• Tomatoes:
  • Sweet Million grown from seed, doing well but still in the propagator; going into pots this week and then into gro-bags in a few weeks.
  • Gartenperle grown from a free pack of seeds with a magazine; as above.
  • Tomazing [A]free-ish plant from a mag; in pot on windowsill awaiting gro-bag.
• French Beans: dwarf grown from seed, in pots on the windowsill now, going into containers outside in a couple of weeks.
• Sweetcorn: minipop just planted these in the propogator yesterday.
• Courgette: Black Forest as [A] above.
• Carrots: Ideal these are baby carrots, the seeds are ready to be planted outside and say they can go in grobags but I can’t work out quite how to sow them? Hmmm.
• Aubergine: Moneymaker as [A] above.
• Basil: Sweet Green seedlings had the lid removed from the propagator too early; am wondering if they will recover; need to get some more herb seeds to sow.
• Chilli: Anaheim I thought these seeds weren’t going to germinate but one has just appeared. Hurray!
• Squashes:
  • Maiden Poll these are little green squashes but don’t seem to be germinating which is a bummer as I love squashes.
  • Ghostrider these are proper Halloween type pumpkins I think; as [A]!
• Calabrese: Sakura aka broccoli. germinated fabulously, had loads of seedlings and have planted a few into pots ready to go into bigger pots outside this month. and some seedlings got shoved straight into a pot outside to see if they could fend for themselves as i had loads.
• Pepper: Summer Salad another one as [A].
• Radish: Jolly; seeds planted in a pot outside last week; more seeds to plany every couple of weeks.
• Onions:
  • Red Beard these are red spring onions and the seeds were planted in a pot outside last week. more to plant every couple of weeks.
  • Turbo these were some left over onion sets that Brian gave me; I put a few in pots outside yesterday.
• Leaves: all had seeds planted in a pot outside last week, and I have more seeds to sow every couple of weeks.
  • Spinach Tetona
  • Lettuce Mix
  • Italian Leaf Mix

That’s more than I thought I had when I started writing it up!

Everything is in pots or gro-bags this year; if things grow well in the spot I’ve bagged then I’ll see about building some proper raised beds next year!

The ones noted with [A] are were five plants I bought from a “free” plant offer with a magazine; I think they were £3.50 for postage and packing and it seemed like a reasonable deal to get some variety without having to buy six packs of plants I don’t have the space for or raising more seedlings.

I also want to get some strawberry plants for my pots; and ought to get various other herbs going too.

I saw this whilst surfing through my rss feeds today and fell instantly in love.

A magnetic spice rack I could visualise fixing inside my cupboard doors to stop me from having to root through a shelf of unsuitably labelled jars each time I want to find the paprika. The one shown is about $40 on amazon.com.

I look for a version for sale in the UK and find that they want £75 ($150ish) for the same kind of thing here.

My mind is already having visions of tins, magnets and nailing old biscuit tin lids to my cupboards when I notice in my search results that someone has been down that path already.

I’m just looking out for some supplies now!

A fab book, deeper than some of Shreve's recent work. She's back in the same house on the New England coast that has featured in several of her other novels. This is good if you've read them. If you haven't the exposition about the house's history is probably a bit incestuous and certainly extraneous to the story here.

Sydney Sklar, only about 28 years old or so I think, has already weathered two marriages: divorcing an aviator who was likely to kill himself and being widowed by a doctor who, well, just died. She comes to the house as an employee, tutoring eighteen year old Julie, and gets caught up in another family's web.

Shreve does place very well:- I feel like I know the coast and the sea here and I could have told you we were back at the same house before she did. The characters can seem a bit watery too, but I'm not really complaining. They don't always feel like real people but I like them that way. I also like the way the writing flips between present and past tenses; it could drive you nuts but the device is used well and it doesn't.

All in all: a good read.

BookMooched.

i’d have thought that my most frequently used command line commands (there will be a less redundant way to say that) were only interesting to me, but i’ve enjoyed reading other people’s take on this so here goes.

locally: i mostly ssh in to my main web server machine, apart from that i kill off processes (ps & kill). this also reveals i still use lpr to print on my mac, and i have never got the hang of using “less” rather than “more” even though i prefer it’s features.

candor:~ kirsty$ uname -a
Darwin candor.local 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

candor:~ kirsty$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn | head
64 ssh
56 ps
56 cd
42 ls
28 kill
13 scp
10 more
8 lpr
7 chmod
6 su

remotely: this is the machine i usually ssh to and mess around with editing php. i’m surprised “mysql” isn’t in the list. this list reveals that i find “date” the easiest way to find out what time it is too; i don’t know why i put a clock at the top of my monitor.

loquax@loquax:~$ uname -a
Linux loquax 2.6.8-3-k7-smp #1 SMP Sat Jul 15 11:05:14 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

loquax@loquax:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
125 grep
95 fg
64 php
50 cd
32 nice
22 php4
21 more
19 date
18 crontab
9 emacs

I guess I'm a Sara Paretsky completist so I wasn't put off by this not being a VI book and not even being a mystery. I was pretty much going to enjoy it whatever. That's probably a good thing because the story is pretty slow to get going. The first quarter of the book or so is a long introduction to place and character and history before the plot really takes off.

The place is Kansas, reading the introduction afterwards I discovered that the book is set in the area where Paretsky herself grew up. The characters are mostly farmers who have been in the area for generations; chiefly the Grellier family, Jim and Susan with teenage children Chip and Lara. The history features the Grellier's great-great-grandmother Abigail who Susan--tangled up in old diaries and the family history--wants to emulate; history between the families and of the land in the 1970s; and history in the making: the war in Iraq.

After the slow beginning when the book found its stride it entertained me as much as VI could have done, with fifteen year old Lara Grellier having some of the same characteristics as Paretsky's detective: more brains than sense and a hotheaded ability to get herself into stupidly sticky situations. The book was well grounded in current times with if anything rather too many namedrops for YouTube. The plot had many elements of a mystery without actually being one which was enough for me.

I enjoyed it a lot, and on the whole I think it was a decent book but I'm afraid I don't think it'll get Paretsky many readers who aren't just waiting about for the next VI.

Purchased on 30th March 2008.