Hi, friends!
I hope you had a good weekend and Sunday is good.
Tonight’s theme is something you did this summer that was great (10/10, would do again) or stuff that you did and were like, welp, not worth the time.
My examples come from my veggie garden, naturally. Last summer a bunch of old people were complaining at Lowe’s that they didn’t have any of the Juliet variety of tomato seedlings, so this year when I saw them available, I grabbed one. 10/10, definitely planting again. Producing a ton of small paste tomatoes that are sturdy and delicious.
Conversely, the patio tomato variety I planted sucked. Like 4 tomatoes total, all small. The salsa variety I got (yeah, that was the actual name, because white people are lazy) started strong and then crapped out. Decent tomatoes, but not a scrappy plant. Tomatoes need to be scrappy.
The yellow pear tomato was the biggest disappointment. That plant grew like crazy, fruited like crazy. They are the most fragile tomatoes I have ever seen. So much splitting and shit like that when it wasn’t a watering issue as nothing else is having that problem. I thought about tearing them out last month but I opted to leave them and let fruit just ripen full out on the vines to distract the birbs and squirrels away from the Juliet tomato.
Also! Yardlong beans. Also called asparagus beans. I planted about a dozen seeds back in early June and holy fuckballs are they going crazy with production. I’ve frozen about 6 pounds of them so far, in addition to giving bags away and eating a fuckton. Will I plant them again next year? Hell yeah! Will I plant half as many seeds? Also hell yeah!
Our vacation to Oregon was pretty great. Mountains, big city, beach, it was all fun. Even with the bad press you read about Portland, what we saw was a good city. It’s not perfect, but where in America is? And the Portlandia version of impossible tweeness seemed overstated too.
The downside to travelling is definitely the security theater I know Butcher and others have complained about. Airports and the TSA still haven’t really thought through helping people get ready to go through security before they go through security, and the glitches keep making the lines go screwy. The attitude pretty clearly is if you put a bulleted list somewhere on some random website, people will know how big of a belt buckle they can wear.
I completed my theme park quad-fecta yesterday. You may recall that I purchased a four-day Florida resident pass for Disney this summer. It was $200 per person. If you’re familiar with Disney theme parks you know that a ticket to any one of them on any given day is about $125.
So $50 a day? Sign me up. But I didn’t realize they expired on Sep. 28 and Labor Day was a blackout date. So my wife figured this out in August and we had to go four times before the end of September because dammit, I paid for tickets and got a good deal.
Of course it’s approximately 146 degrees in the shade right now, which is why you don’t go to Disney World in the summer. But dammit, I paid for tickets and got a good deal.
I hope to never go to a theme park again. But I’ll probably do it again next year.
So how much of the time was rides and how much was sitting in AC with a cold drink?
Eh, 50/50. I bought Lightning Lane passes for the Avatar ride. That’s the big draw. Then we just kind of wandered around and did whatever. One thing about not having a lot of money invested is you don’t feel like you need to do EVERYTHING.
One really GOOD thing, which i HIGHLY recommend, for my fellow bibliophiles & bookworms, is seeing if you can beg/steal/borrow a Grocery Cart or two, when/if you ever need to move/relocate your bookshelves!
One cart can hold *approximately* one 6′ tall 24″-30″ wide shelf’s-worth of books, and it was honest-to-dog, the FASTEST and EASIEST I’ve *ever* moved my books (I have 5-or-so bookshelves of that size, last move, it was about 25 of the 12″×12″×12″ book boxes from U-haul).
It took between 30-45 minutes each, from taking the first book *off* each bookcase, to the time I put the last book back *on* the bookcase in the new apartment.
No boxing or heavy lifting necessary–just a few books at a time, and pushing a hundreds-of-pounds rolling cart😉😁🤗💖
Seriously, I’m thinking of ways to rig up some sort of winch in a U-haul truck, so I can just borrow about 6 carts when we leave this building…
That way I could just load the carts with my books, use the winch to pull ’em on to the truck, then strap the carts to the sides of the truck, haul ’em to my next home, and roll the carts right into the apartment building/ garage/whatever-it-is!😆😂🤣💖
I picked up a Red Ryder wagon at a yard sale years ago and it was one of the smartest impulse buys ever.
We used to grow yellow pears for years and they do have a tendency to split if you look at them wrong–but they are so productive that it was worth it for us. However, since Mrs. Butcher stopped eating tomatoes, I dropped growing any cherry variety. We got a rouge grape tomato plant this year but so far it’s just the one which has kept the harvest manageable.
This year was the first time I grew Big Jim NM Green Chiles (hat tip to LoveShaq for the Pepper Joe’s referral). They are so much better than the shitty Anaheims that I was stuck with for so long because I couldn’t find real NM Chile seeds. They did have a problem with blossom drop and then with the chiles rotting prematurely on the plant, but that’s a soil chemistry problem that I’ll just need to work through. They roast very well and peel so much more easily than the other peppers I was growing. Pepper Joe’s gets them from Sandia Seed Co, so I’ll just order directly from them next year.
I’m impressed and mystified by Mexican/New Mexican pepper growing culture. I love the concept of having tons of sauce on hand, but I’m not sure how to DIY and there’s definitely no easy source to buy good stuff around me.
Honestly I don’t use my chiles to make sauce. I’ll use them in my salsa and I’ll just roast/chop/freeze them for use in other dishes. For the actual sauces I just order them by the case from salsamill.com.
i made a date with a homeless punk……gotta call him later…i have at least a tenners worth of empty cans for him…lol
but really…havent done anything of note all summer….just working and drinking
and on that note….if im a little scarce around here this week especially around duan time…do not be worried…ill just be in bed reading and enjoying the miraculous side effects of sobriety
but yeah….detox will probably take me out of the picture for a couple days
The best thing I did this Summer was get sober thirty years ago. I wish you well, @farscythe.
quitting is easy….its staying quit i struggle with
this is just going to be about 3 days of suck after that i should be fine
but bored….lol
meant to say cheers mate 🙂
welp…off to work