Wednesday, July 15, 2009

There is stuff to do, but today I'll just watch Harry Potter instead

I was reading someone else's blog, how she thinks that she is going to feed her family with her new garden. There's a picture of her garden, or some of her soon to be garden anyway. If the picture shows most of it, then it probably is a bit smaller than mine. She is proud of how she used recycled stuff to make the path around the garden to save money. But then most of her garden is raised beds, about half made from bricks that must have cost several hundred dollars, and the other half being made from heavy lumber that I do not think they found in the scrap bin.

In any case, I am wondering if the garden will feed her family. She is in California, while I am in Texas. Maybe in California they are not having this problem with the bees. Or maybe there is just something about my house in particular that the bees do not like. I saw a bee yesterday, but she was out in the field, not in my yard.

A neighbor who usually has a nice garden has mostly given up for the year. Half of his garden has been dug up and made ready for next year. I don't talk to this particular neighbor, so I don't know what happened to the other half of his plants. He has left the tomatoes, and the sweet potatoes aren't ready to be dug up yet, but most everything else is gone.

I tried to grow some more beans, but again there were no sprouts. I think that maybe they did sprout, but the pill bugs ate them before I saw them. This is getting annoying, as there are pill bugs everywhere that I did nothing about, as all the books said that they were harmless and only ate dead plants. Now I will have to find a way to protect new plants from them.

With all the water I give to the garden plants, the grass around the plants has grown tall. We will have to cut it more often. I wish I had money to cover the rest of the yard with stepping stones and such.

Note to self: in the future do not plant turnips and radishes in the same bed. I have trouble telling which is which, and after the rain some of the seeds moved so that they got mixed in together.

While I am not getting anything done in the garden because of the heat, the front part of the house has improved enough for my husband to comment about it.

August will be here soon. I don't look forward to it. I would like to work really hard for a few weeks and then maybe be in a coma for a month or so. It would be nice to skip the entire month and just wake up one day and find that it was already September and time to do fall planting if I'm going to do that.

Later today we will go and watch the Harry Potter movie. I looked at the emails from last night, and there was no mention of the sneak preview that my friends should have gone to. So I'm glad that I decided not to worry about all that. Maybe I will go with them Saturday night, but I won't decide before then. I'll just see how I feel. I would like to see what they do, but I don't really want to get that into it myself. I have cleaning to do, and I shouldn't stop working right when I am starting to see real progress.

The card came from the unemployment place. We were told it would be three eighty a week on weeks that he qualified for a whole week, and it has four hundred dollars. So that is a bit odd. Not enough for two weeks. So did they decide the didn't qualify for a whole second week, or is more coming later. Anyway, it is a bit annoying about it being a card and not a check. I'm not real sure how to get it from that account to the account that we pay our bills from. Though at this rate we may just end up spending the whole four hundred on stuff and not have any left to transfer to the other account. I wonder why they don't just ask for your regular account information and make a direct deposit to that?

The new business experiment will be in about a month. I keep forgetting things that have to be purchased, or things end up costing more than I thought they would. Like we had to go and buy extra ink cartridges and colored paper for the printer, cause we need about a hundred each of a couple of things. For the black and white stuff we might have gone to a copy place, but color copies are still very expensive, which doesn't quite make since if color ink cartridges don't cost more than black ones. Maybe it is just assumed that color copies use more ink. Anyway, we did not use the copy place this time. Maybe next time, if there is a next time. We bought a frame for a poster, but we haven't ordered the poster yet. We have reserved rental equipment for next month. And if the business doesn't go well it will cost at least another two hundred or so in supplies that we are now committed to spend at the end of next month. The four hundred something dollar computer became a six hundred something dollar computer. By the time next month is over we will have spent over twelve hundred dollars on this thing. I am starting to get nervous about it again.

But today I am just going to enjoy watching the movie and then coming home to eat the expensive cheese that we bought yesterday from the surplus store.

5 comments:

dmarks said...

Mmmm. Surplus cheese.

I hope it was Edam, so you can say what it tastes like.

dmarks said...

Also, about the unemployment card vs direct deposit, check this out:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090527152643AAnxeKZ

Ananda girl said...

Have you thought about getting a bee hive? You can buy and keep a hive.
That's what some people here in town did.

Personally I know nothing about bees other than to avoid them at all cost. But it was a thought you might want to check into. Help re-bee your area maybe.

laughing said...

I don't think that we got edam. I think last time we got something with horseradish and something with mustard. We almost always get something with peppers. We didn't get as much this time as we still had stuff from last time.

I could never get a bee hive by myself. I have no idea what one would cost anyway. I suppose if things were bad enough I would chip in for a neighborhood hive, if someone else was actually doing the part of taking care of the bees. My husband wanted bees at the other house, but I was afraid of them and having none of it, and that was before the problem anyway.

I sit here now and think how at one of my jobs I would kill a few bees everyday when they would get inside the building. Now I don't even see that many outside.

Ananda girl said...

It's terrible about what is happening to the bees. We need them. I know that wasps will do some pollination too, as do moths and butterflies, but so much relies on bees. They used to use wasps to do the figs in Fresno. Ick.

Up here you do not see the typical California type small yellow and black bee. Here we have great big, fuzzy mostly black with one fat stripe bumbles. I think they are darned cute, like something out of Whinnie the Pooh. But they tell me that the sting is horrible.