Garden works

We spent the day in the garden, making a new bed for the artichoke plants (bareroot) that we got at Sparetime supply in Willits on Saturday, and mulching the paths with rice hulls.  The picture here is of our compost windrow.  Our compost is a mix of last years plant matter, weeds, and kitchen scraps.

We saw our friends Mike and Sandrine enjoying the nice weather to get a little gardening in.  We also saw Doug who was pruning his grapes and showed us his tulip plants starting to poke out of the ground.

There is still a ton of work to do on the garden before the growing season starts, but it's still January (for a few more hours), so hopefully we can get out when the weather cooperrates again!

Cat Warhol

A new toy (droid) with new toys inside it (fancy camera effects) is pretty sweet!  Now if only I could rotate it...

Squawesome!

We went to ski-landia this weekend (1/23-24) because it dumped snow with the storms last week.  The crew was Marion (shown) and I, Stefon and Elia, Chezo, and Heather.  Saturday we went to Squaw and got there early enough to find some of the 14" of powder dropped the evening before (while we were in our 6 hour hell-drive up the hill).  We ran all over the mountain and the skiing was amazing.  The afternoon ended pretty early for all of us, since we had only slept four hours the night before, and since none of us are in ski/boarding shape yet for the season.

Sunday we hit Sugar Bowl, the snow was super nice again and we got to find untouched patches of day-old powder in the trees.  There were lots of nice groomies which allowed us to rip until well into the afternoon, as it was pretty much all the muscles could handle after lunch.  We drove home Sunday evening and crashed hard!  Marion won the weekend for the worst injuries after getting trucked by some jackass teenager who was going 100mph and had 0 control.  She's on a strict vitamin I regimen until her neck muscles recover from the whiplash.

Blogg it to Blog it

I haven't been posting recently, so I'm going to do a quick summary of my favorite topical updates for the last few months.

Parties

Lei-out 2010 - Los Angeles
We spent this last weekend (1/15-1/18) down in sunny SoCal playing beach ultimate, catching some sun, seeing old friends, and pretty much having an awesome time.  Our team, straddle, from Davis goaltimate roots, was incredibly fun to play with but we were too short to win the tournament, alas.  Super props to Melody's parents for putting us up in the PV.

Superbowl 2010 - Davis
This party is upcoming, Feb 7th at 3pm.  If you read this blog, you should probably be invited, so if you don't know about the party, send me an e-mail and then come on over!  It will be the most awesome superbowl party of 2010, and you don't want to miss it.


Kayaking
The last kayaking was done in early december, with Stefon and Chazo on the SFA Gorge section.  We put on at 11:30, ahead of the water thinking it would catch up with us before we hit the Gorge proper.  The crew, being particularly prone to restlessness, was unable to wait, so we ran the entire river only 10-20 minutes ahead of the water.  We know this because the people who got off the river 15 minutes after us claimed they were in high water the whole time...  That said, I think SFA Gorge is almost better at low water than high.


Beer
The thanksgiving stout turned out great!  The "beauty and beast" cider is still a story in development.  The beauty finished fermenting, but was bottled with lots of yeast still in suspension, also with too much priming sugar.  The result is a fairly yeasty cider with explosive tendencies.  It may need to be re-bottled and/or donated to the new "fortifying" project.


The beast is still in the carboy, it's long since quit fermenting and is just settling now, but looks nearly clear enough to bottle.  One of these days...

We started another beer, since it's pretty cold outside (daily lows ~40 F) we did a pilsner which wants to be lagered below 50F.  It's fermenting away happily in the shed, but may require a better setup for lagering post-ferment, especially if it warms up after these storms.


Technology
New computer - This is old news, but I never did write anything about it.  We were running out of room on the living room desktop, plus it was slow, plus it was loud, plus it was vertical tower.  The obvious choice was a quad-core AMD machine with 4GB memory and 4TB hard drive in a horizontal form-factor.  It worked OK with WinXP, but is now running very nicely with Win7.  All told, the box, processor, memory, and mobo were ~$300, the HDs were another ~300.

Pending updates - we've decided to catch-up with smartphone technology and are joining the Droid bandwagon.  They seem pretty nice in the "in-store preview", and we'll see how they rate once we have them in hand.

Weather

It's coming down.  I read a neat prediction by some NASA guy about getting 10ft of snow during the next three days of storms, then having a nice warm rain which will melt it all, flood the lowlands, cause the retards in Natomas to get New Orleans-ed, and generally wreck havoc.   Either way, there will be good skiing or great kayaking in the next few days.

Garden
Not much going on, we've taken out all the plants from last year, but it's too wet to be doing anything now, so we'll just be waiting.  The solar system is still working beautifully, I couldn't have designed it better if I knew what I was doing.