[tech]

Who thought even just 10 years ago that we'd be able to record movies on our phone, send it to a friend, or post it online for the world to see. At home, I can watch seasons of TV shows or whole movies, without a DVD, or running lines to the road! I'm typing this blog and publishing it without even having so much as a phone or cable TV line to my house. I don't have satellite TV but can watch shows from the Discovery Channel on my TV. How? Because I'm awesome, and cell phone technology is advancing every single day. I can only imagine how the technology will advance in the years ahead, but when I'm 79 I'm sure I will still be just as amazed at what is being done.

[spring is in the air]

The seeds that we've planted for our garden have officially started sprouting! We've got our porch setup as a pseudo greenhouse with a set of shelves designated for seedlings. I think that we may have jumped the gun just a tad, but anything that we don't have room for inside can get put out into the garden under a row cover. Casey has been wanting a rotating composter, but all
Sam's Club has that is within price range is a stationary composter made out of black recycled plastic. I think it looks good for us, but it's only really appropriate for kitchen scraps and the random brown products that we can throw in from the garden. Otherwise I have a whole corner of the garden dedicated to garden garbage. Hopefully this year we can get some better results from our gardening. Last years garden was kind of a flop, we had good lettuce for a few weeks in the spring, then they bolted. So far this year we have garlic (fall planted) in the garden. Planted in pots on the porch we have a whole variety of peppers, herbs, tomatoes, lettuce, and more.

I'm really excited about getting more blueberry bushes this year. Last year we got two locally propagated bushes from a farm close by and even got a hand full of berries from them the first year that we had them planted. This year I'd like to add about four more.

[spring cleaning]

Last Saturday I spent the better part of my day off cleaning out the garage. There is still some work to be done. However, it's way better than before I had started. You could say that I'm still moving into the garage, and moving out of it. There is a lot of random stuff that either needs to be given away, or thrown away, or even just simply used. I tend to collect stuff, my dad taught me well how to be a pack rat. You never know when something will come in handy. I was able to make a lot of progress just by moving stuff around and emptying all those boxes of "stuff". You know what "stuff" is, the things that just kind of accumulate and don't really belong together. Like computer stuff in the same box as gardening stuff and an anatomy and physiology coloring book. I also filled a rather large box with all of the dried drippings on the floor that come from living off a 1/4 mile drive in the winter. In some spots I couldn't sweep the floor with the broom, I had to shovel it!

Tomorrow the Project of the Day Off is going to be installing a new circuit in the garage for our new chest freezer. If time permits I may simply update all the wiring in the garage with grounded lines. More recently we've been shopping at Sam's Club, and we've got to face the fact that we can't always buy what we need because our refrigerator freezer won't hold it all. It will also give us the opportunity to possibly share a pig or cow or something with Casey's parents in the event that they decide to buy an animal on hoof. It will also be nice to know that we have a place to put any leftovers from the garden that we can't eat right away. Fresh homegrown veggies are great, frozen homegrown veggies are also pretty good too.