probably the biggest challenge. It was previously housed in an old tub that, I believe, was intended to be sunk into the ground and turned into a small pond (thanks, Mom… :). As a result, I had to dig around the outside edge and, eventually, man-handle the thing out of the container, damaging the root ball in the process (which had completely filled the tub, much to my surprise). Fortunately, this plant has already proved itself quite hardy (surviving an artificially induced drought last fall) so I hold out some hope that it will survive unscathed.
The only other tricky bit was deciding where to put the garden. The tree was, thanks to me, unfortunately placed last fall, due to a lack of complete understanding regarding the dimensions of our yard. As a result, I had to take Lenore’s suggestion and extend the garden in behind the tree, in order to use up that dead space… obviously shade-loving plants will need to grow there. You can see the layout in this photo:
In total, the back section is 4’x5’, and the front is 6’x19’, for a total of 134 square feet (I think… :). My goal was to make it possible to divide it up into 2 or 4 square foot sections, rather than doing long rows. We’ll see how that works out.
Busy Busy Weekend
As if having the in-laws over on the weekend didn’t make things hectic enough, it was also Mother’s Day on Sunday (which is, in part, why the in-laws were here), and to top it off, I was actually feeling motivated and decided to get a bunch of TODO items off my list.
So, in between hanging out with the mother- and brother-in-law and joining my sister and mom for a nice brunch at The Manor Café (which is, BTW, an excellent restaurant… the brunch was really fantastic), I also:
- Got the push mower assembled and the front yard lawn cut.
- Rented a lawn roller and compressed the soil in the backyard and parging, after which I started staking out the garden area (though Lenore and I still need to discuss general positioning, etc ;).
And, as if that wasn’t enough, I also did a little bunny-cage-refactoring. You see, we have this giant, home-made bunny cage, depicted below (note, this is an old picture… the cage went through some other minor refactoring since this photo was taken):
Now, the first thing you might ask yourself is, why so big? Well, the plan was to have our two bunnies co-habitate eventually, but alas, that is not to be. So, until yesterday, Herbie, our smaller rabbit, was in the giant cage, and Chloe was in a rather small floor cage (since her Abscesses made it necessary to keep her cage really clean, a task more easily achieved in a smaller cage). This was doubly silly since Herbie never really used the upper floors, anyway.
But all that has changed! I decided this situation was downright silly (not to mention space inefficient) and modded the mansion, dividing it in half, thus creating two cages, one in the top half and one in the bottom, with Herbie remaining in the bottom, and Chloe now inhabiting the top. Photos to come once I get around to taking some.
Meanwhile, tonight the plan is to get the final garden position staked out, the compost started, and perhaps the unkillable Rhubarb in the ground. And if I still have time, maybe I’ll start planting the annuals that we bought on the weekend…
Update:
Here’s the image of the new cage layout. Images of the yardwork, still pending.
Well Worn Ruts
So, the text editor adventure continues. It’s funny, for a long time now coding has lost some of it’s fascination. This is probably at least in part because I’ve been doing it for… 12 years now. Jebus. Thus, I’ve found myself in a bit of a rut. But now I actually find myself looking for reasons to code, if anything to give me an excuse to further explore the power of Vim. Go figure.
‘course, the real question is, what do I work on with my shiny new editor? I could work on, like, work, but that seems wrong somehow. Work on my off-time? How is that a good idea? I could try to come up with a project of my own, but I’m largely tapped out for ideas right now. Or I could continue to try and hack away with POV-Ray… though I’m hardly artistically talented. It’s a bit of a quandry.
What I should really do is see if there’s a script for Vim to publish to a wiki. And should I be unable to find one, maybe I should try to hack one up myself! Hmm… I see a project brewing…