Plants, porn, pizza, and pi

I should warn you that for the last few weeks I have been (and continue to be) absolutely obsessed with the coming gardening season. I got a little wild this year and spent $12 on vegetable seeds. Previous years I bought almost all my vegetable plants, but the seeds are more economical, and I just get so excited about the whole process from buying to planting to watching them sprout that I don't even think of the extra work as being "work". And this way I can share with Mom and she won't have to buy many either (we'll both need to buy tomatoes). Here's what I planted last weekend and early last week:

16 spinach

32 carrots

8 pumpkin

32 sunflowers

8 cantaloupe

24 corn

16 bell peppers

8 crookneck squash

8 zucchini

8 lemon cucumber

3 regular cucumber

16 basil

48 peas

That's a total of 226 seeds! I may have gone a little overboard, but I'm planning to lose about half (they won't germinate, or the bugs will eat them, or they won't survive transplanting), and give half to Mom. That still leaves 56 plants for me. Yikes. I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to raise that many plants previous years, but Patrick is going to install drip irrigation so I won't have to spend an hour watering every night. I'm getting excited just thinking about it. And do you know what I saw today? The very first one is starting to push the dirt away! I'm not at all surprised it's a sunflower (big seed and fast-growing plant). In the next two weeks the rest should pop up, one by one, and I'll drive Patrick and Mom crazy with the daily status updates.

You're probably wondering about why "pornography" is in the title of this post. Well, I figured pornography is so prevalent on the internet that I should post some, too, so here it is:

I was in the garden last weekend, minding my own business, when I saw these two. Yes, that's my patch of oregano they're leaving. And yes, that larger one is the female. She seemed... unfazed... by his attentions.

Moving on...

In celebration of Pi Day, we had a dinner party and served pizza pies and an apple pie. I took a picture of our dry-run pizza from last weekend. We made the crust and sauce from scratch, so I was very proud, even if it doesn't quite look like what you would get in a restaurant:

The actual event yesterday involved 3 pizzas, and each crust turned out slightly different, even though they should have been identical. All in all, the food turned out well. I'm definitely getting better at rolling out dough for pie crusts, it ends up mostly in one piece now. I just need more practice...more delicious practice...

Cannibal Scrabble

I'm addicted to Cannibal Scrabble. I don't really like traditional Scrabble, but I play Cannibal Scrabble every day at lunch in the cafeteria if I have time. Here's how you play: Take all the Scrabble tiles, except the blank ones, and place them in the center, facedown. Players take turns flipping over a tile, going clockwise. If you see a Scrabble-legal word (so no proper names) that's at least 3 letters long, call it out first and you get to take it and place it in front of you, and then you flip the next letter. Words can be stolen (you can steal your own words or other people's) by adding letters to them, but you have to change the root - so "dog" can become "gods", but not "dogs" - and you have to use all the letters from the word being stolen. Once all the letters are flipped over and everyone agrees they don't see any more words, you total up the point values on the letters of your words, and the one with the most points wins. It took quite a while to get to the point where I would actually have a respectable number of words at the end, but now I'm hooked.

Dry January

I know, I said I would keep up on my blog, and then I let it go.
I finally joined facebook, but since the website is blocked at work, and I don't have a computer at home (I take my work laptop home on weekends), it's hard to keep up to date with all the messages. I can (and do) blog at work, so it's easier for me.

The holidays were great. Lots of presents, lots of good food, family, everything you could want. We had my parents over for a breakfast of Swedish Pancakes (traditional in Patrick's family) and then opened presents. I've heard that Christmas is better when you have kids around, but it's hard to imagine a kid could be more excited than I am in a room full of presents.

We had Christmas dinner with my family next door, and my aunt and uncle, their daughter and son-in-law, and their two boys. The youngest one was less than a month old, and the older one, Ryan, is a little over two years old. The grown-ups were all playing 31 (as is traditional in our family) and I was knocked out of the first card game early, so I started playing with Ryan. I ended up skipping the next two games and spent a couple of hours building tunnels of couch cushions for him to knock down. That kid wore me out. Make tunnel! Make tunnel! But we had a good time.

For New Year's Eve we went to dinner in Occidental at a new pub there (Barley and Hops Tavern), and were in bed by 10:30. I had brunch with some of the neighbors the next day, while Patrick went to work for an hour or two.

The weather here has been very unusually warm and dry this month, so I've been spending a lot more time working outside than I usually would in January. The days are still quite short, and the sun is very low, so the portion of the day when it's warm in the yard is smaller than it will be in spring. I've finished at least half of the pruning I should do this winter, so I'm in good shape there. I'm motivated by wanting to impress a couple of Patrick's aunts that may come visit this year, and it's easier to do since we're living there now (last winter we spent at his place in town).