Field work season

We were in the field on Friday. Saw lots of wild turkeys strutting around and fanning their tail feathers. Besides all the bird activity, the other fun thing about working in the woods in spring is the beautiful wild flowers. We saw a number of these little wild orchids in our plots west of Healdsburg. It seems to be common in tanoak forests.
Spent the weekend getting our garden in shape. Ted helped with digging up the beds for the tomatoes- in fact he did all the hard work while I only had to plug in my transplants.
Ted took apart both compost piles and we have the most beautiful compost this year. We are adding that liberally to our beds.
Tomatoes this year are Celebrity, Margharita hybrid, and Juliet. This is the first time in years that we've grown a cherry tomato.
I also dug up a bed, added compost, and transplanted the three tomatillos.
Saturday I went cycling for the first time in two weeks! And I wore shorts: the weather has been really mild. Gray today though.

Yay!!

Well amazingly enough Congress actually passes health care reform. Much weaker than I would like to see, but at least it's something - I hope. What I would really like to see is Canadian style health care here. I really don't see any reason why health care should be delivered by for profit companies. I really wanted to see a single payer system, or at least a government option, but no, we have to stick with the capitalist model. You know the definition of a capitalist don't you? A capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him.
Why would they have to make it illegal to revoke coverage of someone who gets sick? Wouldn't you think that would already be illegal??
Anyway, I hope this bill will go a long way to addressing many of the shortcomings in our current system. Hopefully people can begin to make decisions based on something other than the overriding fear of losing their health insurance.
I for one am grateful that reform has passed, and hope that the move to a single payer system will continue.

Mostly about the garden

I don't plan to devote this entry to the spectacular cold I have, which was mentioned as an aside at the end of my previous post. For the record, I had completely lost my voice by Tuesday evening. My voice is still depleted and I've now entered the incessant coughing phase. I stopped all exercise except for my morning warmup routine given my rundown state.
So to be upbeat, I will devote this entry to garden progress, since I am sorely behind in such entries. I planted my seeds on February 28.
This is what the garden looked like on the 28th of February. In truth the garden doesn't look that much different now, except that the grass has grown and I've been out there with the weed whacker.
My seedlings have grown well. The zucchini are already well past optimum transplant stage and are going in today. I also planted the snow peas last weekend. They are just beginning to emerge. I had better lay some chicken wire over them to protect them from the robins and whitecrown sparrows. Ted heard a quail this morning. They never hang around for long, but it is always nice to hear them, if only for a few days.
I finally got around to cleaning up the blackberries in the garden the end of January. I finally decided they are the trailing and not the upright type, and so wound the long canes through the fence wire rather than trimming them off. We will see how that works out. Note to self, in future don't put off doing this chore. The canes had grown all over and rooted all over, and I had a heck of a time fishing them out of the tall grass without harming them. I still have some left to do on some of the other fences. Urk.

Ted's birthday

John and Anthea invited us over in honor of Ted's birthday. Frances came on Friday as she planned to spend Ted's birthday with a friend of hers who has been diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Her friend will have round 2 of chemo this week at her home. Such a tough diagnosis for her friend and her friend's family. My heart goes out to them. Frances has already lost two family members to cancer. This is going to be so difficult for everyone.

Frances had to go back Saturday for a rehearsal, and then we went to Frances's concert Saturday night. It was really very, very enjoyable.

I made Ted's favorite: Mother Poppel's poppyseed cake. I drove over to John's while Ted worked on a presentation for a client. (what I'm going to do as soon as I finish this blog update.) We had a nice lunch, a nice hike in Burleigh-Murray Ranch State Park, a nice game of Apples to Apples, a nice drive home, and a nice birthday dinner. Unfortunately, I erased the picture of Ted and his cake. Boo hoo!

One more memorable event of Ted's bday. I woke up with a cold. My first of the winter.

A Betta

The last of the black neon tetras finally died several months ago. I'm pretty sure those fish lasted nearly seven years. They were the last in a long running series of aquarium fish, dating back to when Frances was starting the early grades. The first of the fish had been a very pretty and happy betta named Rainbow. He was a beautfiul blue color, and he lived for quite a while. He had several lives just like a cat, but eventually he died in spite of my best efforts at fish doctoring. After that we had a series of various fish, ending with the black neons, which were the longest living of them all.
The aquarium had migrated out of Frances's room and into the dining room with the advent of the black neons. After the last fish died back in December, I had left the aquarium running. There was a thick green coat of algae over the gravel and rocks. I hadn't gotten around to cleaning out the tank during the winter months, since I knew I would want to take the aquarium outside for a good washing out.
Our friends were coming over for the monthly game night, and I really didn't want the aquarium looking the same way it had been when they were here two months ago, so I cleaned out the aquarium. My intent had been to retire it to the shed, or give it away, but once it was all cleaned up I began to think I might actually miss the aquarium. I checked with Ted, who commented that the aquarium certainly brings a bit of liveliness to the dining room. Soooo, I decided to begin again, and I decided to go with a betta. But this time I decided to get a red one. I actually prefer the blue bettas, but somehow the memory of Rainbow was still fresh, or maybe it was the memory of the good times Frances and I had watching that fish. I felt it would be wrong to get a fish that looked like Rainbow.
I rooted about in the garage and found some of the old plastic plants and hidees, which I cleaned up and put in the tank.
I stopped at Petco on the weekend. The bettas were rather pathetic looking. They were in the little individual containers, and many of them were in foul looking water and looked half dead. I didn't have the aquarium gravel in yet, so I didn't buy a fish. I went back several days later. I think it was the same collection of fish but the water had been changed. I bought a red betta that looked reasonably lively. It's now a week later. Today for the first time we saw it eat a betta bite. Either he was really well fed before or those betta bites are really dreadful.
I put a spider plantlet into the aquarium when I set it up last weekend. No roots yet, but it seems to be hanging in there. Salt content is 1 t per 2.5 gal, but I am backing off that as I do the water changes. My current thinking is .5 t with each water change which is on the order of somewhat less than 2 gallons.
This betta does not seem to have the happy personality that Rainbow had, but it is at least somewhat interesting to watch.
Update: It has taken the betta about 10 days to figure out that tapping means food in the front corner of the tank.
UPDATE 10/8/2012
Alas, the Betta died today.  He had been looking and acting very old for a week or two, and I had been worried about him.  He didn't have any visible signs of disease but was looking a little gray around the gills.

Hopefully rehabed

When I added cycling back into my excercise routine, I think I overdid it. I was in such good shape from steps that I overestimated what I could do on my bike. I joined Ted climbing the big hill right away, after only a day or two on the 12 mile two smallish hills loop. I was okay for a while, but the New Years Day hike was really hard on my knees, and that combined with the cycling and steps was just too much for my frail body! I realized I needed to change my ways. Luckily the internet came to my rescue, as I was able to find several good articles on causes of sore knees among cyclists. Among the biggies, excessive hill work, cycling in too high a gear, and not paying attention to position of knees vis a vis the foot position, i.e. biking with the knees splayed outward, rather than keeping knee and foot aligned. Also, I had developed tingling in my left foot, which I think was related to the sore lower back I habitually had after cycling.
So at the beginning of February I began my rehab program. I stopped climbing the big hill. I began taking glucosamine sulfate again. I got out the McKenzie back book and began doing extensions 3 times a day. I went back to cycling the 12 mile loop with careful attention to the position of my knees on the upstroke. I got proper cycling shoes. I alternate cycling days with weight lifting days.
And, oh joy, my knees are a lot better. My back still gets sore after cycling, but generally it doesn't carry over to the next day, and if it does, I throw in an extra day of rest before getting back on my bike.
Anyway, after following the regime for all of February, today I biked up the big hill again. I was going to skip the final ascent, which is pretty darned steep, but I felt pretty good when I got up there, so what the heck, I went up the rest of the way. I was so proud, I asked Ted to take some pictures to document the occasion.
Iced my knees and back with the frozen peas when I got home, we'll see how stiff I am tomorrow.