Hydroponic Gardening

I have been itching to get dirty again working in the garden.  Spring is nearly here and the snow has melted at the house.  Daffodils are starting to poke through and I saw my first forsythia blooming today!  Spring has to be my favorite time of year as life starts popping again.  The bees fly and the birds do what birds do in the Spring.  It’s just inspiring to me…I figure I have survived another Winter.

How the garden area normally looks

We’ve had a bunch of snow this year in WV and it is melting.  Showshoe Mountain in WV actually had more snow this year than they had at Vail, CO.  Snowshoe had 227 inches while Vail had 223.  So, couple the melt with a good bit of rain and we’ve got flooding around Charleston and elsewhere in WV.

Note the fence and white birdhouse posts

The same view...you can barely see the white posts

There's the fence

We live on top of a hill in Charleston so we don’t really have any any danger from flooding at our house.  Our garden, the one I have been itching to get into, is at Emily’s grandparents’ house which is near the river and a creek that drains one of the big nearby hollers.  It is currently under about 5 feet of water.  Nearby houses have significant amounts of water in them and many folks have been forced to leave their homes.  Even with the flooding, the Corps of Engineers report that flood control dams prevented the water from coming even higher (check out the pictures.  We were planning to have Abigail’s birthday party at the South Charleston Rec Center pool…which is now under water).

It’s hard to complain when I consider that our family is safe and our house is intact.  Nonetheless, I am still bummed that the garden is under water and my garlic that was planted last fall is undoubtedly ruined.  I suppose I will have a chance to work in he garden soon enough.  First order of business will be hauling off the trash that washed in.  We’ll have to find a compromise with the ducks and fish we have seen in our garden and consider a new place to plant our garlic this coming Fall.

5 Comments

warren, March 15th 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Garden, Nature, WV

Closet light…a dream come true

Our house is pretty typical of old houses.  Ours was built in 1939 and has tons of character.  We have three full baths which I suppose is strange for a house of that era.  We a small kitchen which also seems odd.  Anyhow, what seems right in line with my impression of older houses is the fact that the master bedroom closet is small.  I suppose that folks in 1939 had a few outfits, suits, etc and that was pretty much it.  A small closet would have suited them fine.

The most pitiful closet of all...lightless

We do not have excessive closet needs but we do have some closet needs.  Emily uses the closet in the master bedroom (which is smaller than the closet I had as a kid) and I use the one (of the same size as Emily’s) in the spare bedroom next door.  I guess to differentiate the master closet as special, the original builders included a pull-chain light in her closet.  My closet, however, being only a guest closet, was not likewise equipped.

Emily's closet...once a showcase for closet lighting

We’ve been doing all sorts of projects on the house and this weekend, as part of another bigger project, I decided it was time to remedy my pitiful light-less closet.  You see, a happy closet is one that has a light and a switch…not just a pull chain.  I am proud to say that I have the happiest closet in the house.  Emily’s closet, though once a happy closet, is now feeling switch envy.  I suppose it won’t be far behind mine as its owner won’t tolerate the closet’s whining for long.

What I used to see in my closet

My closet now...can you feel the joy?

Anyhow, for a short time at least, I have the happiest closet in our old house and another of my dreams is fulfilled!

6 Comments

warren, March 11th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in House

A new belt

Isaac has been taking taekwondo for several months now and the other night, after class, he took his yellow belt test.  He has been studying Korean terms and practicing his forms (the pattern of moves he needs to know for each belt).  He had it all under his “belt” as test night came.  I took him to the dojang and he was cool as can be for his normal training session.  After class, most people headed out until only black belts and the 5 people being tested remained.

Each student had to do two of their forms and answer Grand Master Kang as he asked them questions about Korean terminology.  Isaac did great on the items as he had studied so much.  I knew that he would also have to break a board with a kick but I figured there was no way to safely practice that at home.  So, the moment of truth came and it was Isaac’s turn.  He lined up and positioned the poor guys who had to hold the board and took a practice kick to make sure his aim was right.  And then, my poor helpless son kicked the board so hard that it cracked perfectly.  In fact, I heard the board, long since dead, come back to life, just so it could scream in pain.  His eyes lit up and I have never seen him more proud.  I think I was also as proud as I have ever been.  He didn’t know what exactly to expect so he just jumped in with both feet…well, really with one foot..but he went for it!

Each student got to keep their board pieces but had to line back up for another round of questions…this time the hard ones about family life and respect and helping one’s parents by doing chores and obeying, etc.  This was probably the toughest part of the whole test, especially for the kids.  Kids had to think on their feet and speak extemporaneously.  He answered every question (though, now I have some leverage!) and was passed with no hesitation.  Grand Master Kang awarded him a yellow belt with a green tip.

The last few evenings since that night, Isaac has done almost nothing but practice his forms and think “taekwondo”.  His pride is warranted and I am delighted that he has found something he enjoys so much.  I think I may have to toughen up some for his teenage years though…

10 Comments

warren, March 9th 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Awesome, Family

Sleeping is weird

Sleeping is biological and necessary and all that but it sort of cracks me up how weird we are when we sleep…by “we” I really mean my family.  I sleep entirely normally.  Anyhow, last night I went up to check on the kids and noticed Abigail in one of her crazy sleep poses.  She was a terrible sleeper as a kid but she seems to have turned a corner…most nights she sleeps all night.  Now she just seems to go into “bunker” mode at night.  She still talks in her sleep but it’s usually pretty interesting so I see nothing weird there.  Anyhow, in bunker mode, I think she surely must be protecting herself from Madeline.

Madeline, you see, is a needy cat.  She also sleeps weirdly.  When we first got her, she was very young and sucked her tail every night.   We took her to numerous cat psychics and analysts and, after spending our kids’ college funds on it, they concluded that she was taken from her momma at too young an age so was consoling herself with her tail…sort of like a kitty pacifier.  So, imagine your restless cat who sucks her tail at night waking up in a fit and smacking you in your sleeping  face with a tail full of cat slobber…it’s not pleasant.

Now Isaac is consistent in his sleep weirdness…he sleeps on his stomach under double the blankets that the rest of us use.  I am certain that I would suffocate under the enormous weight of the blankets but he seems to thrive.  It must be 110 degrees under there but he sleeps like that year round.  Actually , I figure that the heat from the blankets works like a kid-greenhouse.  The kid grows like mad and I am convinced that it’s blanket related.  He already wears the same size shoes I wear and he hasn’t even hit puberty yet!

I won’t give details on Emily but let me assure you friends, she is a weird sleeper too.  Now, I can almost guarantee that she is going to get on here and leave a comment saying some untruths about me.  Something like that I snore at night.  It’s simply not true .  That’s Mo (the cat) who snores.  I am a perfect sleeper!

5 Comments

warren, March 4th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Fun, Thoughts

Dead-out

We’ve had a fairly cold winter so, unlike most years, I have not been able to simply look outside and see if the bees are flying to know they are ok.  I prepared the bees this fall by treating them with various things to make sure they were healthy, I made sure they had plenty of honey and pollen to eat through the winter and then I crossed my fingers.

Still clustered, but dead

A few weeks ago, we had a warm day and I was able to check the 4 hives at my house.  To my dismay, 2 were dead-outs.  All of my hives at other locations are fine so I was surprised to find some at my house that were gone.  We live atop a hill in Charleston, WV and we get serious wind.  I have a windbreak around them but I suppose that the extreme drafts might have gotten to them.  That is the one characteristic that separates the hives at my house from the ones I have elsewhere.  It has been said that one cannot freeze bees…if they stay dry and not too windy.  If either problem exists, all bets are off so I figured I fell prey to the wind.

Heads down in the cells...telltale sign of starvation

I opened the hives and immediately knew that the wind was not to blame, but rather the cold…sort of.  You see, my bees didn’t freeze, but rather starved to death.  The cold makes bees cluster together.  As it gets especially cold with no warm days interspersed, the bees cannot break their cluster.  Without breaking cluster, they cannot move through the hive either.  Since their honey stores are spread throughout the hive, they need to be able to move around periodically to eat.

Some honey nearby where they were clustered

Plenty of honey one more frame over...

So, I opened 2 hives and saw the tell-tale signs…bees still clustered together,  many bees with their heads deep in honeycomb cells, and honey nearby, but not right where they died.

I hate for a colony to die, and when it is related to something I might have done wrong, it irritates me even more (fortunately, that doesn’t happen often anymore).  But when it’s due to nature, I guess I feel a little bit of relief.  It’s never fun, but it is a reality of beekeeping.  So, I just hope for warmer days here and there so the bees can move to food and also for a quick Spring!  Come on Spring!

10 Comments

warren, March 2nd 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Bees

Clipping my toenails

I was messing around the other night on facebook (definitely an evil place) and I was pretty bored…so I updated my status to “gonna clip my toenails”.  A friend suggested that I blog about it and it occurred to me that I have strong opinions about toes…and feet…and actually, ankles too.  You see, I really, really hate feet.  Baby feet are ok but once a person starts to support their own weight on their feet, all bets are off.  Feet turn instantly gross and get worse as time goes on.

I know some people have a “thing” for feet but I truly don’t understand.  Most people have funky, crooked, hairy toes with nasty toenails and crusty heels and stuff growing between said toes (well, maybe most people don’t have all of those, but any one of them disqualifies feet for me).  I did a (very) little bit of looking for pictures of feet that I could use as examples but could not continue.  Please, I beg you, do not search google images for “feet” or “toes”…honestly, it isn’t really safe to search google images for much of anything, but what I found was particularly disturbing.

Anyhow, since I have to clip my own toenails regularly, I have grown accustomed to my own feet and can go on with my day after a trim (and after a good hand washing).  The kids and wife are on their own though.  I can handle belly button lint and ear wax and those little white crunchy things you sometimes cough up from the back of your throat…but toe jam?  The horror!  No chance!  I figure that there must be some traumatic event in my history that made me like this because my brother shares a similar aversion…

Ok, that’s probably a whole lotta too much information, but in the interest of transparency, I thought you should know.

Anybody else share my madness?

12 Comments

warren, February 26th 2010 | Tags:
Posted in Thoughts

Everyday Math

The kids bring home papers from school and, like most parents, we look over them to make sure they are doing well. Most of the stuff is pretty typical fare, but I can’t get over the math papers that Isaac brings home. You see, he is being taught Everyday Math…it’s a curriculum that is mandated by the state (or maybe county? I think state) and it is crazy. The whole idea is to do math problems that one might encounter in their day to day life.

I am not exactly sure how I feel about it. I know the teachers are mandated to teach math using the curriculum so I do not blame his teachers one bit. I honestly doubt they like teaching it either. Anyhow, let me give you an example:

Directions: Estimate the answer. Write a number model to show how you estimated.

Problem A: A prairie vole (a mouselike rodent) has an average of 9 babies per litter. If it has 17 liters in a season, how many babies are produced.

Isaac’s number model: 10X17 = 170
This answer was marked wrong
The “correct” answer: 10X20 = 200
The real answer: = 9X17 = 153 (Isaac’s answer was closer)

I understand that the idea is to round numbers so you can get an easier problem that is doable in one’s head…but let’s give a little credit here…most 4th graders can handle 10X17!

Problem B:  In the next hour, French people will save 12,000 trees by recycling paper.  About how many trees will they save in two days?

Isaac’s number model: 50X12,000 = 600,000
This answer was marked wrong
The “correct” answer:  50X10,000 = 500,000
The real answer: = 48X12,000 = 576,000 (Isaac’s answer was closer)

There were 5 problems and Isaac “missed” 3 of them.  Now, I love learning to estimate.  It’s super helpful when I am at the grocery store, but this stuff is absolutely ridiculous!

I learned to estimate very well after I learned how to actually get the right answer!  Isaac and most of the other kids do know how to get the right answer, but they are definitely not as fluent with it as they should be.  So, as long as the kids need to estimate their grocery bill, they will be well equipped (although Isaac may be too accurate).  However, if we need to build a bridge or send a woman to Mars, she is out of luck…though I figure we can get her close…

I don’t often rant on here but why on Earth are the powers-that-be messing with math programs that taught engineers and scientists to build great dams, and discover new medicines and send men to the Moon?  Surely the times have changed since then, but those “old” techniques worked.  Update the problems…kids don’t need to know how to calculate how many bales of hay can fit on a hay cart, but they do need to know how to calculate!  I truly don’t blame teachers.  Most of them are disgusted by it as well.

Okay, I am going to stop at that…there are other similar examples of how the new curriculum is making math less useful and more difficult, but I’ll save that for another day…

12 Comments

warren, February 25th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Thoughts, WV

Poop = Spring

Sunday was absolutely beautiful in WV. The high temperature was in the 50s and the snow started to give way to small signs of spring. Daffodils are breaking  through the ground and my bees were able to get out of the hive to poop. Bees, you see, won’t poop in the hive. They also cannot fly outside in cold temperatures. Bees are cold-blooded so if they break the cluster (bees cluster together very closely in the hive in cold temperatures and rub together using friction to stay warm all winter), they very quickly slow down and die. What’s a bee to do then? Well, they hold it of course…sometimes for months!

See it? Yellow spots...both sides in the snow...relief!

Why am I fascinated with this?

So, it always brightens my day in the early spring when I see yellow…I love the yellow of daffodils, the yellow of forsythia, and the yellow of fresh bee poop!  When temperatures rise such that any of my three yellows are possible, I get out and frolic a bit (not like the rabbits frolic of course).

Fifteen minutes after I washed my car!

I washed Steve Sunday morning and parked it in the driveway so I could watch it shine in the sun.  Much like birds are able to find a clean car, so too can bees.  Of course, remember that there can be as many as a quarter of a million bees in the hives at my house…and all of those bees have had their legs crossed for a long time.  My formerly green car now has a yellow tint…but you know what…I love yellow…it means spring!

Smart pills!

Emily says I am preoccupied with poop and animal anatomy so you can imagine my fascination with this pile of deer poop in my yard.  My Dad used to call those pellets smart pills.  I don’t think they really worked very well, but that’s another story.  Anyhow, Momma deer are now with fawns so my finding smart pills gives me hope that I will get to see newborn fawns again this year.

Oh yeah, check out this bird’s song!  Beautiful…and very springy!  Charleston is starting to break through I hope (though we have snow forecast for the rest of the week…but I choose to ignore that).

By no means do I want my yard overrun with natural fertilizer, but I have to tell you, a little poop means spring and in my book, that’s a great thing!

5 Comments

warren, February 23rd 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Audio, Bees, Nature, Thoughts

Maple Syrup…teaching the kids to work

When I was a kid, my parents fully believed in child labor.  My brother and I shoveled snow and cut wood and actually had to clean up after ourselves.  We also carried maple sap through the woods from trees that we tapped to the storage barrel where it was stored until we cooked it into maple syrup.  Every spring we’d haul gallons and gallons of sap on our backs…well, as long as I was bigger, my brother hauled gallons and gallons on his back while I “encouraged” him.  We built a huge fire every weekend and boiled the sap into syrup and generally had great times making the sweet magic from the trees.  Anyhow, with their “advanced” age and lack of kids living in the house, my parents are now, fundamentally opposed to child labor (i.e. they don’t heat with wood).

Not wanting to deprive my kids of the joy that is  child labor making maple syrup, we are tapping our tree this spring.  Yesterday the temperature fit the bill for when to tap (below freezing at night, above during the day) so we did our work.

When I was a kid, we drilled a hole by hand and tapped a piece of pvc pipe into the tree to let the sap flow into our collection buckets.  Our buckets were typically anything we could find that would hold liquid…from milk jugs to pop bottles to commercial sized grease containers.  I found a place to order taps meant for maple sugaring and they work but sort of lack that originality that I remember as a kid.

Anyhow, we tapped our tree with two taps and the sap began to flow like mad.  I only have small containers to capture the sap so I will have to get the kids out twice a day to collect it.  They only have to walk 50 feet to do their chores though.  Maple syrup for them may be waaaay too easy.  Maybe we need to heat with wood…

9 Comments

warren, February 22nd 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Green, Nature

Coffee will do…I guess

Well, Lent is upon us.  I still have my shirt after yesterday so I figure it will be a pretty easy going Lenten season.  I don’t typically give up stuff for it but my family does.  You may remember last year that Isaac gave up farting on the cat and Abigail gave up wearing Mom’s sparkly eye shadow.  This year Abigail is giving up chocolate…typical girl.  Isaac wanted to give up school but I told him that was not an option.  After much debate, he finally decided to give up graham crackers…way to go trooper!

Anyhow, I have had an ongoing struggle against caffeine which I won’t attempt to beat this spring.  I think a big part of it is a correlated addiction to pop.  So, this year for Lent, I am going to buck my typical lack of Lenten cheer and actually give up pop.  So, without pop, I still need a caffeine delivery system (I’ll work on that addiction another time).  The only other alternative to pop is coffee so I have been practicing drinking coffee and actually pretty well like it now.  It’s strange that I had to convince myself that I like something but I suppose lots of things in life are that way.

So, for special occasions like delays from school, we stop by the local convenience store and grab a couple of cappuccinos (Isaac likes them a lot) so we can be fully caffeinated as we greet the day!  Convenience store cappuccinos aren’t as flashy as “real” cappuccinos but at $1.29, I don’t really care…plus, they are just plain tasty…forget the purism!

At work I don’t (yet) have a cappuccino machine so I stick with the regular style coffee…strong, bitter and black…like my heart.  Most regular men would be satisfied with a regular-sized coffee cup, but, because of my caffeine disability, I prefer to drink from a barrel.  My barrel of coffee drains about half of the pot at a time.  I believe coffee will do…

Not only is WV wild and wonderful, but Isaac and I are as well when we are fully caffeinated!

11 Comments

warren, February 17th 2010 | Tags: ,
Posted in Adventure, Family, Food, Fun
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