Still Awake

It's now 3:57pm. I have been awake with no nap for over 12 hours-woof!

It's a warm sunny day and by warm I mean it is almost 60˚F and it is the middle of December. Gotta love the el Nino effect on SW Ohio. We get dry warm winters when there is a strong el Nino this time of year.

This is good for our winter gardening. This means the ground will not freeze badly if at all and that means plowing and tilling can be done in January and February. This means the things in hoophouses will grow very well. We have some nice spring mix that will be cut tomorrow for the farmers' market this Saturday. This is good since the older spring mix beds that were not in a hoophouse got pretty nuked by the combination of high winds and snow followed by bitter cold. The lettuce and other greens are still alive but a lot of the leaves are pretty burned and thus not very usable. I am hoping there is some arugula that is usable as Eugene, for some reason he cannot explain, did not plant any arugula with the lovely spring mix in the hoophouse. Arugula is pretty darned important in my spring mix mix, it's a much duller salad without it.

Ah c'est la vie.

puzzles in today's Dayton Daily News are repeats from yesterday. I did some house cleaning this morning. Discovered the crossword and SudokuHmmmph!
Lightly weeded the spring mix so it would be ready for harvest tomorrow. Ate lunch-PB&J sandwiches, bananas in vanilla yogurt and a big cold glass of ovaltine and raw milk. Than went to Eaton to get more hangers for the gutters that Eugene is putting up today. Got some clamps for the Montero muffler (the Montero is my 1986 Mitsubishi Montero, the 1st SUV ever made. It is a small tidy vehicle, nothing like the behemoths of today) at TSC because the Auto Zone place was out of them. And dog licenses at the court house (I love the Preble County Court House). Despite living in a very rural county Homeland Security decided there might be terrorist threats at the PC Court House. This means there is a deputy Sheriff stationed at the door and you have to walk through a metal detector and if you have a bag or purse it goes through the x-ray machine. A bit of big city paranoia in small town America. Gotta love it. Got the dog licenses. $28 for two dogs. It was not too long ago it was $7 per dog. Now Arlo and Nate are legal for 2007.

Eugene is busy hanging gutters, something that should have been done last fall but we had a porch and roof to paint because our old insurance people said we had to. The roof took a lot of time and because I have a morbid fear of heights I was zero help in the roof painting project. If I get up on a roof I have an extremely hard time moving or getting back down so I avoid roofs when ever possible. So it took Eugene something like 8 weeks to get it done (look at the Oct and Nov 2005 archives for the full story). the night after he finished the roof it started snowing and did not quit for about 5 weeks than when it did warm up farming got in the way (he had 150 beds to open up last winter) so the porch and eaves did not get a final coat on them until this fall when he quit farming for the most part for the season. Two weeks ago everything was ready to receive the gutters 'cepting the weather which got windy than cold. But now we are unreasonably warm and the gutters are going up.

When we got back home from our errands I made an appointment to get some periodontal infection dug out of my gum and to get an implant screwed into my jaw. 6 months ago I had a horribly infected tooth pulled and that is why I am getting an implant. The tooth next to the horribly infected tooth was also infected but instead of the infection going into the tooth it went into the gum along side root of the tooth. So on Jan 10th at 4pm I get to go and get that checked out and likely will get the infection out at that visit and than 2 weeks later get the implant or at least get fitted for the implant. The woman I talked to assured me it would be almost painless. My dentist tells me it will be about as painful as getting my gums flayed open (which is what they do to you if you have to have a full born periodontal cleaning. It is not as fun as it sounds. Been there, done that. Makes a filling with no Novocaine seem like a day at the beach). I do not know why I pay people a lot of money to put me into exquisite pain in my mouth but I do. I guess to save my teeth and health. A sick mouth will lead to a very sick to dead body. A healthy mouth means good health for the rest of the body.

Now I am thinking about what to have for dinner. Could always go to Taco Bell and eat some e-coli laced lettuce (Or is it the beef? Or is it the tomatoes? Or is it the food system?!). Or I can make something here that will cost less, taste better, be far more nutritious and not be full of pathogens rampant in the industrial food system.