flics
December 31st, 2007 nickNeed a distraction from the pending new year? Check out the Weng Weng Rap or Terminus.
Need a distraction from the pending new year? Check out the Weng Weng Rap or Terminus.
Nothing like a few quiet days at home to get me thinking about next spring’s backyard garden. On a recommendation from Jenn, who came over to my folk’s house for Christmas dinner, I checked out High Mowing Organic Seeds. They have a positive mission, they grow ~40% of their own seed, and the prices seem very comparable to what we’re paying . Add to that the fact that I’m a little ticked at Territorial Seed Company for selling our info to other seed catalogues, and we may just have found ourselves a new seed supplier. That said, we don’t need that much in the way of new seed this year as we have a lot left over because we don’t use that much in any given growing season. The current list of seed we need:
We have high hopes that, armed with the castings and juice from our friends in the basement, this years harvest will be more bountiful than the past two.
Settling back into the rhythm here in Baltimore, having just returned from western Mass where there is whole lot of snow. It’s in the high 40s and sunny down here, south of the Mason-Dixon line. Speaking of which, I’m trying to get into Mason & Dixon by Pynchon again (for the third time?) and am not sure I’m going to make it. I need to give it to page 100, though, rather than just page 10. And conditions were such at home this past week that I was having trouble focusing on reading.
Grandma died a week ago Friday of a heart attack. Sudden and very very sad, although not entirely unexpected as her health had been declining for a while. She remains the only person, to my knowledge, who read my entire undergrad thesis (excluding professors whose job it was to do so). Even ignoring the fact that she thought it was mostly bunk (or at least that Delillo is full of overblown prose and underdeveloped characters), this was a huge act of love and one that I will always remember.
So that cast a bit of a pall over holiday celebrations in Leverett. But we still muddled through and even managed a few of those good deep unstoppable laughs that I only seem to have with my family. The visit was capped with a wonderfully busy Friday evening: a quick but cozy visit with Jay, Iris and (3 month-old) Ivy, a great double-date-night with Celia and Emmet at the Hope & Olive in Greenfield, and a healthy dose of smiling and twirling at the contra dance at the Grange.
I’m going to try to keep the number of miscellaneous technical posts to a minimum (and all of them will have the bulk below the fold), but occasionally I will throw up some installation notes or some other such gobbledy-gook either for myself down the road or for anyone else that might find it useful. In any case, about six months ago I installed Beamer, the package for the LaTeX typesetting program that allows you to make pdf presentation files. It was not as straightforward as I thought it should be, so I tried to write down my steps as best I could…
I’ve been working with Justin on a research project on certain clinical characteristics of influenza. Specifically, we’ve been trying to catalogue references to the incubation period (the length of time between infection and symptoms) and the serial interval (the length of time between when one person gets sick and when another gets sick). Anyways, in the process of this cataloging, I ran across a book published in 1891 on the accounts of these characteristics of influenza as seen and recorded by country doctors in England and Wales. Most of the entries are pretty boring (I typed them all over so we’d have an electronic version of the data) but every once in a while, something would come by that was frickin’ hysterical. The responses were displayed in a table as below and I’ve chosen some of the more juicy ones for display…
| name of doc | town | description/report of influenza |
| C. C. Smith, M.B. | Redditch | Intervals 1-2 days. |
| B. C. Gowing | Penistone | A had influenza 6 days after return from London. B relative, 3 days later. [etc...] |
| B. B. Joll, M.B. | Much Woolton | Intervals, A, 6 days, B, 3 days, C, 5 days, D, 6 days. |
| T. W. Green, M.D. | Rawtenstall | Intervals 4 days. |
| G. Willis, M.D. | Monmouth | “Incubation short, 24-48 hours.” In one case 48 hours from kissing patient. |
I really want to meet the Englishman who, with a sober and straight face said, “hey, let’s name our town Redditch!” Or the one with such imagination as to think of what name might be appropriate for their town, given that they have a lot of sheep. But I’d probably rather not meet the doc who’s snogging his patient.
I can’t stop listening to “Jail” by Dan Bern. And it’s available for free at archive.org.
Some other time I’ll go on a rant about why I think this song is a compelling argument to chill out about the Barry Bonds scandal (and all the others that are about to hit with the release of the Mitchell report).
We brought back about 15 pounds of veggie scraps from Thanksgiving for our composting red wiggler worms. This was a larger influx of food than they’ve ever had and they’re struggling to keep up. For the first time since we got them in early February, some of the food is smelling a little bad and we’re seeing a bit of mold in a few places. If it gets too nasty, we’ll probably pull some of the moldy stuff, but I bet they catch up and munch the bad stuff before it gets too gross. Also, we’re hoping that they’ll reproduce more with all the excess food available and then we’ll have some worms to give away for Christmas. We’ve already promised two worm bins as presents.
We harvested our first batch of compost too and I can’t wait to start growing some beans, tomatoes, cukes, etc… in it next spring. Actually, I probably won’t wait until then, as I’m scheming to grow some herbs and smaller plants in the windowsill over the winter, and this rich soil would make a nice nutritional additive for any sun-deprived window dweller.
When we gave some worm juice (not the soil, just the drippings from the compost bin) to a droopy cucumber plant at the end of the summer, it was like we had given it some RAWBERRY.
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