The Empty Cabinets of my Mind

Busy as One of These

Maybe I won't have to hand-pollinate the cucumbers after all :-)

Dread Math?

After reading a killer article about four-season gardening in Northern California, I discovered that one of the responses was written in a language other than English which looked interesting enough to try to translate.  Somehow, while keying it in over at BabelFish, I happened to notice a link to Dr. Mercola's informative site called Take Control of Your Health.  See how one thing leads to another?

Ever since he first started pointing out the dangers of artificial sweeteners, he has been one of my favorite resources, and so I clicked on the link to see what he was up to. 

He was talking about some of the things schools should teach but never do.   That led me to a fascinating link which Mercola describes as required reading, and so do I:

A Great Article by Brian Armstrong 

There you will find two Excel templates that you can download for free that help streamline your monthly personal accounting.  All I can say is WOW!  Do it!  Do it now!

When I was working on my PhT degree (Putting Hubby Through--that is the one I got before the PhD, to enable him to put me through!), I worked in a bank for several years.

There it was a customer who taught me something I consider a highly valuable life skill.  When possible, code payments (and receipts) by incorporating the date into the payment amount.  For example, I recently made a principal-only mortgage prepayment in the amount of 3009.27 instead of $3000 even.  See the code?  The payment tells me I made it on 9-27.  Remembering that I'd made a prepayment in September, when I scanned my statement it showed a payment of $2845.16 instead.  Without this trick I might have thought "That doesn't look right" but then set the statement aside for a few days to look up later, but this way I caught it right away and got it corrected immediately.   

If you have more than one tenant you can code the apartment numbers into the amount of rent they pay, so that the tenant in apartment 5 pays 800.05 each month for example, and the tenant in apartment 6 pays $800.06 and so on.  Then when you scan the bank statement it is easy to see which tenants are paid on time and which are late.  It also helps identify who wrote checks that bounced, although we hope that never happens to you.   

This is the sort of thing they should teach in school.

Oh, and if you are not familiar with Mercola, here is a good place to start:

Mercola's Natural Health Center

Can Anyone Guess what this Is?

Clicking anywhere on the picture will make it larger.

If you give up, the answer is here:

The Whole Picture

 

I Can't Believe I Lost My Cellphone

No, not my snazzy new Helio Ocean smart phone, but the ratty old Motorola V176 that I got from TracFone to use back when I was still trying to decide which smart phone to get.  Not that the V176 wasn't pretty in its own clunky retro kind of way, but it was too short and too fat and lacked any useful features.  So I like to think it is merely misplaced and not lost, as Meticulous Me would never actually lose a mobile device, especially not one with  Lifetime Double Minutes and around $200 worth of rolled over airtime on it.

But I went into a small panic yesterday upon discovering that the air card had to be renewed immediately or the phone number and the minutes would go up in smoke.  No problem, the Radio Shack down the street not only transferred my number and minutes to a nicer phone, but the W376g that I walked away with cost less than I'd paid for the phone that went missing.

It is a clam shell: 

But it has a nicer look and feel: 

I am probably the only person in the world who uses a photo of a live AeroGrown purslane plant for mobile wallpaper, but hey, you never know. 

We Got our Air Conditioner Fixed

You know how that works.  Fix the AC and the temperatures drop, so yesterday was the coldest day we've had since February.   But we do expect more hot weather before Halloween is over and what passes for winter here in the Mohave begins.  Whereas A/C might be considered a convenience in many places, here in the desert it is a necessity, even in August.

We had to get a California smog check.  Our car always passes the test, but for some reason they have us profiled for Test Only. 

Needless to say, we are not wintering in California, so we had to drive across the state line to get the work done.  Fortunately for us there was a Test Only/Gold Shield Station in the neighboring town on Needles, which is the only California town anywhere near us.   I love an excuse to run down to Needles anyway.  Ever since our beloved Food City Market shut down last year, we need to visit that is the only place we can get Country Creek Farms Hot Pork Cracklins, which I can only describe as junk food to die for. 

Econo Smog and Tune in Needles is not just the only licensed Gold Shield station less than a four hour drive from here, but it would be a great resource wherever it was.   The owner is a family man who takes off a bit early on Wednesdays to go watch his son play soccer.  His shop is across from the historic Amtrak station, more or less, so while we were waiting, we sat outside on a lovely shaded bench and watched the cargo trains go by. 

Our family car passed the smog check with flying colors, so we asked Eric to go ahead and fix the air conditioning while we were down there.

Although I hardly ever work on my own cars any more, I like to shop parts online.  It keeps me up on what the shops we use are doing and makes me feel more comfortable being around auto mechanics. We don't begrudge the folks who keep our vehicles safely and smoothly running a fair markup, but I do like to know what the parts are supposed to cost. So I just looked up the shipped cost for an a/c compressor for my car. Wahoo, they had it here:

BMW AC compressor

No, I don't drive a Beemer, but that is a link to Discount AC Parts, a company that not only ships free but offered a free 12 month Gold Warranty for the compressor that would work in the car that I do drive.   Discount AC Parts has a really easy to navigate web site and if you need to research ac compressors, I would recommend it as a great place to start looking, and all compressors come with a full warranty and free shipping.

My Plants Have More Sense Than I Do

I was just sitting down to a late lunch when I remembered that I wanted to take a picture of this:

I jumped up from the table and did it.  My honey even held a flashlight to make sure the picture got enough light.  Then we sat down and had a nice meal.  You wouldn't think an extra light would be needed to shoot plants in a brightly lit AeroGarden, but the camera blocks most of the light when you get in close.

This is the first time I've tried to grow Portulaca Grandiflora in the AeroGarden.  Since it is known as a drought-loving plant, we weren't sure how it would do in the AeroGarden, but it seems to be quite the happy little camper.

After eating we thought we'd take a couple more photos, but this is what we found:
      
Although the lamps were set to stay on until our bedtime (not until the wee hours of the morning), shortly before 4:30 p.m this little beauty said "Bedtime" and folded up for the night. 

We should be so smart. 

About a month and a half later, after much growing, this little sprig of a plant decided to have another flower.  Good thing we didn't blink:

The monster plants on either side of this moss rose are its tastier cousin purslane, which we enjoy fresh in a salad or cooked with pinto or Anasazi beans.

Too bad these only last a day.

Got mobile? Love Games? Try Moola!

Then and Now

There are a LOT of open flowers on top of one of our AeroGrown tomato plants, but look what was hiding way down under.  "Then" was shot 51 days from planting the seed and "Now" was short just 4 days later. 

These are determinate tomatoes, but after they have completed a growing season, I will just take stem cuttings and root each one in a new Master Gardener Grow Pod.  This process is described, with photos, in the latest AeroGrow catalog, p. 36. 

The rest of my own tomato photos are HERE.