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Good Stuff :)

Jul. 6th, 2014 06:30 pm
dawn_felagund: (yavanna earth)
I want to apologize first to my flist for that long, uncut vacation post with pictures yesterday! (At least I didn't curse too much ...) I initially posted to DW, as I always do, to crosspost to LJ. I messed up the LJ-cut, went back to edit and fix it, and instead of editing the LJ post, DW crossposted a second copy of the entry, which meant that the first one sans LJ cut was left up with my realizing it. Sorry, y'all.

This weekend has had some remarkably good stuff, despite the fact that I'm back from vacation and staring at impending work tomorrow. (I probably wouldn't mind going back to work if we had one more day without the students, but when they give us our summer schedules and shove us out the door on the last day of school, that doesn't leave much time to plan when we walk back into the building again at the same time as the students, and there are things I will not get done because of it. I spent most of today on planning, but some things I just have to be in the building to do.)

First of all, we confirmed today that our bee swarm did indeed successfully move into the hive that Bobby hastily constructed for them, so getting stung on the nose was worth it. We now have two honeybee colonies. \0/

This is the wonderful time of the year when it is possible to find fresh and local pretty much anything you want to eat. The garden is crazy-productive this year; we front-loaded a lot of effort this year into properly preparing the soil and mulching while the plants were small, and the payoffs look like they are going to be huge. Bobby picked our first tomatoes today, and we have reached the point where we are leaving zucchini on the vine because we've picked so many. (The one bad point: We have squash bugs again this year. Ugh. Picking eggs off the plants and squooshing larvae and adults every day is not a chore I look forward to. If you've never dug around in squash leaves, they are very prickly; my arms are quite marked up right now.) Bobby harvested our garlic yesterday, and we had our biggest harvest ever. Our bramble fruits are doing ridiculously well; we harvested almost a quart of blackberries today, and Bobby has made jam with entirely our own berries for the first time ever. Everything is doing really, really well. I need to take and post pictures.

Last night, I went back to the gym after a two-week hiatus. Two weeks ago, I must have twinged my knee--I'd increased my weights on that night--and the next day, while sitting for a long time working with my leg twisted under me, I stood up to discover that my knee really hurt. I ended up missing almost a week of dance and gym, and our vacation followed immediately on the heels of it. I was not looking forward to going back last night, after two weeks of indolence and almost a week of eating horribly down the ocean. But I actually managed the same level I was doing before my two-week hiatus (600 calories in 45 minutes on the elliptical). My legs felt crazy when I was done, but I did it.

Things.

Mar. 19th, 2014 10:02 pm
dawn_felagund: (peace)
I forgot to mention a whole bunch of stuff in my last post!

  • I have started at a gym. O.O This is something I swore I would never do. (Just like I swore I would never study English in university, would never become a teacher, would never write fantasy/fanfic ...) But I spent more than a year in constant pain, dealing with inflammation issues and joint pain that are finally under control. I have always taken pride in being strong, and I want my former strength back, that I lost during the year when even turning over in bed hurt. And. And ... I actually like it. I like feeling like a human being again who is capable of doing more than shuffling from the computer, limping into the basement, and limping back upstairs to bed.


  • We've solved the henhouse mystery, but it's gross. Just to recap, last year, we noticed we were missing eggs and discovered that the hens (or so we thought) were getting out of the coop and hiding them under the lawnmower. We didn't even give consideration that something might be getting into to coop ... well, we did, but we assumed that this critter would eat the eggs in the coop rather than going to the trouble of spiriting them out of the coop and into the shed. Wrong.

    We know we've had a critter in the shed that connects to the chicken coop. Bobby saw it a few times (but never well enough to identify it), and Alex was intensely interested in the lawnmower. Well, Bobby took me out to the shed one day, shook the lawnmower to scare out the critter so I could see it, and what ran out but a fat. fucking. Norway. rat.

    So yes. We have a damned rat in our chicken coop that is stealing the eggs. I can't imagine a worse outcome to our mystery. We set a live animal trap but Norway rats apparently avoid them. (Just as well. We had an extended conversation about what to do if we actually caught it that, at one point, involved me wailing, "I think we've gone totally country if we're talking about shooting vermin in our backyard with a .22!!") So Bobby set a rat trap and several trays of D-Con in the shed yesterday. Someone had a nice meal on the D-Con last night. Hopefully that is the end of the problem.


  • From my mod seat, B2MeM is almost over. The winter week is underway. I was stressing over the winter week, truth be told, because it was much more popular than the other seasons, so I had quite a number of stories to schedule, and of course, they're getting longer as the event progresses and people have more time to work. I didn't want anyone to feel shortchanged by having to share the spotlight with lots of other stories. So it was quite a balancing act, but it seems to be going well, and no one has complained (yet). Almost all of the spring stories are in, which means that scheduling could be done, in theory, by tomorrow. Yay? It almost seems to have gone too well. I'm waiting for a big wrench to get tossed into the cogs. (I know, I know ... I'm usually an optimist.)


  • I feel like there was one other thing I wanted to say but damned if I remember what it was.
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