First Dirt

Posted on Friday 18 April 2008 at 06:12

I spent two hours digging over a flowerbed today. For the last two years, my beds have suffered serious neglect in favour of the market garden. Now that I'm no longer doing that...well, actually, I feel like myself again.

One of the reasons I quit the market garden was that it was killing my enjoyment of horticulture. The other was that it just didn't pay. For less work, I can save way more money off the food bill than what people were paying me to garden for them. Plus, no weekly hour-long drive, and no Mr. Ornery Customer (I only had one of those types, but he was an amazing jerk).

So, today was the first day of the rest of my season. I'm not starting seedlings this year. I'm actually looking forward to my yard. I'm looking forward to having time for flowers again. As an online pal told me back when I started at this place, "Vegetables are for the body. But flowers are for the soul."

Ever Wonder What to Blog About? I Do....

Posted on Tuesday 15 April 2008 at 09:05

However, I just got rid of the dino dial-up (WOOHOO), so I'm now able to access a lot more information. Here's what has resulted:

Added a bazillion news feeds from all over the world to my RSS reader.

Started a YahooGroup for brainstorming blogging ideas, where I can post links to a wide variety of news topics. (ChristianBloggersHitList is found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CBHL/, for anyone interested.)

Having great fun sorting through all the amazing news stories out there. For instance, this week, I found one on how classical music causes climate change. The solution involved cow manure. Now that's how to tickle my funny bone.

And, of course, we're greatly enjoying being able to bribe the kids to do their schoolwork with classic Looney Tunes clips on YouTube.

Photos of the Lunar Eclipse

Posted on Thursday 21 February 2008 at 01:29

Last night was crisp, clear, the stars standing out of the bright sky. There is such a thing as a bright darkness; just combine a full moon with miles upon miles of ice-coated snow.

We watched the earth’s shadow drift across the pale moon. I tried taking some digital photos of it over the course of the evening. None are wonderful, but the event is documented for posterity. We got out the telescope and tried to see Saturn, a golden speck to the left of the shadowed satellite of Earth. I had hoped to see the rings. However, we never did quite get it all sorted out before the brilliant white sliver began crossing back onto the moon’s face. But we did look at some lunar craters.

By the time the light returned to the moon, it had moved farther south in our sky, and its position was changed relative to the earth's movement. Although the earth's shadow came across it from left to right, the moon "reappeared" starting at its bottom edge.

Click here for a large composite image of the eclipse phases we recorded on camera.

Here is another homeschooler who got some good shots of the moon in shadow.

Musings of a Farm Truck Connoisseur

Posted on Saturday 16 February 2008 at 11:33

We knew it had to happen sometime. Bearing obvious signs of having been driven by a citified idiot of a previous owner, one day our truck’s clutch began to slip like it was made of banana peels. Thankfully, I wasn’t the one driving it, or the scenes of panic would have made the national news. Dave was the one halfway home from the city with an engine that turned great and wheels that didn’t.

The Beast is a mid-nineties F-350 crew cab with a 7.3 turbo diesel. That means a dual-mass flywheel, or it did originally. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, the difference between the old clutch and the new clutch is like this. Old clutch: Like trying to stomp on something that stomps back with the force of a mildly irritated draft horse. New clutch: Like driving a classic race car, baby. Let me explain.

Dave, although he doesn’t really act like a true Mennonite a lot of the time, still owes much of his behaviour to genetics. He was told replacement parts could cost as much as $2600. So, he managed to find a secret source in the States, a guy selling brand-new single-mass flywheel kits for oodles less. Moreover, the loonie was trading high against the greenback on the day of his purchase. He called it his “Mennonite moment of the year.” Without at least one of these almost supernatural purchases in a twelve-month period, he’s left with a restless sense of non-fulfilment.

I drove the Beast for the first time after the clutch swap-out, and I was perturbed by all the odd little rattles I heard and felt. A bit of dash tappet, a small grumble of vibration in the accelerator. As I chauffeured the inevitable rug rats into town, I frowned and kept an ear open. Finally, I realised what the suspected problem was. The truck-shaking shimmy-cough-hop-bark of a dying clutch was gone forever. My tranny was saved!

I arrived at a corner and shifted. The sensation made me smile. It’s odd; in my youth, I planned to run away from rural Manitoba forever and become a refined, artsy type in a big city somewhere, probably riding a bicycle to save the earth. Thank goodness that never panned out. I never would have known the subtle joys of driving a 21-foot-long super-tuned brute of a vehicle full of hollering kids down an unplowed back road in the middle of a prairie snowstorm. Now that would have been a waste.

How to Raise Your Own Honeybees, Part 2

Posted on Friday 15 February 2008 at 04:58