We had our first salad the other night from our garden and it was great. I can’t wait for all of the other crops — peas, carrots, and even cantaloupe! Yum!
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Happy Earth Day!
Yeah, I know I’m a week late, but I had to post an update on our square foot garden. My wife did a great job getting all of our crops planted and now we are only a few weeks away from having some delicious home-grown salads with dinner. Yum! Stay […]
Square Foot Gardening
We picked up Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening book last year with the intent of planting a small vegetable garden, but never got around to doing it. But this year, we are off and running! Only a couple more days and we will have our seedlings in the ground, and […]
HTPC Results
[This is the final part in a series on building your own HTPC] The primary reason I set out to build a Home Theater PC was so I could get rid of DirecTV. I’ve been a subscriber since 1999, and I’ve never had any complaints about their service, apart from […]
Home Theater PC
When you start the research, like I did, on building your own Home Theater PC, you inevitably come across a page or two that claims to give you all the information you need to build the “ultimate” rig for yourself. Some of these pages do provide a wealth of valuable […]
Green vs Green
If you want to “go green” for environmental reasons, that’s great. If you want to do it for financial reasons, that’s great too, but what I’ve discovered is that it might be difficult to quantify exactly how much you are saving. I’ve been waiting since last year to calculate the […]
Back to Normal
He we are at the end of another 30 days. I won’t talk about how difficult it was — I think I covered that last year. And I won’t make any vague promises about how I will try to increase the frequency of my posting, because I did that last […]
Michael
Last year at this time, almost to the day, I was remembering George Carlin after his passing. Yesterday, the universe reminded me once again that I’m old with the passing of two icons from my youth. Although I did watch Charlie’s Angels, like all other pre-pubescent males did back then, […]
Time Wasters
I usually save links to post to my other site, but these don’t really fit that well, so I thought I’d share them here. One is called Fantastic Contraption, and it is completely addictive once you figure out how it works. This will definitely appeal to any engineering types out […]
Hulu on the Wii
Last year we bought a Wii. Shortly after we downloaded the Internet Channel for it, one of its biggest limitations became apparent. The Wii ships with an ancient version (well, ancient by computer standards) of Adobe’s Flash player. This version works with some web sites, but most, like Hulu, require […]
Grade School Reunion
I told a few people last week that I was planning a reunion for members of my 8th grade class, and their reaction was something like, “8th Grade?!?” Is it that unusual? I don’t know. Maybe it is. Is it unusual because people don’t generally have reunions for that? Or […]
Schmittel’s Nursery
Last week I wrote about our new trees. We bought them from Schmittel’s Nursery in Maryland Heights, and paid them to install the trees. The installation was complicated by the fact that two of the trees were 5-inch maples that are very large and very heavy. They could not use […]
Chalkboard Door
In addition to the updated spice rack, we also recently remodeled the basement door. My wife has had the idea of turning it into a chalkboard ever since we moved in, and it’s finally a reality. She sanded and primed the door and then painted it with chalkboard paint (that […]
The Electric Car Cometh, Maybe
I’ve written about electric cars before, but for a while now I’ve been following what I consider to be the most promising entry into this market. The current offering from Zenn Motors is little more than a glorified golf cart. Classified as a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV), with limited range, […]
Our New Patio
Between increasing state tourism and boosting consumer confidence, we were already doing our part to stimulate the economy, but now we are funding infrastructure projects too! Eat your heart out, Obama! We have talked about it ever since we moved in, and now we finally have our patio. It still […]
A Poem Lovely As A Tree
It’s been a year since I last wrote about the torturous sewer project that transpired in our back yard. There is one final chapter in this saga, however, that I wanted to document here for the benefit of anyone else who might have to deal with MSD. A few weeks […]
30 Days of Blog – The Sequel
I’m probably going to regret this, but I signed up for another 30 days of punishment. Last year was a lot more difficult than I anticipated, but this year, I have taken the precaution of jotting down ideas in the weeks leading up to today, so I am hopeful that […]
Magnetic Spice Rack Revisited
It was time to update our old magnetic spice rack and my wife found some cool magnetic knife racks from IKEA. Combined with the containers we already had from Specialty Bottle, and this is no longer a spice rack, it’s wall art!
Free Energy
Last summer when I wrote about our solar water heater installation, I was anxious to see how it would function during the winter. As an example, right now it is 10am, and 29 degrees outside, and the temperature sensor on the panels currently says 111 degrees. Overall, I have been […]
The End of the Road
Well, here we are at the end of 30 Days of Blog. It was fun, but I must admit that this turned out to be more difficult than I initially thought. Just finding the time to write was enough of a challenge, but finding interesting topics to write about was […]
I’m Cheating
Fridays are the hardest. Whew. When I accepted this challenge, I wouldn’t have guessed that one day would be harder than the rest, but Fridays have turned out to be more difficult to find something to write about than the remaining days of the week. So yeah, I’m cheating. It’s […]
It Ain’t Over Yet
Looks like I might have spoken a bit prematurely last month when I said that the end was in sight. Since the contractor has been negligent in watering the new sod that they laid down in our backyard, most of it has turned brown, and I’m not sure it will […]
Going Solar
As I mentioned previously, I was considering installing a photovoltaic system this year to offset some of our home energy costs. But the PV systems are still quite expensive. Even with net metering, it could take decades for a system to pay for itself, and as the fine folks at […]
There’s A Bathroom On The Right
If you’ve ever been to AmIRight.com, you may have seen one of my favorite misheard song lyrics — Creedence’s “bad moon on the rise” in some people’s ears turns into a “bathroom on the right.” Speaking of bathrooms, it’s only taken six months, but our bathroom remodel is finally coming […]