Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Winnie is only really happy when she’s working in her gardens. She’s been building gardens ever since joining me here in the US, trying different plants and different techniques. For this year, she’s outdone herself not only by building her largest garden ever, but in her elaborate use of bamboo for fencing and trellises.
She’s truly built a garden rhapsody in bamboo.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
So after a long dry spell it’s time for another edition of This and That; all the news fit to print and a whole lot more.
So to catch up on current news; The Covid-19 pandemic is almost over except for all the places it’s not. Floods are washing out Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, London, and parts of China. The Northwestern United States is burning up while roving gangs of MAGA-morons roam the vast wastelands waiting for their savior trump to return to the White House in a blaze of glory. Across the street from the White House, Congress-people are locked in a macabe dance of swords, fingers in their ears, screaming “I Can’t Hear You!”
In good news; today is pizza day, the second time we’ve had Costco pizza in sixteen months. I guess we take whatever good we can find and run with it.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Winnie and I decided to celebrate yesterday’s Fourth of July on the water. It turned out to be a very memorable event. We had some adventure, learned new things, and an overall great day of boating. Especially after a year of pandemic lockdown, it was a very pleasant day indeed.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Last week Winnie and I took a brave leap into suburban homesteading with backyard chickens. We acquired three hens that just started laying (according to the farmer we purchased them from), and four chicks. Ideally, at least a couple of the chicks are hens and will add to our egg-laying flock.
This experiment is already turning out well for our breakfasts. However, the side issue for our backyard chickens project is someplace to properly keep them. Building a quickie chicken coop involved some creative thinking on the fly.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
We’ve been doing small scale suburban gardening ever since we settled here in Northern Virginia. Winnie is a terrific gardener, and has been gradually building more expansive vegetable gardens each year. But this hasn’t qualified us to call ourselves “suburban homesteaders.”
Saturday, that changed when we expanded our suburban gardening into backyard chickens.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
I’ve pretty much lived on the Internet for the past 20 years. As one measure of my life online; I maintain four email accounts that I check daily. I have several more email accounts that I don’t much bother with beyond a weekly check. These are in addition to my iPhone text messages and business Skype messages I deal with, daily. Believe it or not, I sometimes even receive non-spam phone calls.
Last week, I decided I needed to clean up my primary email inbox. I came to this decision when I saw I had over 99,000 unread emails and was using 98 percent of my allotted account space. Cleaning up my inbox became another adventure in online living.
Seven years ago, Winnie and I invested wisely in an indoor exercise machine. By then we had lived in this semi-Northern climate, with four distinct seasons, long enough to learn we did very little physical activity during winter months. So, we thought that having an exercise machine would give us the option to stay physically fit.
Over the years since, our machine has been helpfully parked in our basement den, readily available whenever either of us get the urge to use it. However, a couple of weeks ago our exercise machine suddenly stopped working, and getting it repaired has been a different kind of exercise.
Spring has sprung, and with it comes new life. Mother nature is dressing trees with new greens while early season flowers bloom. Birds are returning to their summer habitats, being nominally welcomed by their year-round feathered residents.
Here inside the on-going pandemic lifestyle, there are signs life is also returning after a year-long winter of frozen plans and lives put on hold. The spring weather seems to be building a bridge from the pandemic to post-pandemic life. People are slowly springing back to life.
As the old saying goes; “No job is complete until the paperwork is finished.” Well, for my senior citizen college adventure, the job is finished. A few days ago I received my graduate diploma via snail mail. It was a very nice feeling indeed.
As regular as clockwork, we’re once again fighting over the minimum wage. For those lucky people living without benefit of TV news; the minimum wage references the minimum amount of money our government forces employers to pay their employees. Depending upon which side of the fence you’re on, this is either a basic governmental role of providing for the common good. Or, it’s a serious overreach of government leading down that slippery slope towards communism socialism tyranny a 1000 year reign of terror.
The minimum wage issue does not impact me personally. But, I remember my very first job, and I know many people currently working at minimum wage (or less). I see this as an issue of fairness