h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Gardening During A Drought:

Our water district imposed restrictions beginning on the first of last month (Florae), so we've had a whole month's practice capturing and re-using our grey water. Three sources of reusable water are the kitchen, the shower, and the laundry.

Watering with dish water is easy, just carry the dish pan outside. If one does this during the daylight hours, one has a chance to recover the odd fork or spoon attempting to escape into the wild.

Recovering water from the shower is a little more involved. We bought a trash bin and a small submersible pump from the hardware store. The pump sends used shower water from the bathtub through a hose leading out of the bathroom window and into the trash bin positioned outside.

Laundry water would ordinarily be pumped from the washing machine through a hose up to a drain just under the laundry room window. Now the hose goes out the window, into a piece of 2-inch pipe leading to the trash bin, cleverly repositioned from outside the bathroom window to outside the laundry window just in time to catch the wash water.

Once the water is outside the house and in the trash bin, it only remains to get it to the plants. Depending on the distance to the thirsty plant, my enthusiasm, and how fast I need to get the water out of the trash bin before the laundry's rinse cycle begins, I either use a bucket or the pump with a long garden hose.

Watering in this fashion has some interesting side effects, including weeding, dragging a trash bin around, insect bites, and chatting with the neighbors.

Note to any health authorities: The food plants are still being watered with fresh water.

Roller Derby:

Our roller derby league's first scrimmage match with another team is on the 11th of next month, and we are working like mad women honing our skills. We do drills and races and more drills and scrimmages amongst ourselves. We have also been promoting the sport and recruiting more skaters.

Employment or Not:

I haven't been going out of my way to find employment, I must admit. I have been making connections, making chocolates, making other things of value, and doing all those things around the house that haven't gotten done since we moved in, but not as yet making money. This means we are digging into savings a bit, but right now this is the most advantageous strategy. At least we hope so.

We've been getting rain, which we normally don't get this time of year, so maybe that'll help make up for the dry winter. Either that,or there'll be lots more stuff to dry out and be fuel

Some rain here too, but mostly thunder and lightening, plus some hail. Folks are understandably a little nervous because lightening started the fire complex about this time last year. The hail is large enough to warrant breaking into radio shows with emergency weather announcements on the radio.

I'm of an age that, when I hear the emergency tone on the radio outside of the usual weekly test time, I have to stifle a sudden impulse to crawl under my desk. Do they still make kids do duck-&-cover nuclear attack drills?

No, but they do crawl under desks for school lockdown drills. I guess desks aren't lead-lined anymore

Drought: We just got our water bill. We're well within the water restriction due to the drought. In fact, we can even water a bit more, so we don't have to sacrifice our strawberry patch this summer.

The ornamentals, watered with grey water, are looking fine. I've been putting thick layers of compost and mulch around each plant to help hold in the moisture. The lawn itself is a "freedom lawn" (fancy term for mowed weeds) and we don't water it at all.

Roller Derby: I can only skate a bit right now. I've stressed my knees too much with all this fun skating lately. Tomorrow I go back to the physical therapist. Since I saw him last week, I've been doing these exercises to strengthen the muscles around my knees so that my knee caps go straight up and down, rather than the exciting, new directions they've been going lately.

Eventually I should be back to skating like a mad-woman. In the meantime, I'll help my teammates by playing scorekeeper or something.

Must keep skating in character, after all

Oh, did I tell you what skate name I settled on?

Connie Tusion

Well, well, well,

Happy Nerd,

I thought there were only droughts in Africa, !!

You seem to be doing all the right things.

and skating.

My goodness. !! I would not be amle to keep myself up, that is for sure.

Do hope that your knees are "repaired " very soon.

With affection


Christiane, Alsoran80

Thanks, Christiane. I'm going to take my knees and my skates to the rink tomorrow and (very gently) see how I do.

The firewood arrived yesterday, with only one hitch. The driver didn't fasten his truck's doors down, so when he tried to dump the load, his doors swung, one of them smashing one of our windows. I was very nice and didn't laugh, at least while he was within ear-shot.

Skating is still problematic, due to sore knee. So I've sort of morphed into a score-keeper for the time being.

This morning I saw an announcement for a county job for which I could apply. Time to brush up the old resume. And stack firewood.

Over the weekend, Mr. Nerd and I got brave about cutting into the deck. The walnut tree growing through the deck was pressing against the edge of its hole.

Mr. Nerd assembled a reciprocating saw, and I started cutting the bigger hole until I ran into a joist. After some tactical planning and a quick trip to the hardware store, I put on knee pads and started inching under the deck, while Mr. Nerd assembled tools and supplies.

No excessive pressure was put on my knees, because there's not enough room to actually crawl. I squirmed my way to the tree using my feet and elbows, an amazing exercise for the abdomen. Mr. Nerd passed me tools and supplies and I installed the new joist. As I began the slow journey back to liberty, Mr. Nerd cut through the old joist, freeing the tree. With any luck, I made the hole big enough we won't have to do this again.

The window broken during the firewood delivery is now fixed, and I've finished stacking the firewood. Now for a shower and a trip to the skating rink for some gentle, easy roller skating.

Oh my dear Happy Nerd,

How on earth did you manage that. Are you sure you did not suffer some dreadful injury???

I suffered just from reading about your crawl under the deck. !!

I do hope that you have fixed the joist and the walnut tree so that it does not misbehave again.

Take care my dear friend

Christiane
AR80

It's sort of like starting a push-up, but inching forward rather than pushing up. And I'm okay, Christiane, please don't worry for me. I must admit I stopped to rest quite a few times along the way. The new joist is in place, the deck is sound, and the walnut tree won't be strangled in a too-small hole.

In other news, my Yodeling entry got picked up by a sub-editor, the multi-talented Malabarista.