Garden Planted!

The soil arrived bright and early last Saturday and I spent the first part of the morning moving it from the front driveway to the back and into the box.  I don’t own a wheelbarrow and so was using a tarp to haul all the dirt back, until one of my neighbors came over and volunteered his wheelbarrow!  With the added technology the moving went much faster.  Once all the dirt was in the box I spent the next 30 to 40 minutes getting the soil saturated with water.

After a trip to the local ACE garden section and we picked up a number of things:  Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, onions, parsley, leeks, cucumber seeds, yellow cucumber seeds, pole bean seeds, edamame seeds, kale, zucchini, and cantaloupe seeds.  I’m hoping to see some of the seeds push through the surface in the next 3 or 5 days.  When we planted everything it was sunny and the temperature was trending up to the 7os… But, this week its been cold and overcast… I’m hoping the weekend brings the sun and warmth and we start seeing some seedlings.  Then, of course, I’ll have to worry about birds something already tore one of the peppers in the front out.

So, a purchase of some wire mesh cages is on the horizon.  This is my first attempt at home gardening.  I’m hoping it turns out well, but we’ll see.  There is so much space in the box, and much more on the other end (See picture below) because many of the plants we put in can get quite big (zucchini and cantaloupe especially) we wanted to make sure there was going to be room for everything and that no plants choked out any others.

Once these plants are growing and (hopefully producing) I’ll write more.  Alternatively, if they all die I’ll let you know too, I’m not expecting that outcome though…  What an adult-like adventure I’m having!

Planting Gardens

So the clouds have finally parted and Spring is coming to northern California, I can’t say I’m not excited to see it.  I’ve missed the sun terribly since I saw it last sometime in late November.  Not everything about spring is great, my allergies have returned with the Sun and I’ve had to go back on a cocktail of drugs in order to breathe through my nose and see through my eyes.  Time will tell if this price is worth paying for.

With spring here, it was time to finally put my thoughts on gardening into more than just lines on a paper:

This turns out to have been a little too optimistic about what I could fit into the side yard and so I settled on a single 4’x10′ box instead of the two smaller ones, there just wasn’t enough room to move around with the original plan.  A quick trip to Ace Hardware, a realization that my automatic drill wasn’t up to snuff, a return trip to Ace, and a little bit of sweat and:

Soil arrives tomorrow to fill the box up, and then there will be one last trip to Ace for seeds and seedlings.  D and I plan on putting in eggplants, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, melons, beans, and basil.  Give or take.  Since this is the first time we’ve done this some experimenting is on order and so we’ve planted tomatoes, beans, and peppers in the front yard too, where they’ll get more direct sunlight than the box on the side.  It only required my butchering one of the hedges (I’d like to remove all of them and put in some sort of sage grass, but I’m only renting.)  Hopefully, between the two I’ll get something to show out of this work.

Once the box is in place, filled, and planted I’ll take some more pictures.  If everything works this site should soon be full of the garden’s progress.  If you don’t see anything else about it, I’m merely hiding my shame.

Initiated into the Oddfellows and Community Involvement

It has been longer than I’d have liked it to be since I last updated Di Mortui Sunt.  The Holidays can really mess up a schedule.   I’ve been a pledge of the local Oddfellows chapter for most of this year and became a member on the night of October 28th.  The picture above is of all the new members and the Noble Grand of the Lodge (he’s the chairman, basically).  If it’s hard to see me it is because the black woman’s, center-right, second row, hat is blocking my face.  What do Oddfellows do?  Well it’s a social fraternity much like the Elks or Free-Masons, except the Oddfellows didn’t became a fraternity to help out their members instead they came together to do community service and help the poor.  This was something I wanted to be a part of and so I did.  If you want to know more here’s the website for the International Order as well as the Wiki page.

I’ve recommended the group to several of my friends and will be attempting to get D to join as well.  Not only does the Order help the community but it is a great social network to be part of the Lodge puts together hikes, dances, dinners, concerts, and more.  Next Tuesday (12/22) I’ll be getting my three degrees as well.  I don’t know what all this entails.  I wish I could tell you about the initiation ceremony, but then I’d have to kill you… Or maybe they’d kill me, I forget which.

Keeping with the spirit of the post I just wanted to mention how social fraternities like the Oddfellows, the Rotary club, Elk’s Lodge, etc…  are a great way to get involved with your community and to meet your neighbors.  Our culture increasingly isolates individuals from the people nearest to them: in their own towns and neighborhoods.  This alienation from the people around us can go a long way in explaining our ability to label everyone around us as ‘them’ while our own ‘us’ shrinks and shrinks.  if you don’t feel like getting active politically in your community these local social groups are another great way to contribute to your town/city while getting to know more people and make new friends.

Connecting with the people around us is the very first step in making your community, state, country, the world, a better place.

What is Di Mortui Sunt all About?

Di Mortui Sunt is my personal blog and it shows, the things I write about here are varied and mostly unrelated.  In an attempt to perhaps focus the blog on a specific topic and to satisfy my own curiosity I visited Wordle and had a Word Cloud made of my blog, (it’s that image up there, at the top.  The one that looks like a large grouping, or cloud, of words) two things happened as a result of this:  I found a really fun new font, coolvetica, that I will be using in documents; and two, that I write mostly about games.

The question is do I want Di Mortui Sunt to be a blog about videogaming?  As much fun as that sounds I don’t see myself contributing much to the discussion, when there are really excellent gaming blogs out there (Gamespite, Dubious Quality, Gamasutra, oh, and my own Gamestooge to name only a few) who are taking the hobby seriously.   Okay, so gaming isn’t what this site is about, what about writing?  I’ve posted my writing here and I’ve certainly talked about it here.  Since, writing is important, as is the written word, I think it’s safe to say that they are apart of what Di Mortui Sunt is.  I’ve talked about government here as well and I’ll continue to do so, as I’m involved in it at a professional level and I won’t be able to get around it

I think that I’d like to see Di Mortui Sunt have more focus.  I’m writing for myself here, but I’d like to have what I say be of some use to those who read it, even if they take nothing more from it but a smile.  Since, I’m lacking inspiration now, besides making this a blog about the lack of Gods, (the title up there says “the Gods are dead” in Latin) and everyone know we have a overabundance of atheist blogs and sites.  I’ll ask you dear reader what you think?   Perhaps a blog about being spiritual without being religious?  Or attempted at living authentically in an inauthentic culture?  Or maybe I should just rant here about the black helicopters, Glenn Beck and Area 51?  Let me know in the comments.

I’m going to keep writing about games and other things but I think I’ll find a new place to do so.

EDIT:  Light colors on a white background doesn’t work very well does it, click for the full-sized image and things will be easier to read

EDIT: I re-named the blog on 8/1/11 to False(B)logic

%d bloggers like this: