This Year’s Garden

I meant to post when I planted but did not because, “reasons.” More specifically, a lack of motivation to do so. It’s not exactly anything impressive anyway, but that isn’t really supposed to matter anyway. My 2024 gardening is underway, and if it’s anything like the past several years, it will not be very fruitful.

At our old house, we had a pretty decent garden. I built a nice tiered raised bed pyramid thing, we grew plenty of peppers and tomatoes and the plants were super large and full. We had so many tomatoes we made a ton of salsa and I think I still have hot peppers frozen somewhere, though I doubt they are any good years later now.

The new house has been, not so successful. We get a lot more backyard animals here, and generally speaking, they eat all the fruits and vegetables. We have tried a few things to discourage it from keeping them up high on the back deck, to rubber snakes and other things.

I am trying again this year. I moved all of the plants (everything is is pots or buckets) down to the lower deck area, the pots still have the useless rubber snakes. I put my wind chimes down there as well, I am hoping the noise deters the animals a bit. In the past, we could not really use this lower area because we had our dog outside down there fairly often and she would get into things. She passed away a few years ago (like 20 years old, we thought she was immortal). So the lower area is available.

Anyway, also for deterrent, I have planted a bunch of garlic in the bottoms of all the pots, and a few mint plants in small pots nearby. Both are supposed to deter animals due to the smell, or so I hear.

As for what, it’s nothing super fancy, a tomato plant, a cherry tomato plant, a green pepper plant, a poblano pepper plant. I also have some oregano and basil. I also had a cilantro plant but something has already come along and snatched it up completely. Most of the plants I picked up from a sale at the local college agriculture building. They did not have any mint there though so I picked those up at the Kroger. They were conveniently on sale in the vegetable department later the same day I had gone to the college sale.

I also had my leftover plants from last year. Sadly, none of those had made it. We took them inside for the winter but they don’t seem to be coming back at all. Something took and ate my oregano and basil from last year anyway. I also had a Lemon and a Lime tree I had bought on clearance at the end of the summer last year. Both just seem to be dead sticks still.

I don’t have enough plants to make any huge batches of salsa or anything, but hopefully I can start getting some vegetables to eat occasionally.

Housekeeping Matters

It’s been a bit since I’ve last posted, I admit. Today I mostly wanted to address a few housekeeping matters.

I’ve moved the Letterboxd movie post syndication to Lameazoid.com. These posts were filtered from the home page and primarily serve the purpose of archiving what I post on Letterboxd. Frankly,. if you cared about these, I’d prefer a follow over there. They also now appear here on Lameazoid. They are still excluded from the main page. I post TV and movie content on Lameazoid, it’s just a “better fit” over there.

On the subject of “mostly for archival purposes”. I believe I have at least made the BlueSky archive posts slightly less ugly looking. Maybe not. I am not entirely sue how to use all fo the options on the RSS feed plug in and it’s not really important enough to care that much. It’s primarily for archival purposes, in case Blue Sky, or Letterboxed, etc close, I still have my posts. I want to add Threads as well at some point.

My wife is trying to get more serious with her online sales business. We’ve set up a website and Facebook page for it. The website collects the various sales pages mostly. Anyway, I’ve replaced the old “ebay” link with a link to the site. If you want to buy vintage (and some newer) clothing, that’s the primary things for sale over there.

Also notable, I updated the theme to something else. Mostly, I was bored with the old one.

I keep telling myself I should post and write more, I have ideas and thoughts to post on, but in the end, I just get in the way of myself and don’t. I even started writing in my own private journal a bit more just to sort of, try to get the juices flowing more. Which sort of works, but also not. Anyway, I just wanted to get these couple of housekeeping things mentioned.

Eclipse Adventure

In 2017, I took a trek with my parents down to Carbondale Illinois to view the total solar eclipse. While these are reasonably common occurrences, they are not super common in an area where it’s easy to go see them. At this point, I’ve been fortunate to have two of them come nearby within a few years. We had vague plans to go back to Carbondale again for the 2024 eclipse but instead opted to go to my aunt and uncle’s place in Indiana. With one big benefit being that it meant avoiding excessively pricey hotels. Last Eclipse, we stayed in my parent’s camper, but they don’t have the camper anymore so that wasn’t an option this round. It also meant it was much easier to stay an extra night and avoid the stress of the traffic leaving the area.

Aside from visiting my relative’s new house for the first time, my main draw is trying to take photos of the event. It’s also just, neat to be here. My pics from last Eclipse came out pretty well, and I wanted to give it another go. I also tried a little experiment this time using my laptop and a spare webcam I had to try to take a video of the while thing. This… sort of worked out, but it’s not exactly amazing footage. It was still a fun experiment though.

The actual eclipse photos themselves came out alright, though I am not sure why they have such a blue tint to them. It looks pretty cool though. I tried a variety of F-stop and shutter speeds to try to get some of the different layers based on some reading online but they all kind of just came out pretty similar. For these photos, I used my Pentax K-3 DSLR and a 300mm telephoto lens.

I really should look into a better lense at some point, this one is quite old I had a bit of trouble with it zooming out on it’s own while pointed upwards because the weight would cause it to collapse back into itself. I “fixed” it with a spot of tape on the barrel, but it’s been a bit of an issue off and on for a while. For a filter I reused the one I had from 2017. I’d kept it in good shape stored in a small plastic box.

I’ve also posted a full gallery here.