Farming dandelions while Aloysius sleeps on

The sun finally came out today. As well it might, it being the end of May and therefore the day before SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I woke up at 5.30am because a) it was an amazing sunrise which my body obviously wanted me to see, and b) the virus that felled Himself and Queenie has morphed into the streaming nose bit, which is good because that means it's nearly over, and bad because I was sleeping with Aloysius Snuffelupagus last night.

No, I didn't know his name was Aloysius either. There you go. You never leave this blog without learning something useful.

I lasted until about 6.40am and then I had to get up to get away from the noise.

I banged the door on the way out of the bedroom just to drive the point home.

But it was worth the early start to sit on the deck and listen to the birds justa singin' their little hearts out. Susan Boyd my ass - I counted eleven different melodies, most of them coming from pretty drab little birds.

We have a lot of smallish, brownish type birds that I haven't nailed yet. As well as blue jays (but they don't sing, they scream), a pair of wood pigeons who sound like owls, a pair of robins nesting in a tree near the driveway, chick-a-dees, the woodpecker of course, and a bird that sounds like a blackbird but I don't know what it is here.

Today, Raven visited us. That's the first time I've seen him.

Raven is of course, very important in Aboriginal storytelling, and his role in stories is very ambiguous, so I don't know if Raven is good or bad.

Whatever Raven feels like being I think.

And Bunny was sitting in the gravel pile munching on dandelion flowers.

How do I get Bunny to sit in the lawn and do this....

I wish I had a million Bunnies.

I should just call what I do in the yard what it is and tell the world I'm a dandelion farmer.

Anyway, I can't type for much longer because my hands are sore from weeding. I spent all day on the flower beds and really you can't tell I did.

The problem is my response ability. It's not up to a Canadian summer yet.

In Ireland, around March, weeds start to poke their heads up, and you mutter, yes.... hmmmm... must weed that bed.... and eventually you either get it done bit by bit, or you are useless, and the weeds get big and then you have a problem.

In Canada, around the end of April, the ground is still frozen for the most part, and it's about minus 3 in the morning, so there's nothing to be done unless you get a great day. Then in May, you start getting everything ready (Irish style) ... buy seeds, plant seeds, water seeds, mow lawn, get compost, draw garden plan, browse stores which open on Mother's Day, etc.

Then it's late May and suddenly its plus 10 in the morning and there are a gazillion fucking weeds where there was nothing but mulch the day before.

So instead of the nice day planting you had planned you spend the day communing with the fecundity, wondering if this is a plant or a weed.

Thankfully, the plants are similar enough so that I know what is a weed and what is a plant, but they come up INTERTWINED...

Anyways, because of the early start, quite a bit of the list got done. Himself got up and even though he is still ill did his best to help out with the heavy stuff.

So the beds are done, the pruning is done... I made one serious error so one of my plants look like it shaved its head with a lawnmower... the path to the front door is freshly gravelled, the lawn is mowed, (we only have one million dandelions now), the whipper snipping done.

Himself even tried to do some transplanting in the greenhouse, but it appears to have been taken over by hordes of angry biting ants. Judging by the bites on his feet.

Those of you who know me know that several years ago, I had an extraordinarily bad night one night. It involved a tent, a carpark, a horde of biting ants, a one horse town in central Venezuela, and a carload of copulating gauchos. It was traumatic. Needless to say I won't be going in the greenhouse until they've been eliminated.

Getting places.

Finally.

Of course, after a day of sunshine, there will be one million more weeds tomorrow.

Surprises with the morning coffee

Facebook is full of Irish friends enjoying the sunshine of the June Bank Holiday weekend.

Goddamn them all!

Here it is not a bank holiday weekend.

It is raining.

And we are still struggling with whatever insidious virus felled us this week.

Himself is still asleep, so I made my morning coffee and perambulated around the garden.

I'm starting to realise I've bitten off a little more than I can chew.

Without a Paddy.

This morning, I found a pile of wild strawberries blooming by the side of the shed.

And a slug in the greenhouse.

Curled around one of the zucchini plants.

How did he get in???

Today I really need to start transplanting those seeds into the beds we put into the greenhouse.

The grass needs to be mowed again.

We have too much grass. We could just mow the lawn and nothing else and that would be a full-time job.

The flowerbeds need to be weeded.

The main garden beds need to be worked on - we don't even have them cleared enough for topsoil.

I need to whipper snipper around the yard.

I need to prune some bushes so they'll grow up instead of out.

And all I want to do is go back to bed.

Bah. Hate being sick.

Nevermind what I felt about Nevermind

One of the problems with writing a personal blog is that you generally aren't near a computer when you are having slightly better than shallow thoughts. And I do my thinking in the car, or when I can't sleep, which makes even scribbling things down on a piece of paper difficult.

So, even when I have managed to figure something out, by the time I get round to blogging about it, I've usually forgotten what it was.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't know if this post is going anywhere.

But it's the journey, boys and girls...

We were in the car on Sunday, driving through the radio wasteland that is the Annapolis Valley, so I put on Nevermind and we listened to it for the first time in a long time.

I think Nevermind is the only album I own whose opening track brings me right back to the moment I heard it for the first time.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is November 1991. I am in my room in the GMB in Trinity. A friend up from Galway is raving about his newest tape. Accent Monkey is here and other people are coming and going as usual and we play it and it is fantastic so we play it six more times and then the girl upstairs (the one who has the enormously loud orgasms with someone called T-aaa-dddhhh--gggg-hhhh!!!!! twice a week) bangs on the floor so we stop.

Then the movie Singles came out a few months later. Set in Seattle, home of Nirvana, it made the twenty-something struggle to fit into the world of work and bills and adulthood hopelessly romantic, and we all thought we'd like to be Seattle grunge slacker green creatives who live in way cool co-op apartments and drink Starbucks coffee.

Well, I did.

While trying to find an adequate definition of the word 'slacker', I found this post from what could be described as a very early blog. It's called Barefoot Jim's Flat. Like Barefoot Jim, I've never considered the word slacker as describing someone who is 'workshy', unlike him I've always seen it as being in some way 'responsibility shy'.

It's hard to believe all that angst and hope and trepidation was swirling around my head nearly eighteen years ago.

It's also hard to believe I ever aspired to drinking Starbucks coffee, but there you go...

It's even harder to believe I'm still getting away with being a slacker. Even though it's not a word I can say outside my head anymore, and I had to move to Atlantic Canada (Capital of the Slacker Universe) to haul my ass back onto the slacker waggon train...

...because slacker's a dirty word these days...

Why, I don't know.

Look at the end result of all the running around and huffing and puffing and wheeling and dealing we did between 1996 - 2008.

What did we achieve that we could not have achieved in a more sustainable way and at a slightly slower pace?

I hope I never get taken in like that again.

I want to grow old and be a slacker Walmart greeter.

Alice Munro wins Man Booker International Prize

Hooray!! The Man Booker International Committee has decided to honour Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer this year.

Here's a piece from The Chronicle Herald: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/1124082.html

Everything I ever needed to know about being a woman I read in an Alice Munro story. Her writing has so much insight into femininity, being in a relationship, getting older, and just being a woman in today's world.

She is one of the greats.

And she's just the sweetest little old lady nowadays... when she's on the CBC news (as she is whenever she wins a prize) Peter Mansbridge just melts.

If you are near Trinity College on June 25th, when she gets her prize, give her a little wave from me and tell her I love her!!

And in other exciting female CanLit news, Anne Michaels has a new novel coming out this year, a long-awaited follow up to Fugitive Pieces.

Hard day at the Superstore

I feel stupid even writing about this, but I was so upset, I need to get it out of my system.

I've already tried two glasses of wine and telling Himself, who give him his due, got adequately upset on my behalf, but the stone is still in my shoe.

Here's the thing...

In our house, I usually do the food shopping.

I hate doing the food shopping... hate hate hate... and Himself quite likes browsing the bargains, so really we should swap chores and I should clean out the water filter or something. But it just works out better if I do the food shopping because I am the cook most of the time and I keep the mental tab of what's missing because I make it missing.

In other words I am a control freak who likes to know what's in the fridge.

Plus I hate doing the water filter.

So we spent the weekend on the island and I didn't get the shopping done and I realised on the bus there were no decent options for a nice Monday supper for a man who worked a ten hour day, so that meant even though it was already 6pm, I had to do the shopping.

Also I had to get gas.

Those of you who know me or read this blog will know I have an irrational hatred of getting gas.

It's expensive, it destroys the planet, it gives me guilt, and causes me poverty between May and November, plus I have to stand in a wind tunnel for ten minutes.

So this evening, with a heavy heart, instead of just heading on into the beauty of an Eastern Shore sunset, I turned into the Superstore that's near the Esso on the way to Hwy 207.

Heaved myself out of my replenished gas guzzling machine, retrieved my recyclable bags from the enormous trunk, felt the inevitable twitch of irony about that particular situation, and went in.

Note1: We are currently going through the transition from plastic to recyclable grocery bags in Nova Scotia, and Gifted Typist recently wrote a post on how that transition is going for her (never has a bag in the car) which was very true and very funny.

Note 2: There was a ridiculous but typical 'shock horror, germs invading Canada leading to appalling death, ohmygod' CBC piece on the radio this morning about how people are not laundering their recyclable shopping bags enough, and consequently there are germs in them from the meat (even though it is wrapped in plastic) and WE WILL ALL DIE.

Me, I had to do the recycled bag thing in Spanish in 1989, in German in 1990, and in Ireland in the 2000s, so I am an old hand at having the bags ready.

GT - Hang the bags on the inside front doorknob!!

Note 3: I am so friggin' cheap, I brought my recyclable shopping bags with me from Germany via Ireland.

Note 4: My green bag *shame* - I have never washed them. Everything I buy is wrapped in plastic FFS!!

So, I tear around the fresh produce section and buy veggies and meat.

I ignore the centre aisles, like a good shopper is supposed to do.

The supermarket is quiet. I trundle up to a checkout and unload.

She's talking to her friend.

She is a 'pass it over the scanner and toss it anywhere' checkout girl.

Normally in this store, they are Grade 12 'after school and a quick toke behind the store' checkout boys. So they forget to scan half the stuff, and then you have to unpack and tell him they are leeks or porcini mushrooms, or parmesan cheese or whatever, so they can find the code, and find the label and put everything on the counter straight etc.

This one is a full-timer.

But me, I am the Queen of anal retentive.

I am ready for her.

My bags are open - I catch the produce and throw it in one bag, I catch the meat and put it in the other.

While I am doing this, she is foostering under the counter.

I know what her game is, so I haul my bag of meat out of harms way back onto my trolley.

Credit card in hand I stand there, the picture of 'I packed my own bags and now I want to pay using your store's credit card so I can get points for my green bags' innocence.

Because you get extra points for using recyclable bags.

Which would imply that the store WANTS you to do that.

Plus you get charged for plastic.

She hauls out a roll of plastic bags and shouts at me.

YES, SHOUTS...

"I was GOING to pack the meat in plastic bags."

I said, 'that stuff about germs, it's just a plot created by the plastic bag companies.'

I was just trying to be funny....

She shook her fist in my face and screamed at me in frustration.

I stood there and said nothing, thinking, wow, every auld one in the store today must have insisted on wrapping everything in the green bag in plastic.

I felt her pain.

I did.

Then she *forgot* to give me my credit for my recyclable bags.

They don't forget, it's just really complicated and stupid, so they *forget*.

Which meant I had to a) ask for it, b) get one of those customer service shrugs which means, you are a nightmare green customer beyotch, c) get mad enough to queue up for a 'raincheck' at the Lotto counter, and d) feel like a fucking cheapskate doing it.

By the time I got back to the car I was in tears.

Mainly because I have to go through this every time I shop at this store.

Here's the thing....

1. If you as a company purport to offer me a choice to decline plastic wrapping, then offer me the choice:

Train your FUCKING staff to offer me the choice.

Untrain them to assume I want a different type of plastic and then shout at me because I decline it.

2. If you as a company feel that the plastics industry is in fact correct, and the plastic wrapping currently on the meat is allowing juice to leak into the recylable bags and potentially causing eColi, (and lawsuits) then stop using plastic altogether and wrap the meat in something impermeable... like... oooh... I dunno... greaseproof paper maybe...

Like they do in the store where I am planning to spend my $700 a month food budget starting on Friday.

3. If I pack the bags like your checkout person is supposed to do, then tell them to say thank you, like they do in the Spryfield Superstore, because I'M DOING THEIR FUCKING JOB.

I'm calling Stephen the manager tomorrow.

I'm really upset.

On so many levels.

And all I wanted to do was buy some meat and veg.

Hard day at the Superstore, Himself said.

Hard day indeed.

The respectable will always be with us

The utter shame I felt when listening to survivors of the Irish industrial school system speak about their ordeals last week on Canadian radio... I haven't really been able to put it into words.

But I thought Ann Marie Hourihane did a good job of it in today's Irish Times:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0525/1224247322712.html

Here in Canada there is a similar story with First Nations people...

Wolfram Alpha know nahtink!

I tried Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine, that's apparently not a search engine. There's a great article in The Guardian about it today, which says (and I'll try not to do a Maureen Dowd on this) that asking Alpha something is like asking someone sitting in a room full of idiots savant. In other words, if you ask a question and one of the IS knows the subject you'll get the dish on it, but if the expert IS is not in the room, the answer is 'huh?'.

So I typed in my hometown and got Egyptian currency, the birr.

I typed in Halifax and found out that the city is 52m above sea level.

I typed in my date of birth and learned that I was born on the same day as Beck.

I don't care to learn any of those facts. If I did, I would've bothered remembering them the last time I heard them.

Still, it's very excellent for doing hard sums - you just type in the equation - so I added it to the Favourites list anyway. Check it out.

Competition is good.

Even for people who don't do evil.

Bunny's back

Queenie and Himself don't have any pets. Mostly out of pure laziness, dressed up as concern about their care. We don't have a dog because we're gone for almost ten hours every day... too long for a dog to be left alone. No point in thinking through a solution to the issue.

We don't have a cat because... well because that would involve finding a cat and getting all the cat accoutrements and looking after the cat.

Etc.

Pure laziness.

Happily, here in chez Eagle, we have lots of critters, who are now our pets. Who are great pets because they feed, house, exercise and clean themselves and all we have to do is admire their cute antics.

Himself has a special pet.. a rabbit that appears a few times a day to eat our lawn. Himself loves bunny because he's very tame (he obviously hasn't heard of Himself's previous life as a bunny shooter and boiler). In fact, he's so tame, he pops out of the undergrowth every evening to say hi when Himself pulls up in Albert the Station Wagon.

Not me. He never pops out to see me.

Just Himself.

Except that for the last few days he has been missing.

Coyotes gottim, Himself decided.

I was thinking maybe she's a lady bunny and she's been off having babies.

We were a little sad.

Then this morning I opened the back door to check the rain and there Bunny was. Chomping away like there's no tomorrow.

Bunny's back.

Thank goodness for that.

Goddamn Mercury... you devil you....

We have a joke in the office. The joke is Queenie knows about astrology, and when weird planetary alignments occur, she warns everyone in the office.

And they all laugh at the weird Irish woman in the office.

And then it all goes Peter Tong because the SHIT IS REAL!

It's kinda like a weird grown-up-lady version of telling zombie stories in the tent with just a flashlight at summer camp.

Before you go for that last trip to the toilet pits....

So, last week, I let the Office LayDeez know... mercury is going retrograde again.

Three times a year.

Six weeks a time.

Plus the turbulence four days fore and aft.

That's a lotta days a year.

Retrograde Mercury's like a poltergeist - cars, computers, electronics, contracts, job offers, all that kind of necessary shit... it all goes pear-shaped. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....psssssssssst... stuff breaks down, blows out, messes up... things you think are legally nailed suddenly take off and fly through the atmosphere.

You just avoid avoid avoid.

I've been pretty good at avoiding it, but the Universe has been gunning for me for a while as I have been floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee for far too long.

Today the little bastard got me.

Queenie had a day off.

Queenie's Day Off.
By Queenie.

5.40am. Get up. Shower. Put work clothes on.

6.10am. Drive Himself to work because Albert the Station Wagon is at the doctor with a potentially extremely expensive light on and a desire to stall constantly.

6.20am. Get to Himself's work 30 minutes early because Himself hates to be late.

Sit in carpark because it's raining and I still love him too much to make him stand in the rain despite the fact that I could still be in bed asleep.

6.47am. Leave carpark and drive 275km to Antigonish. Notice there are no other cars on the road because it's the Friday of a bank holiday weekend and everyone else is winding down, Nova Scotia-style.

9.18am. Get to Antigonish one hour early for meeting. Drive around Antigonish looking for nice alternative Fair Trade-type cafe for breakfast.

9.55am. Give up and order Tim Horton's Bacon Breakfast sandwich with no cheese.

10.05am. Eat THBBs with cheese.

10.06am. Gag on cheese.

10.10am. Try to pull out of Antigonish Main St. onto Hwy 104 at weird Yield Junction where speed limit is supposed to be 70kmh.

I have to paste this, because I can't write it again:

I've just come off my favourite highway - the 104 highway of death - and some cnut in a tandem truck just veered over and put me out of my lane, and put me ahead of the path of an suv doing about 150 so I just put my foot down and closed my eyes and said goodbye to you all.

After a moment the suv started beeping like crazy so I reckon I got ahead of him and woke him up.

O joyous life!!

That is the third time this has happened to me on this stretch of road.

Anyways..... I have a mad adrenalin rush on now!!!!!!! Jibber jibber jibber.......

1030am. Facilitate meeting between ten engineering types who have no intention of ever fucking agreeing about anything.

Get them to agree on what they disagree on. Facilitation 101.

11.59am. The weekend starts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

12.01am. The car won't start.

Thirty minutes, three sets of cable, and a conclave of engineers later, the car starts, but I have to drive to Halifax without stopping to strengthen the battery and I only have half a tank of gas.

3.38pm. Glide into the Ultramar on Victoria Rd. on fumes, fill the car, pee (oh bliss), get a coffee, get a water, get a bar of chocolate, pay $80 for the lot, start the car again.

3.39pm. It starts!!!!!!!!!!!

And I would remind you boys and girls, that I am alive at this point, having nearly died earlier.

4.00pm. Pick up Himself at work where I left him in the rain nine hours earlier. Albert the Station Waggon needs a new fuel pump. $1200. Minimum. Plus $300 for the spark plugs.

Goddamn Mercury... you devil you.. you got me this time.....

But I'm ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy Victoria Day everyone... it's not about her, it's about VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Taking the yard back in piles

Those of you who know me know that Queenie likes nothing better than to potter about in a garden/ yard/ farm/ pumpkin field/balcony pots/ terrace/ whatever.

So long as she has to scrub her fingernails afterwards, despite wearing a pair of gloves, she's happy.

As you can imagine, with a whole acre to play with, I am now in Queenie Heaven.

Every evening, I get home from work, I change into my yard clothes, I water my seedlings (my watermelon seeds started to sprout today) and I tackle something.

Someone in work asked me about my yard today (note - a yard in Canada is a garden, not a yard).

I said it was an okay yard, but it wasn't my yard, so it would probably take me about three years to get it right.

Probably 4 - 5 then, he said. Totally serious.

Probably he's right, he seems like a guy who knows what he's talking about.

So, five years....

I knew this year would be the back-breaking, re-organizing year, but all we seem to be doing is creating piles.

Piles and piles of stuff the previous people left behind.

There's the pile of paving stones.

They're everywhere.

Not just the piles.... the stones.

Coming from the Paddy Egan 'put the tools away' School of Gardening, I'm pretty anal about a place for everything and everything in its place, so when I find a paving brick, I have to put it on the pile.

Pretty soon, we had gotten down past the grass and they were everywhere, and that involved so much walking I was getting nothing done so I have created several piles.

I don't even like them.

The bricks.

Not that I like the piles either.

They're the red brick pavers... you know the ones.

There are three types: the octogon on top of a rectangle one that looks like a grandfather clock, the one that looks like a grandfather clock cut in half, and the rectangular one.

I have found over two hundred already... lying just about everywhere in our yard.

And I am such a weakling I can only put twelve in a wheelbarrow and carry them to the main pile, so it's taking a while.

There's something a little depressing about spending a whole day hauling someone else's boring red brick paving stones around the yard.

But HEY!!! When I get bored, there's the pile of building supplies.

It's bi-located - one pile under the blue tarp to be taken away, the other in the building for re-use.

There is building deitrus everywhere.

Wooden steps. Balustrade spindles. Large round balls for the tops of the spindles. Roofing felt. Wood. More wood. Gyprock. Rotting gyprock (the worst task so far). Different kind of more wood. Aluminium piping. Bathroom tiles. Copper piping. Lead piping. Paint cans. Tools.

Parts of cars.

ugggggghhhh.....

Then, you lift something up and you find a little pile of fiddlerheads.

Or tulips.

It's kinda fun in a back-breaking way.

We are trying to reuse as much as we can, but while we think what to do with the stuff, it's in a pile.

We found three huge tarpaulins.

I'm talking really expensive well-made stuff here.

Someone obviously had a boat at some point.

Then, I started to get mad...

One day, after about an hour, I finally dug up a really nice canvas tarp for a speed boat. Left out in the yard until it sank under the grass and rotted.

GODDAMN. IF YOU'RE GONNA LEAVE IT FOR ME PUT IT IN THE GODDAMN BUILDING SO I CAN USE IT.

Our building (which in Canada is the shed, not the main building) is a sturdy old New England type three room affair with a woodcote on top. I love it. We are going to put a wood stove in it so we can be outside in the winter. Sort of.

On Sunday, I realised it has a beautiful attic. With throw open windows at both ends and a warm, sweet-smelling spruce floor. it's going to make the most wonderful summer sleeping room for kids who are staying, or adventurous adults. All we have to do is build a sleeping platform and redo the mosquito nets... simple.

It took me a while to realise the potential. We're all a little more fire alert now, seeing as we're only two weeks into fire season and we've already had one major conflagration.

Sunday, I remembered seeing a lot of paper rubbish in the attic. I hauled myself up the ladder.

Five enormous garbage bags full of squirrel-chewed styrofoam later, I found the floor.

Forty five moving boxes (to add to our collection) later, I realised there was a second window. Four chest-height boxes full of random pieces of paper later, I just started throwing stuff out the windows.

Himself got a barrel and started burning the crap because we have enough piles.

But now, see photo above...I have a whole new pile.

Six in fact.

(I would just like to point out that I hauled all that shit out of the ground BY MYSELF).

There's one pathway into our little wood and with a little work it can be brought back to its original bucolic bliss - someone who used to live here worked really hard on it and planted all kinds of forest floor stuff, including fiddler heads and primroses and lupins and other flowers. But I haven't been able to find the end of the path - where it leads to.

I figure it must be near the building, but there's an enormous pile of brush left over from a tree fall lying there.

At least that's what I thought it was.

This evening, I waded into it and started lifting some of the brush.

And I found a cord of wood underneath.

A friggin' cord of wood.

Note: In Canada you buy wood in cords. A cord of wood is worth about $150 - $200 depending on the wood.

About four cords will get you through a winter.

So, wood is useful. It is currency. People need to buy it.

This wood was rotting.

The top layer was fine.
The second layer was softish, but it'll dry out.
The third layer was an interesting example of how wood fibre breaks down.
The fourth layer is what we call mulch nowadays.
The fifth layer was peat.

So now I have six more fucking piles.

In my driveway.

Brush.
Good wood.
Wet wood.
Useless wood
Mulch.
Peat.

Soon, I will be able to get a grant to open a garden centre.

I should be happy I suppose, I could spend years trying to get this level of decomposition going.

But the thing is, I live on the Eastern Shore, where there's lots of wood, and lots of wood stoves and lots of houses that would embarrass you with the beauty of their enormous wood pile. But I drive past houses every day that have a wood stove chimney and no wood outside and I always wonder.. is it some old couple that can't get any wood, or can't afford to buy wood or just need wood for some reason or another.

But there's always a truck in the yard, so the people in the house could come get some free wood if it were available. And they knew about it.

Himself drove in as I was working myself up into a tantrum about the needless death of the trees, and the waste of biofuel, and the lack of community spirit, yadda yadda... plus I was after pulling the leg attached to my recently Yoga/Pilates obsession with The Plank-destroyed right knee out of a particularly deep and dangerous mulch hole.

Maybe they were trying to fill in this space so it wouldn't get washed out....

WITH A CORD OF FRIGGIN' WOOD?

Maybe not...

Or maybe they just didn't like dirty fingernails too much.

They liked ball games. I have found - two soccer balls, a rugby ball, a volleyball, a tennis ball, a space hopper, and a basketball so far....

I've been trying to think what kind of little community festival I could have here now that I have more space than I can possibly think to do with.

Maybe we're heading inexorably towards the little festival of piles....

In the spirit of Paddy Kavanagh, we could stand on the steaming dungheaps of my piles and recite potery...

Like Paddy.. I'll have to find ways to avoid the haulin' and draggin' that goes on in the stony grey soil of the Eastern Shore so I can write potery.

Or maybe my piles are a little Song of Myself for the New World...

Addendum:

I just mentioned my piles post to Himself and he was horrified that I had forgotten our gravel pile. A previous owner had a child who had cancer, who had a playground built for them by the Make a Wish foundation. The toys are all gone, but there's sixty cubic feet of gravel left. Right where the vegetable garden will go.

You don't know despair until you have tried to shovel sixty cubic feet of gravel into a pile.

I hate to work on it, because every time I do I wonder what happened to that child...

We are leaving one corner... for our fire pit.

Also, Himself wants to make it clear that we did not burn the styrofoam, we left it out for the recycling truck.

I had to rescue the neighbour's cat from one of the bags this morning, such was the excruciating smell of squirrel emanating from the bag...

Oh stoney grey gravel of Lawrencetown

The laugh from my love you took

etc etc

The negative Greenhouse effect

From today's Guardian.... if I were to take this to its logical conclusion I would shut down my blog to save energy.

Hmmm ... not enough readers to make a damned difference.

Read on, boys and girls, read on!

But, just to be serious for a moment, as the Google rep quoted at the end states, the drain on resources is nowhere near transportation.... so now that we're all connected electronically, why do we all still have to go to the office everyday?

The internet's increasing appetite for electricity poses a major threat to companies such as Google, according to scientists and industry executives.
Leading figures have told the Guardian that many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs of delivering billions of web pages, videos and files online – in a "perfect storm" that could even threaten the future of the internet itself.

"In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption," said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers.
Bapat said the network of web servers and data centres that store online information is becoming more expensive, while profits come under pressure as a result of the recession.

"We need more data centres, we need more servers. Each server burns more watts than the previous generation and each watt costs more," he said. "If you compound all of these trends, you have the perfect storm."

With more than 1.5 billion people online around the world, scientists estimate that the energy footprint of the net is growing by more than 10% each year. This leaves many internet companies caught in a bind: energy costs are escalating because of their increasing popularity, while at the same time their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.

One site under particular scrutiny is YouTube — now the world's third-biggest website, but one that requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner. Although the site's financial details are kept under wraps, a recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggested that it could lose as much as $470m (£317m) this year, as it succumbs to the high price of delivering power-intensive videos over the internet.

And while the demand for electricity is a primary concern, a secondary result of the explosion of internet use is that the computer industry's carbon debt is increasing drastically. From having a relatively small impact just a few years ago, it is now leapfrogging other sectors like the airline industry that are more widely known for their negative environmental impact.

However, tracking the growth of the internet's energy use is difficult, since internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.

"A lot of this internet stuff is fairly secretive," Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, told the Guardian.

"Google is probably the best example: they see it as a trade secret: how many data centres they have, how big they are, how many servers they have."

One study by Brown, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested that US data centres used 61bn kilowatt hours of energy in 2006. That is enough to supply the whole of the UK for two months, and 1.5% of the entire electricity usage of the US.

Brown said that despite efforts to achieve greater efficiency, internet use is growing at such a rate that it is outstripping technical improvements – meaning that American data centres could account for as much as 80bn kWh this year.

"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story … technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."

Among the problems that could result from the internet's voracious hunger for electricity are website failures and communications disruption costing millions in lost business every hour – as well as power cuts and brownouts at plants which supply data centres with electricity.

To combat this, initiatives are taking place across the industry to cope with the problem, including new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.

Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are even turning to older technology in an attempt to turn the clock back – by replacing energy-hungry new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.

"It turns out that those processors have been designed to be very energy efficient, basically to make batteries last," said Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

"We found we can build more energy-efficient data centres with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."

Google was among the first internet companies to take action to reduce its footprint by developing its own data centres — but even though it pumped an estimated $2.3bn into infrastructure projects last year, it remains unclear whether it is winning the battle.

The company's vice-president of operations, Urs Hölzle, told the Guardian that it was struggling to contain energy costs. "You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he said.

"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."

Despite mounting evidence that the internet's energy footprint is in danger of running out of control, however, Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the web as "overblown".

"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving. There is consumption there, but in the grand scheme of things I think it is not the problem."

The positive Greenhouse Effect

I was texting my sister Gypsy the other day and mentioned that we were building a greenhouse.

For Himself's cherry tomatoes no doubt!! ;-) she texted back.

Laugh!!!!

I nearly fell off the bus seat.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that last year, Queenie figured out the Canadian growing season after a couple of half-assed attempts. And managed to get a full crop of vegetables to harvest.

Of which achievement she was mightily proud.

But nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in that harvest (not even the potatoes) came close to achieving the greatness of Himself's cherry tomatoes.

After I annoyed him by insisting on growing boring old heirlooms, one afternoon he took a hammer out and gunthered a lopsided, triangular 'greenhouse' out of some plastic sheeting he'd appropriated somewhere, and a few 2 x 4s he'd appropriated from somewhere else.

And nailed it to the neighbour's fence.

Hot, sleepy afternoons in our shared back yard were spent admiring the cherry tomatoes growing like crazy behind the plastic.

As well as having to do most of the admiring, Queenie had to do all the harvesting of course.

Anyways, this year we have our own garden and lots of space so as a reward for being the Cherry Tomato Cheerleader-in-Chief last summer, Himself promised me that my heart's desire - my very own proper greenhouse - would be the very first project this year.

We spent the last two weekends working on it, with the help of Little 'Un last week (who insisted on digging for treasure while not hammering, and found a fresh spring right beside said greenhouse which will help with our irrigation system. Go the boy.).

This year, we're using greenhouse plastic, as opposed to glass. To make sure it all works well. If it does, hopefully we'll replace the plastic next spring.

I love my new greenhouse.

For a start, it has the same dimensions as the living room in my Dublin apartment.

Yes, you read that right.

Build 'em on the fly 'n' stack 'em high, as they used to say in Irish property developer circles.... ah well, at least now they're saying ... get me that list of hot countries with democratic governments and no extradition, we're headin' out boys!!

17' x 9', if you're that interested.

The apartment was 436 square feet in total.

And people wonder why I put up with Canadian winters!!

Anyways... back to the tomatoes.

I have a four foot bed running the length of the greenhouse, and a big worktable for seeding and potting.

I even have a rack for my tools.

We are hooking up water barrels with a pump so we have running water, and Himself spent a couple of hours last night installing a drainage pipe around the base of the greenhouse to draw excess water away from the soil. Which will also make it more difficult for our yard rabbit to dig into the building.

All in all, it's very professional looking. And as it's round the back of our garage/ shed well hidden from public view, I have no doubt the Mounties will be round to search it come the first fly-over of the summer.

Well they won't find any of that muck!!!

Just peppers, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, chives, herbs, sweet corn, peas, beets, and hopefully, water melons!

I popped into the greenhouse this morning to see how things were doing on the seedling front and the warm, cloying smell of compost and condensation hit me and reminded me, as all my gardening efforts do, of an afternoon spent at home with Paddy in the greenhouse (which was also the boiler house) thirty five years ago.

I think maybe I shall get an old wood stump or two from our little copse, and place them in my own greenhouse, so I can sit there during a rain storm and listen to the shore and the birds...