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Thursday, March 16, 2006

Of Doctors, Archaeologists, Lettuce and Asparagus Trenches

It's been an interesting past 24 hours. Yesterday I went to a doctor (nurse practitioner actually) because I have an ear infection that in a normal person would be so painful they would be hitting the lortabs hard. But since I have this incredibly high pain threshold when it comes to my head (I have had cavities filled with no Novocain, painful but not too bad) I have felt very little pain. At any rate, I went to see a medical professional, she looked at my ear and sinuses and declared me clogged up and sent me away with a prescription for Keflex, a penicillin drug, which is making my ear feel A LOT better (I can hear out of it for the first time in days) but the drug is making the rest of me feel not so great. You see I am very allergic to Amoxocillin which is a close relative to penicillin (which I am not allergic to) and most doctors when they hear I am allergic to amoxocillin than refuse to give me any other meds in that class and than I am forced to go out and buy incredibly expensive meds. Not this time. This time the medical professional actually listened to me and when I said I can take penicillin she said okay try this antibiotic (Keflex) and call her if I get any adverse reaction to it. Other than feeling a bit depressed physically (like I have a cold) no reactions to it so far.

After the doctor visit we came back home and got beds ready for strawberries which meant burning holes every foot into the middle of the mulch before putting it down. So eugene and me did that for a while than it was time to put down the irrigation tapes (they go under the mulch) and finally we dragged the mulch over to the beds where it is going and put it down. This was supposed to be an easy task but one bed was too wide and the soil to wet to work with so Eugene ended up tacking down the fabric and hoped for a windless night (which we had) so the fabric would not be picked up by the wind and moved. The other two beds were drier and narrower so they were no problem. And now we have our strawberry beds ready to receive the strawberry plants that are in the barn in a box with the asparagus roots.

For dinner I picked some lettuce we had been growing on pots since November and at one point decided for some reason the stuff was too bitter to eat. But because the conventional lettuce at Kroger's is expensive, small and in bad shape I decided to see if the lettuce we had was really inedible. It was not, as a matter of fact it was the best salad I have had in months. Can't go wrong with rouge d'hiver and a some young dandelion greens.

Today we had an appointment for an archaeologist to come out and look at our place and he arrived around 3pm and liked what he saw, took a few chert samples with him and suggested we might have a paleo site (the land has a terminal moraine going through the middle and that means that yes, there probably were hunters around here 20,000PB). I wish we were independently wealthy and could take the time to do a complete dig to phase 4 but we have to farm to make a living...

Before he arrived I spent the morning making soil and soil blocks so the lettuces seeds that had germinated in small blocks could be transplanted into larger blocks. that took a couple of hours mainly because I could not find a bucket of premade soil and ended up having to make an entire batch of soil. About 3 minutes after I finished making the soil I found the bucket of premade soil mix (figures).

While I was farting around with soil mix and lettuce Eugene was screening compost and preparing the asparagus beds which need to be trenched about 18" deep. He stopped the trenching because of the archaeology visit and we all walked around the land for an hour or so. But after the visit was over he went back to work and about 5 minutes after that it started to hail and continued to do so for about 15 minutes.

Now it is dinner time and time for me to make some chili using tomato sauce I canned up last fall using our fantastic Opalka tomatoes, onions and garlic we grew as well as some frozen peppers from last season and hot peppers we grew too. I will also make a pan or corn bread and I think I will pick some more yummy lettuce for a salad.

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