Grass Patching

Over the summer I decided to adjust the sprinklers for our complex to see if we could save a bunch of water while keeping our lawn green, since California is 3 years into a drought. The default setting on the sprinkers is 10 minutes per sprinkler per day, which seemed like way more than was needed. Last winter I turned the sprinklers off for the rainy season, and when the rain ended I set them to 3 minutes. That didn’t work out so well, and the lawn started browning. Unfortunately, I thought I’d changed them upward but in fact I’d just imagined it, I guess, so the lawn got browner and browner until finally I changed it to 5 minutes, which seemed to do the trick. Alas, some patches of grass had just plain died, and two months later had not come back, even though the rest of the lawn was green and growing.

So I went out and bought some grass seed – actually a mix which included some green stuff to deliver the seed in, which I think also contained fertilizer – and spent some time digging up the brown patches to mix up the soil, laying down the seed mix, and watering the results. The one patch I tried it on a few weeks ago has come up quite nicely, so this weekend I did a whole bunch of other patches in front of my neighbor’s unit.

Last night Debbi and I were watching WALL•E after dinner when the doorbell rang: The neighbor had come over with a plate of delicious brownies to thank me for laying down the grass seed.

Sometimes good deeds do get rewarded!

(And we’ve hopefully saved a lot of water this summer, too. I don’t know how much water the sprinklers use, but if it’s 1 gallon/minute, then I estimate that that’s over 100 gallons/day! I bet it’s less than that, but still significant.)

My Green Thumb Turns Brown

Since I moved in to my house, I’ve planted a garden every year. Some years are better than others, and I always have a few mishaps: Some flowers die, and I’ve never been able to successfully grow peppers. But usually we get some pretty flowers and a whole bunch of tomatoes and some cucumbers out of it.

But this year has just been one mishap after another.

Since we were debating how to go about treating our building for termites, I held off planting because my garden planter is up against the building, and would have to be included in the tenting, which would likely kill all the plants. Once that was resolved, I planted some marigolds, a gerbera daisy, and a pair of cherry tomato plants. I also planted my usual assortment of herbs.

Well, the marigolds and daisy have all done really well (except for one marigold plant that didn’t quite make it), but the tomato plants have had a rough time of it. We’ve got some field mice in the yard this year which I suspect have been taking the green tomato fruits (and also licking the grease from the grease trap in the grill – ew). I finally put some netting over the plants, and that seemed to help, but one of the plants has had one of its stalks die, and the rest of it doesn’t seem to be in great shape either. So rather than having a boatload of tomatoes, we might only get a handful this year.

On top of that, the basil plants have not been doing so great, even though I bought a large pot for them this year. Usually they last until the frost sets in, but two of the three plants are looking pretty sickly, and I don’t know why. (The third one is newer than the first two, so maybe the first two were just from a bad batch?).

It’s kind of a bummer overall. We also have some squirrels who like to chew on the bark of the trees over my patio (I’ve seen them do this), which kills the branch they chew on, which means extra dead leaves in the yard in the middle of summer. Annoying. On the other hand, this gives me some incentive to prune the trees back a bit, which they usually need anyway. (Some of the dead limbs are too high for me to reach, though, even with my 20-foot extension pruner.)

On the bright side, the flowers I planted on the upstairs porch have been doing well this year, and we have some holdovers from last year that are still kicking as well. So I don’t feel like a total failure!

I’m gonna miss having the tomatoes, though.

Walkability

A few months ago I wrote about how I’ve been walking to more places near my house this year, and later how walking to get lunch was a nice fringe benefit of working from home. Now J.D. Roth has written his own entry on walkable neighborhoods.

J.D. emphasizes his most important point:

To me, a “walkable neighborhood” doesn’t mean a neighborhood where people could walk to-and-from stores; it means a neighborhood where people do walk to-and-from stores. That’s a subtle but important difference.

I agree totally. While I could walk to more places in my area, in reality I mostly head into our city’s downtown, which is much more interesting than any of the local neighborhoods (and is, indeed, one of the nicest downtowns in the county, in my opinion). But it’s a 30-minute walk away, and I’m rarely motivated to spend a 60-minute round trip just commuting to and from downtown. In reality, I only walk there when I’m going down to catch the train up to San Francisco. Plus, downtown has abundant parking. So I drive there instead. I think the presence of downtown in easy driving distance, but somewhat more difficult walking distance, greatly reduces the walkability of my own neighborhood. Consequently, although was have a few little strip malls within half a mile of my house, I think the presence of downtown dissuades potential restauranteurs and retail stores from opening up in my area. They’d rather be downtown, where the people are.

Serious walkers – and I know several – may laugh at my being daunted by a 30-minute walk one-way, but honestly my time is more important to me than either getting some walking in or reducing my environmental impact by driving less. I’d rather spend that time biking, and I tend not to use my bike to commute, except to work, for various reasons. Also, my environmental footprint is already fairly small; I drive a Honda Civic, and only put around 7K miles on it a year, which is a minuscule impact compared to most of my fellow Americans, I’d guess.

The other neat thing in J.D.’s post is a reference to Walk Score, which will compute the “walk score” for any address. I both love automated computation engines like this, and view them with suspicion. That doesn’t stop me from playing around with them, though, so, I checked out walk scores for many of the places I’ve lived:

  • The house where I grew up has a score of 62, “somewhat walkable”. This surprised me, since the nearby town center has a Starbucks, grocery store, hardware store, post office, bank, and subway station. Not much retail or dining, though, which might hurt it.
  • The apartment I lived senior year of college has a score of 86, “very walkable”. It was a 30-minute walk from campus, and a 5-minute walk from the New Orleans streetcar line, plus various other stores. It didn’t feel quite this walkable, though.
  • The apartment I lived in during grad school in Madison has a score of 86 too. It was right next to a 7-11, a 20 minute walk from downtown, and had many other things in easy walking distance. It was a great location.
  • The apartment I moved to after grad school has a score of 89, also “very walkable”. It was close to a grocery store and a 10-minute walk from downtown, so this makes sense.
  • The apartment I lived in when I first moved to California has a score of 49, “car dependent”. It was a 10-minute walk from downtown, and downtown was a pretty desolate place at the time (it’s better now, including having a light rail station). But yeah, getting around was difficult. I hated the location, mainly because all my friends lived at least a 20-minute drive away. (The apartment was nice enough, though.)
  • My current home has a score of 75, “very walkable”. This seems high to me, although I agree the area is not really car-dependent.

As you might guess, when we next move Debbi and I would like to get closer to downtown. Though overall our current place is a pretty good location. And it has another advantage that’s the exact opposite of walkability: Outstanding freeway access.

Upgrades

All-in-all, quite a productive weekend.

After a quiet morning at home on Saturday, Debbi and I went for a bike ride through the park and down the bike trail, stopping in the park for lunch at the lakeside cafe, and going over the new pedestrian bridge they finished a month or so ago. We cooled down with some yoga exercises on the Wii.

Then we headed to Palo Alto where I bought myself an iPhone 3GS, upgrading from my original model. While this is a tad frivolous, it is a much bigger upgrade over my phone than the 3G was: Faster processors, better camera, more memory, built-in compass – all useful items. Especially the speed and the camera. I ordered a new holster, the newer edition of the one I’ve been using for my old phone: A Marware Sidewinder Deluxe. I like the hard shell and screen protection when I’m not using the phone, while giving me full access to the screen when I am using it. Hopefully it’ll be just as good as the earlier version.

We went to Cafe Borrone in the evening as usual, and on the way home got caught on a summer rainshower that hit the mid-peninsula – very unusual in these parts in July. We often get a little shower in August, and I’ll be curious to see whether it arrived a month early, or if this was a bonus shower. Either way, it was nice.

Today we had an even quieter morning at home, with Debbi making scones and then us sitting on the porch reading the paper with our scones and coffee, enjoying the cool weather. Then we hit the farmer’s market.

In the afternoon I tackled the project of installing a new faucet in the sink of Debbi’s bathroom. This was a pain in the ass, partly because I’d never replaced a faucet before, and partly because the old tubing for the cold water lost its seal when I was trying to fix it all up, and we had to go out and buy a new tube. But I finally got it hooked up, including the drain control, and it works without any leaks. In retrospect I guess it wasn’t too bad, but messing around under the sink is not at all convenient.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned my latest physical ailment: My hips have been getting sore at odd times, usually for days on end, making it difficult to switch between sitting and standing. It started the week before we left on vacation, so less than a month ago. For some reason working under the sink aggravated them badly, and I’ve been hobbling around for the rest of the afternoon. It’s really frustrating, especially since the pinched nerve in my neck seems to be almost better (it only bothered me a little while biking yesterday). Doing a couple of yoga poses seems to help work out the soreness, fortunately, but it’s not a panacea.

Anyway, I wrapped up the day with our book discussion group, dinner at Su Hong, and a few more yoga poses with the Wii. Tomorrow I plan to bike in to work, just in time for temperatures around here to clear 90. Ugh!

But I’m happy with what I got done this weekend. Now I need to go relax for the rest of the evening.

The Stuff Shuffle

This weekend I went out and bought something I’ve been thinking of buying for 2 years: A new television.

Of course, it hasn’t been delivered yet. And, more importantly, we’re still preparing for it.

One issue is that my stereo cabinet is something like 25 years old. I remember going out with my Dad to a furniture store in which seemed like an old-and-decrepit part of Boston (which probably means it was just “any not-suburban part”) to buy it, which was back in high school. I used to have slats for it to store LPs, although I think I chucked them a few years ago. Anyway, the thing is really old, and even though it could probably hold the new TV, I’m going to buy a cabinet made in this century which isn’t just a boring rectangle of particle boards. We scoped some out (note: Ikea’s TV stands are totally not made for me: short, boring, and lacking in storage space) and I’ll likely go buy the one we liked tomorrow (from Fry’s), now that we think it will meet our needs (read: it’ll fit in the space for the TV and hold my stereo components).

The other issue is reorganizing our DVD collection. We have frighteningly more DVDs than I thought we had, and yet probably an order of magnitude fewer than any serious DVD collector. But we don’t really have a good place to store them – we’ve been using some old semi-modular CD racks that Debbi had plus a modular wooden A/V rack to hold the DVDs and a variety of other things. Debbi’s idea was to just buy a bookcase and keep the DVDs in that. I was skeptical that a bookcase – rather than a case made specially for DVDs – would work, but we measured stuff at home and I was convinced. So I stopped at Ikea on the way home from my book discussion and picked one up. I put it together and the moved the DVDs into it. Yay! It’s more compact than the old shelves, but we can also keep some of the old shelves for knick knacks.

(By the way, I spend a lot of time measuring stuff and scoping stuff out when it comes to buying or arranging furniture. Our place isn’t very big and we have a lot of stuff [which arguably can be reworded as “I have a lot of books”] so I prefer to be careful to figure out whether what we’re looking at will fit.)

So that kept us plenty busy for the weekend, and will for the next couple of days as well. But hopefully it’ll be worth the effort. The last hurdle will be to see if the electrical circuit can handle the load of a modern TV (as opposed to the 8-year-old picture tube model we’ve got right now). We’ll find out later this week…

Full Weekend

We’re finishing up a full weekend around here.

Friday night we got together with our friends Chad and Camille for dinner at Cascal, the popular tapas restaurant downtown which we finally discovered a few months ago. C&C used to live in Mountain View, but moved further into the valley around the time I moved here, so we also walked around downtown so they could see what had changed since they were last here.

Saturday I got a much-needed haircut, and then we met up with Subrata and Susan for lunch, Magic and dominoes. Subrata and I played some more Shadowmoor-Eventide sealed deck, and our games took quite a while since we each kept drawing most of our removal and other tricky spells, so we had lots of maneuvering to do. I eventually prevailed 2 games to 1 with my white-blue deck over his black-red deck. Ironically, I put together my own black-red deck which had most of my rares in it – my blue-white deck had none – but didn’t get to play it. I’m not sure it would have been very consistent anyway.

Today we had a relatively lazy day, watching football and the James Bond film License to Kill (1989), the Dalton film I hadn’t seen before. It’s not as bad as I’d feared, but it’s lackluster at best. The acting is often atrocious, with Dalton a shining star next to anyone – indeed, everyone – else.

The painting around here is just about done, so I put the furniture back on the upstairs porch. I’ll move the plants back there over the next week or so. I’m so glad it’s nearly over. It’s been quite a haul to get it all done. (I’m sure the painter feels the same way times ten. I think it’s been a bigger job than he expected. It looks like he did a really good job, though!)

One good anecdote before I finish up: This past week I was sitting for my friend Josh’s cats. (He and his fiancée went to Hawaii, the lucky ducks.) Thursday night I went up to find his one cat who usually hangs out under the bed. Sure enough, there he was, and I went around to the other side to pet him and coax him out. While I rubbed his chin I looked to the side, and…

…well, I went downstairs and said to Debbi, “Either Josh has the most realistic cat toy ever, or there’s a dead sparrow under his bed.”

Sure enough, it was a dead sparrow – still warm, even – and I threw it outside. I suspect it came into one of the enclosed porches somehow – one with a cat door leading out to it – and one of the cats dispatched it and brought it inside to, uh, enjoy. Fortunately, it was still basically intact, rather than being a mess. I sent Josh a text message and he replied that he was sorry I had to deal with that, but that he thinks it’s happened once before.

The things we put up with for our furry friends!

Weekend Projects

A very productive weekend. I:

  1. Replaced the burned-out bulbs in the front post light on one side of our complex’s driveway. This included trimming back bushes so I could get to it.
  2. Bought and installed a new showerhead.
  3. Bought and installed a new double light switch in the master bathroom. For some reason one of the switches only works if the other one is on too, which isn’t how the old one worked, but I can’t figure out exactly what I did wrong, and the way it works now is good enough, since I always turn those two on at the same time anyway.
  4. Figured out which of our complex’s sprinklers is busted and gushing water in the morning, and shut it down until we can get it fixed.
  5. Played some Spore. Did I mention that I bought Spore last week?
  6. Bought cat food. This one is very important – just ask the cats!
  7. Talked to my Mom.

Plus various little chores around the house.

The downside is that I payed bills tonight and noticed a couple of charges on one of my credit cards which were not mine. It sounds like someone got hold of and used the previous number attached to my account (and which is auto-forwarded to the new number). So I asked them to close the account and open a new one. And dispute the bogus charges, of course. Hopefully it will all go smoothly and I’ll be up-and-running again in a couple of days with a new card. But I always get all stressed out whenever something like this happens – I wish I didn’t, but I don’t know how not to. Debbi told me to take deep breaths, since there’s nothing I can do until the new card arrives – I’ve done all I can do. But I’ll be on edge until it does arrive.

At least this time it didn’t happen right before I went away on vacation.

Busy Work

So yesterday Debbi gives me a call near the end of the day: She’d gone home early due to a slow day at her office, got home and was puttering around the house, when the power went out. No idea why, but she called PG&E and was told that it was targeted to be fixed in the next two hours.

I got home an hour later, and we went out to dinner and did a little shopping. We got home after the 2-hour window, and the power was still out. So I called PG&E again and they said the outage was due to an equipment failure, and it would be fixed in – yup – the next two hours.

Fortunately, 20 minutes later the power came on again, saving us from having to figure out where else we could go to watch Michael Phelps win his 7th gold medal of this year’s Olympics.

Unfortunately, when I opened my laptop to check baseball scores I learned (after running around the house a couple of times) that our phone service was out, both voice and DSL. So I called AT&T and learned that they didn’t have any service appointments over the weekend, and only a 12-hour appointment available on Monday. Grr. (Naturally, I didn’t actually talk to a human during all of this, and it took me nearly 8 minutes to navigate their phone menu system along the way.)

Half an hour later, I checked the phone again and lo and behold it was working again, Intarwebs and all.

So this morning I called AT&T to cancel the appointment.

You guessed it, I’ve been on hold for 30 minutes waiting to cancel an appointment.

Fortunately, shortly after I typed the previous sentence, I got through to a human and within 2 minutes she’s routed me to the right place and I cancelled my appointment. Yay!

Though along the way I learned that I could have cancelled the appointment on-line.

Sigh.

Here’s hoping the rest of the weekend goes more smoothly.

Bugs Bug Me

No, not computer bugs. Okay, those bug me too, especially the ones I wrote myself and have to fix. (But at least they pay me for that.) No, I mean actual insects, which were the sources of some annoyance over the weekend.

First of all, we got the results of the termite inspection for our complex, and the inspector says he found signs of infestation in my unit, and recommends we tent and fumigate the building. This is weird because I was home when he came by, and he didn’t say anything to me about it. I’d have expected that he’d at least have called me over to see what he found and be able to recognize the infestation from first-hand experience. He apparently noted some issues with other buildings, too. However, in one case we think it was an infestation which was killed off years ago, but the damage (which was cosmetic) was never patched up. So now we’re not sure whether we’ve got an active infestation or not. So we’ll likely ask for clarification and/or get a second opinion.

Getting our place tented would be a big pain in the ass, mainly because of the cats, since we’d have to figure out where to put them while it’s going on, and how much cleaning up we’d have to do afterwards. The problem with cats is that you can’t really give them to your friends who already have cats, since cats and other cats often don’t mix. And friends without cats often don’t have cats for a good reason. So we might have to board them, which we’d like to avoid.

Still, termites are rampant in the valley, and as annoying as this would be, I’m sure there will be several house-tentings in my future while I live here. So I shouldn’t kvetch too much.

The other bugs vexing me this week is a colony of wasps which has taken up residence inside my redwood bench which also houses my vegetable planter. I see them crawling in and out through a single spot in the planter. Yesterday, one of them landed on my shoulder, rode me into the house, and stung me through my shirt. Ouchie! I killed it, and fortunately it didn’t leave its stinger in my arm, but it hurt like heck for an hour or so. Today I can barely tell I got stung, which I guess means I’m not allergic to wasp stings – good to know.

Anyway, the wasps are getting pretty annoying, so I want to find a way to take care of them – preferably without tearing the bench apart. So I’ll go to OSH after work and see what I can find.

These wasps have been lurking around the area for a couple of years, and their nests seem to move each year. I guess they die off over the winter and then come back and reestablish themselves. I don’t intrinsically object to their presence, since they do some useful things, but I don’t really want them taking up residence where they see me as a threat which needs to get stung. So I’ll see if I can encourage them to take up residence elsewhere.

Sigh. It’s always something.

T.G.I.F. Dammit

All things considered, this has been a pretty crappy week:

  • A couple of last-minute, difficult projects landed on my shoulders this week, resulting in a great deal of stress for me at work. I managed to finish one today and make progress on the other one, but man, it was a rough week. And of course the things I’d planned to work on got deferred in the meantime. Sigh.
  • Debbi has her own job stress, since the majority shareholder of the company she works for has made an offer to buy the rest of the company. I’ve never been part of a corporate buyout, never mind one of this magnitude, but I’m sure this makes everyone who works there uneasy, since who knows how things might change if the buyout takes place?
  • We’re painting our townhouse complex soon, and I realized that my vegetable garden runs right along one of the exterior walls, so now I’m stressed out that I might need to pull out the vegetables just as they’re ripening in order to allow the painters access. Gah! Maybe I can cover them with tarps for the days they’ll be painting there, or maybe I can offer to paint that section myself after the growing season is over. Sigh.

So I’m really glad it’s Friday, because I’m exhausted and frazzled.

On the bright side:

  • I upgraded my journal to WordPress 2.6 and started having a couple of problems with it. But I eventually discovered that one problem was due to having the wrong bookmark to access the admin pages of my journal (I’d bookmarked the login page rather than the admin page), and the other was because I’d been editing some old entries recently which explained why Akismet‘s “automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month” feature seemed to be broken – editing the entries apparently re-set their age counter, so I’m getting a little more spam in my spam trap than I used to. But, it looks like it’s all good in the end.

    (All that said, I am really looking forward to using the “live preview” feature of WordPress 2.6, as I’ve wanted to switch to a new journal template for FP for months now.)
  • I got to play poker last night with friends, and finished up a few bucks in our low-stakes game. All of my profits came from a single hand when my set of Jacks beat pocket Aces. I also managed to get away with losing the minimum when my A-Q hit top pair on the flop, and I folded to two bets – correctly, as it turned out as I was up against Aces again. I’m far from a great player, but I seem to be holding my own in this group.
  • And Debbi and I went to my favorite Italian restaurant for dinner tonight. Yay!

I think we’re going to have a low-key weekend. We have a few chores to do, but otherwise we need to empty our brains and de-stress.