Last weekend was the first in about three weeks where we did not have grey, dreary rain all weekend, so it was a whirlwind of outdoor projects.

(Seriously, the weekdays – when we are stuck in the office staring out the window at the lovely weather  – have been gorgeous, and the weekends – when we are supposed to be enjoying our lives – have been miserable.  No fair.)

The vegetable garden is now planted.  If all goes well (and we hope that it does) we will have more vegetables than we can eat in a month or so.

We have:

• 24 tomato plants:
  • 4 Black Prince
  • 4 Lemon Boy
  • 4 Phoenix (heat resistant variety – which will be useful if this summer is as hot as the last one was)
  • 4 Sweet 100s cherry tomatoes
  • 4 Roma (for sauce mostly)
  • 4 Mr Stripey
• 3 eggplants (2 purple and 1 white)
• 3 sweet green peppers
• 3 mucho nacho jalapeno peppers
• 3 ancho chili peppers (started from seeds, and honestly not looking like they will survive)
• 2 greek oregano
• 3 sage
• 3 basil
• rosemary (left over from last year and still doing quite well)
• 3 bush beans (started from seeds, 2 are doing well, and one looks like it is slowly dying)
• 4 zucchini (3 in pots on the deck, and 1 at the corner of the house)
• 6 sugar snap peas (planted next to the deck and provided with a string trellis so that they have something to climb)

We ended up with fewer eggplants and more zucchini than we intended because I grabbed a flat marked “eggplant” at the Meijer’s Garden Store without actually checking that all of the plants on it were in fact eggplants.  Oops.  But at least we like zucchini.

Since we have planted in this patch for several years now, and since at the end of the growing season we just turn the dead plants into the soil and cover the whole thing with burlap for the winder, we have a lot of what we call “volunteers”… things that we did not plant this year, but nonetheless plan on nurturing.  We have no less than 5 volunteer tomatoes, which will hopefully survive long enough to bear fruit so that we can see what variety they are.  We also have several volunteer basil and sage plants.

The blackberry and raspberry vines along the side of the house are spreading faster than ever.  I hope that this year I will be able to at least make one pie, or at least a small tart, with the berries.  My primary competition for which will be all of the neighborhood birds.

We even (mostly) finished the work on the front bed around the new Japanese Cherry.  The soil has been turned over several times (and many, many roots from the crabapple have been discovered and removed), topsoil has been added, daisy seeds of several varieties have been scattered around the tree, and other new plants have been added.  Most of those new plants are hostas, as we have been planting, transplanting, and replanting a lot of hostas this spring.  Hostas are just amazingly hardy and versatile.  Their only drawback is that they die back to the root ball and regrow completely every year, so there will always be that span of time over winter and into early spring where the flowerbeds are completely barren and empty.

We also planted three rosebushes at the corner of the house.  We have fewer deer wandering through our yard here then my parents do up in Cleveland, so they may survive, and even (hopefully) thrive.

Despite the fact that nothing (other than the pea plants) have visibly grown since we planted them, there are already flowers on a couple of the tomato plants and one of the green peppers, and buds on all of the roses.

Another year older yesterday.

We went out to dinner (at The Pine Club) the night before since the actual day I had to spend down in Cincinnati for non-reschedule-able work reasons, and there was some uncertainty over when I would actually make it home that evening.

So last night after I finally got home I had leftover bone-in ribeye steak, guacamole and tortilla chips, some fresh bread, and a bottle (shared with John) of my brother Jeff’s (very delicious) wine.  A dinner of whatever then heck I could scrounge out of the kitchen because I sure didn’t feel like cooking, and John needed to kitchen for bread-making and coating the cheese with wax anyway.

(More on the cheese later…)

It was an odd birthday, and I didn’t get to take the day off as I like to do, but an oddly satisfying one nevertheless.

First, the good news. The flowering Japanese cherry tree that we planted in the front of the house to replace the crab apple tree is finally budding and putting out leaves and flowers.  Hooray!  For the longest time after we planted it, it just sat there, looking like a dead stick and stubbornly doing nothing, even as all of the other trees in the neighborhood grew leaves and flowered.   It is a slow starter, but at leave it is still alive.

If only the vegetable seedlings that we intended to use in the garden this year were doing so well.

We had the brilliant idea several months ago that we should start seeds and then use those for planting the vegetable garden.  We would save money (as buying the seedlings from Home Depot or Lowes is not cheap) and we would be assured of being able to get exactly what kind of vegetables we wanted.  So we ordered a bunch of seeds, John built a super-cool germination area (that looks remarkably like a chemical hood) in the basement, and we put the seed in the little starter trays and waited.

We didn’t have to wait too long.  They started out so well.  After a little while it became pretty obvious that there wasn’t enough room in the starter trays for them, and that they would need to be re-potted in order to give them more room.

Easter weekend, it was nicer and warm and sunny, so we decided to re-pot everything on the back deck, and also plant some of the little seedlings right away and see how they would do.

They didn’t do so well.  Everything that we re-potted and planted died.  And almost everything that we re-potted and took back inside died also.  The only exceptions were two ancho chili seedlings and three zucchini seedlings.  I guess that the re-potting was just too much of a shock to their root systems.

Lesson learned.  We may try starting seeds again next year, but we will start them out in the large biodegradable pots instead of in the too-small plastic trays.

This year we will once again be going to Home Depot for seedlings.  We will probably try re-planting the garden in another week or two.

I have never been one of those flexible kids.  Those cheerleader types.  The ones who can turn a perfect cartwheel, handspring, or backflip.  Who can drop down into the splits and then roll up effortlessly into a headstand.

The splits will probably remain forever out of my reach.

However.  After three years of yoga, at the age of almost-36, I can finally do a headstand.

And I don’t even need a wall behind me, ‘just in case’.

Not that I should really complain.  It has been sunny and in the 70s the past couple of days, and in the 50s-60s before that.  I have been coming home from work and changing into shorts.  John and I broke out the bikes and went for a couple of rides around the neighborhood.  We opened the windows.  Last night we even talked briefly about turning on the A/C because it was so warm and stuffy upstairs.

(In Ohio.  In March.  Where in a normal year we would still have grey, slushy snow and temperatures in the 30s-40s.)

Perhaps this is the upside to global warming?

We have started to do some of the traditional springtime work of cleaning out the flowerbeds.

The ivy which I planted back when we bought the house in an attempt to get some ground cover started in the area around the crabapple tree has to go.  It has just been too aggressive in spreading and taking over other parts of the flowerbeds, the lawn, the end of the porch, and may even have been partially responsible for the decline of the tree’s health.  We pulled out a lot of it by the roots.

We also made use of a weed-burner, which is a nifty tool that John picked up some time ago.  Basically this is a flamethrower.  That you can use in your garden.  (Can you believe that you can just walk into a Home Depot and buy one of these things?)  It is… a whole lot of fun to use, but since it is an area effect item, you do have to be careful that you don’t torch things that you want to keep… like “good” plants, the porch, the deck, the garden shed, and drainpipes.  We managed to confine our fiery destruction to unwanted weeds and ground-cover and the aforementioned ivy.

This weekend we have yet more yard work planned, if the weather continues to cooperate.

Initially John wanted to either plant a new tree to replace the crabapple we pulled out last fall or edge the front flowerbeds.  I argued for doing both, since one is a very simple job (plopping a tree into an already existent hole and then dumping in a couple of bags of topsoil to fill it) while the other is somewhat more involved (digging a trench to define the border between lawn and flowerbed and then placing bricks in said trench and re-filling the gaps with dirt to hold everything in place)

I also would like to think about filling in some of the gaps on the front flowerbed that we created last week by pulling/burning out the ivy.

We will see how much we actually get done.  The forecast calls for continued warm weather and intermittent thunderstorms.

Everyone has a day-of-rest special routine.

Maybe you gather up the clan and go to church (or synagog, or mosque, or whatever).  Maybe you do the New York Times crossword puzzle.  In pen, if you are feeling especially bold and/or lucky.

My routine is that John wakes me up with a cup of coffee a little bit after 7, and I spend the next hour sipping coffee and reading comics and the news online.  Then I go to yoga class, stopping by Dorothy Lane Market on the way home to pick up fresh bagels and lox (and cream cheese or coffee as needed).

While we toast bagels and make more coffee, Percival gets a few shreds of smoked salmon for being such a good cat.

John and I enjoy our brunch and then get busy with the rest of the day’s chores, errands, and work.

Merlin gets no smoked salmon… she doesn’t like it very much (tuna, on the other hand…) and prefers to lick smears of cream cheese off of my plate after I am done with brunch.

There were a lot of early Christian martyrs who were named Valentine (or some derivation thereof) and Valentine’s Day was originally set up to honor them.  Then, sometime during the middle ages, what had been a day of remembrance of people who were killed for their religion turned into a day to celebrate romantic and courtly love.  (Thank you, Wikipedia.)  How did that transition happen?  Who the heck knows….

It is pretty fashionably to scorn Valentine’s Day as an over-hyped Hallmark holiday, and one that only exists to sell flowers, candy (especially chocolate), heart-shaped gee-gaws, anything red or pink, and over-priced restaurant dinners.

Eh, I admit that I can do without all of that.  But a day devoted to reminding yourself about all of the people in your life that you love and appreciate?  There is nothing bad about that.

So with that out of the way, I would just like to say the following…

Dear John,

Everything that we do together is an adventure, and it makes me so very very happy that you are my Valentine.

I love you.

Do you remember the movie “UHF“?  Remember that part where Stanley congratulates the kid who won some game on his show “Stanley Spadowski’s Playhouse” and tells him that the prize is that he “gets to drink from the firehose”?  And then the firehose is turned on and the kid gets blasted across the room by the jet of water?

Between all of the news sites, all of the industry and personal sites and blogs that I follow, twitter, skype, instant messages, email, texts, RSS feeds, the online video conference room that I “hang out in” with remotely located colleagues during the workdays, and all of the rest… most days I feel like that kid, getting blasted across the room by the deluge of information that is always on and always flowing.  Every day there is more of it.  Every day is a struggle to keep up with it all.  Every day I worry that I am slipping behind.

Do I have a solution for that?  Not really.  Do I have any ideas for how to even begin to deal with the information overload?  Again, not really.  I just deal with everything as it comes, try to concentrate on the stuff that seems most interesting and/or important, and try not to fret about the rest.

I also write a lot of notes to myself and stick them all over my workspace.

If you have any better ideas, I would love to hear them.

So far, the simplest slow cooker recipe that John and I have tried is also the best. (Isn’t that the way that it usually works out?)

This recipe for Kalua Pig was touted as “a simple way of making traditional Hawaiian kalua pig without having to dig a hole in your back yard” on the website I found it on. Since we really enjoyed Kalua pig when we were on Maui, we decided to try it out.

Ingredients:

• 1 (6 pound) pork butt roast
• 1 1/2 tablespoons Hawaiian sea salt
• 1 tablespoon liquid smoke flavoring

Directions:

1. Pierce pork all over with a carving fork. Rub salt then liquid smoke over meat. Place roast in a slow cooker.
2. Cover, and cook on Low for 16 to 20 hours, turning once during cooking time.
3. Remove meat from slow cooker, and shred, adding drippings as needed to moisten.

That’s it.

We ate the shredded meat and juices mixed with rice.

It was like being back at the Aloha Mixed Plate in Lahaina.  Delicious.

According to Punxsutawney Phil, that future predicting rodent, we still have six weeks of winter to go. Which should be interesting, since we have not even had six consecutive days of winter yet. I have decided to be hopeful that this wintery forecast indicates that we should expect winter to start any day now, and last about six weeks.

Seriously, I would just about kill for a good blizzard at this point. It was in the 60s here yesterday, and it is supposed to be in the 50s today through the end of the weekend. This is ridiculous.