We just spent a week on Martha’s Vineyard, and while we were gone, it rained. A lot, apparently. It was raining when we got home, so I didn’t rush out to see the vegetable garden up close and personal, but from the back door I could see two things: the tomato plants are inches higher than they were when we left, and the zucchini plant looks to be taking over the world.
It was interesting reading this piece in the NY Times, and equally interesting were the responses to it. I’m not sure all the respondents grasped some of the nuance in Iyer’s piece.
In any case, I don’t think one needs to flee home in order to simplify, unless one is willing to also cut oneself loose from the human entanglements that make us… well, human.
The little zucchini plant — all of four leaves strong when we bought it — has tripled or quadrupled in size seemingly overnight. We’ve had a couple of days of rain, and the garden has turned into some sort of veggie paradise. I hope things stay happy and healthy out there — in a couple of months we’ll be eating home-grown salsa. And zucchini/eggplant parmesan. And salad.
So we did really well yesterday with Ticketmaster. Got field tickets to two shows at Giants Stadium, although the ones we really wanted were the Saturday night ones, for the, ya know, last show.
So what do they do today? They announce two more shows because the other three sold out instantly. So now of course we don’t have tickets to the last show at all.
Bryan helped me out today by installing my WordPress theme and getting my URL redirect to work properly. I’m starting to play around with the theme a bit, and I’m preparing some content. I hope to get this up and running for good before I head off to Martha’s Vineyard (which trip in itself should provide some cool content).
I opened a Twitter account for the new site too.
More info to come. Soon.
For those of you who don’t know, they’re tearing Giants Stadium down to build a new Giants Stadium. Bruce and the E Street Band are closing it down in style at the end of September with a three-night stand. With a little luck and a little coordination, we’ve managed to score floor tickets for both the Friday and Saturday night shows. Since we really want to go the Saturday show, I guess we’ll have to find a good home for the Friday night tickets.
There will be a tailgate picnic and a very good show in my future.
I’m going to try really hard to get my food blog up and running this weekend. Bryan has a really nice graphic made for it. I’m going to have him resize it for the header once I get WordPress upgraded and get the template uploaded.
Jim mentioned this morning that the deck is pretty shady for the first half of the day, so I moved the potted tomatoes, peppers, and basil onto the observatory deck which is in full sun in the morning.
Two of the potted plum tomatoes look like they might not make it (sniff!), so I’ve tried ministering to them a bit (they were sort of falling over — I’ve set them straight, and removed some dying leaves and shriveled stems), and perhaps with the addition of some sunlight, they’ll perk up.
If they don’t, the two remaining potted ones and the two planted in the garden look pretty healthy.
Amazingly, the romaine lettuce, which we were told is hard to grow, looks to be thriving. Can salad be in our future?
I know that rain is necessary for gardening, but I’m a little worried about the veggie plants, which are still very small and delicate. They’re being assaulted by a fairly heavy rain this morning. I had to go out and re-stake one of the small plum tomato plants on the deck this morning because it looked all soggy and sad. They need some sunshine, dammit!
In other edible plant news, the herb seeds on the kitchen counter are germinating! I think that in a week I should have herb sprouts. As soon as they’re big enough, I’ll put them in slightly larger pots and set them out on the deck so they can get plenty of sunlight.
I got a screener from a PR guy in NY who handles South Asian cinema, so I wrote a review of a little indie flick called Offshore (not to be confused with Outsourced, which is also about… well, you get it). You should go read it. It’s the first movie I watched on my new Mac, which offered a better movie-viewing experience than I was expecting.
