And Some Crafty Stuff...and chatter

Gardeny crafty: made labels for the veggies out of a "Simply Limeade" bottle, then duct taped them to bamboo sticks. Not sure the tape will hold up but didn't really have another option right now.

Knitting: the HP shawl is on the back burner, i think I will start on it again soon. I have been knitting dishcloths 'cause they are easy and mindless.

Painting: I am actually painting something. Granted it's on a canvas about 2"x2",but painting nonetheless. If I finish it, I will post a pic.

Baking: I made banana bread waffles. Which is to say, I made banana bread batter, and then cooked it in a waffle iron ( not a Belgian one.) They are tasty and good, and easy to toast. I would recommend this, it's yummy and different, not a muffin and not a loaf. However, since one waffle is about a 1/2 cup of batter, I don;t recommend them AS waffles, for, you know, breakfast. That would be like eating a stack of large muffins! ugh. Needs no butter or syrup though i think it would be really good with ice cream...


I saw Pirates of the Caribbean on Friday. If you can do it, I recommend going to their late show opening weekend. Then you get to see the movie early, but no one likes the late show so it's not crowded. I saw Shrek this way too, highly enjoyable, if you don;t mind being up late anyway, Pirates is 3 hours or close to it, I got out at 2:30 am! eek.
Anyway, I liked it, it was fun.
I also saw night in the museum last night as a rental on the advice of several people. I don;t care for Ben Stiller much anymore, same old schlock. But people would say , oh but this is different, or you work in a museum, it's funny! (from other museum people.) Well, it was ok. It's a very fancy museum to only have two staff people and one security guard...=P and Capuchin monkeys are NOT FROM AFRICA, they are from SOUTH AMERICA!! How do they DO this stuff?! And get away with it? IT"S ABOUT A MUSEUM! Good gravy, if we had an exhibit about the Serengeti, and put capuchin monkeys in it, we would lose some creditability or something. It's almost as bad as calling apes monkeys.. ARARARAR... The monkey was obviously a key player but a chimp would work as well...that's why PIRATES had parrots and monkeys, they are from the new world and all trendy and stuff.. arrrrg. OHhhhhhh god did that bother me. =P It shouldn't, its a Hollywood silly comedy movie. but it DOES.
But it was ok.

More Garden Nonsense

The yard is all tided up and ready for simple summer things like maintenance, few new plants here and there, watering, pruning, enjoying. No more big projects. The last was covering the back slope of the vegetable garden with weed blocker stuff, plastic mesh that is supposed to allow only thing things you cut holes in it to grow there...it's mulched (as are the other beds), it's got three different ground cover plants started on it and it's got a soaker hose around it to see if I can cut down on water use this summer. It might change position. Right now I figure that it's on the hill, the water will soak into the ground and trickle down to the garden. But I fear it won't soak all the way to the edge so I might weave it through the rows, if it's long enough. We shall see.



The beds are looking well. I pulled a trailing rose from the front of the fence to the back in the new bed, mulched and added some alyssium for ground cover.


The side yard got all neatend up and the hosta is looking lovely this year.


There are new additions to the bed by the porch, you can't see them here. There are 8 new little dahlia starts to go with the dahlia I planted last year which is just beginning to return. Another thing you can't see is the plant I thought wouldn't come back this year. I can't remember it's name, but it had fuzzy leaves and purple flowers and was lovely. I was going to plant a columbine there, but lo! it had little sprouts underground. Annuals may be showy, but perennials are like magic things that you don't expect and POOF there they are.













New additions to the bed: a blue geranium and something called white butterflies or something (have to find it's real name.. ) it's got spotty green and red leaves that are very cool and it will get big with little white flowers that look like butterflies, i guess. It's a cool looking plant. Both are perennial. Also some more alyssium and some ground cover left over from the hillside and chives. Two columbines as well, I love columbine. You might notice there are upside down wine bottles...they are fill of water, sort of an automatic watering system. Another thing I am trying this summer, you can use anything like that to do this, houseplants too, water bottles, soda bottles, beer bottles..just fill with water and invert quickly into soil ( like, stab it into the soil.), reusing and saving water, yay!













close ups of some flowers in Photographia.

Amended!

This shot from Saturday (which I used as a before shot, but it's actually next to the plot I worked Saturday, the other side looked as bad before I worked on it so it made a good before shot)...


is now this...Matt even helped! =D


And, at the end of the afternoon when all the gloves had been washed, they turned into "demented ikebana" according to Matt. or somthing like that.

Movies for Geeks Like Me

Why is Clare Danes riding a unicorn? Read more and find out! (this still is from Stardust.)
For what ever reason, suddenly the studio big budget movies this year look more than promising. The summer movie season, usually rife with action movies, all effects, little plot, and featuring "major male action movie star here" are almost all geek movies...
Yes, yes! We have a few excellent looking action movies here; Spidy 3 , Fantastic 4 (well, it might be good.But since it's a comic movie, any press is good press!), and then there is Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean , and Harry Potter , and Shrek the Third (Hey, it was very action packed and it's ALL special effects..) all of these are action movies, rife with special effects and oh, major movie stars.

There is also the Bourne Ultimatum, Live Free or Die Hard, Oceans 13 and Rush Hour 3. Now, these last movies are what the summer is usually FULL of, and many are usually NEW. Now we have the old guard of action heroes in their death throes trying to live the glory of the 90's action movie that just may have been killed by Armageddon.

This summer we have a lot 3's and 4's and some 2's. Serial movies. The difference is, the latter movies mentioned above, are the movies of yesterday. The geeks have inherited the cineplex! Thank you Peter Jackman! Oh, thank you to the bottom of my little fan girl heart. The biggest movies of the summer are all comic book movies, movies based on the best children's book series EVER (and no, that is NOT Narnia, no offense Narnia.), and a children's' tv show from the 80's. HUWHA?! Bruce Willis has a run for his macho money.

Not only that, serial movies used to suck, after two it was, like, why is this in a theater? Why was this not straight to video?? But now..man, I hope there is a Shrek 4. Although I don't hope there is a 4th Pirates.

And there are more..MORE you say?!
Yeah, there are the movies that aren't serials. And NONE of them are macho action flicks.
Stardust , based on a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman with a stellar cast.
Ratatouille by Pixar and who dosn;t love Pixar in spite of themselves.
Knocked Up looks inappropriately Hilarious.
Evan Almighty (arguably a serial as it's a spin off from Bruce Almighty) looks totally worth seeing.
A remake of Hairspray that looks really good. And there are not enough musicals. There aren't!!(Sweeney Todd!!! ooo! Can't wait..Look at the cast! Look at the Director, Snape? Giles? Captain Jack? Saurman(Or King Haggard and I like to remember him), Wormtail? The Corpse Bride? and oh god, Borat?!And a guy named Jayne? (not the Jayne we know and love.but still.) how can you lose, I mean, really now. )
The Simpson Movie, I need not say more.
Paprika the next big Anime
Waitress
Once
And then there will be the indies and the stuff I haven't heard about yet.



And, then there are the movies that will suck. Besides Rush Hour 3 and Live Free or Die hard. (I haven't seen any of the Ocean's or Bourne movies, they may very well be good. Ocean's 13 looks funny enough to make me want to find out.)
And these movies are
Surf's up (enough with the penguins...although, it's a kids movie.. it looks cute..I am sure it will be a hit. I am just more than a little sick of penguins. I would rather it have been a spin off of Little Nemo with the turtle.)
Licence to Wed
Good Luck Chuck
Aqua Teen Hunger Force ( oh come on..)
and sadly, as we all know 28 Weeks Later.
More may join this list as they come out and are seen for what they really are.

I have seen Spiky 3 and Shrek 3, and I can recommend them both. Spidy should end with this movie, it is a good ride, it's fun, well made etc, but it's a bit complicated and it's trying to do too much in it's 2 1/2 hr run. But it was still fun.
Shrek on the other hand, man, it was great. SO GREAT. I need to buy these movies. GO see Shrek!
Out of all these flicks this summer, in order of excitement, here is my list of hopeful bests:
Harry Potter! DUH!
Stardust
Transformers (Oh, man, seeing Optimus Prime for the first time in the trailer was magic! But..this one could be a big fat bomb.)
Pirates
Paprika
Simpsons
Ratatouille
Hairspray
Knocked Up
Evan Almighty
And a lot of them are, get this..KIDS movies. Family movies! What?! Stuff with a pg-13 rating ro less dominating the theater?!
And this is just the summer, oh, this fall and winter looks equally promising, ending with The Golden Compass...
To day, we take over the movies, tomorrow THE WORLD!!! MAUAHAHAHhahahAHAHHAHAHAHAhahahahahhah....!
YaY Geekdom!
And for all you Naruto Fans (Matt this means you) the Naruto Movie will be playing here and there soon, which means it may get a wider realeas this summer too.

A Gardening in Spring: Amending Soil

I am going to start posting HERE instead of Naturalista for gardening stuff. Mostly 'cause I think it's excessive to have three blogs when two will do, one as a photo repository and one as a blog. So here the posting shall be! I won't delete NAturalista, but I won't be posting there anymore.

Onto the garden then!

So to day was a lovely rainy day in Portland. Not to cold, not too overcast, not too rainy. Just right as a rainy day can be. Well, there could be some thunder and lightning, that would be fun. Yesterday was spent turning this into this.

That consisted of weeding (a tarpful), digging up the dirt into giant clay clods and breaking up the clay clods. Then adding perlite( with a mask on), adding aged manure (with gloves on), sand and garden soil. Then, I mixed the lot up together by turning it in with a shovel, repeatedly, breaking up large clods by hand or with the spade.
This took about 4 hours, for half my garden plot. Toilsome and back breaking (or at least aching). There was a 30 min trip to home depot for more dirt. And a few little 10 min breaks here and there to rest. The results are worth the effort, and here's why.

City yards, and sometimes suburban ones and rural ones, are usually composed of hard, compacted soil. Ours happens to also have a large clay content, being near a river and all, in the path of former alluvial plains and near the path of a former creak that now runs under the city. It is no longer an alluvial plain, but it has been lived on for nigh over a century. In that time, it has not been aerated, dug up much or amended in any way. Usually city soil is also compacted by whatever equipment went into building the building it's next to. Big machines( and likely for our place, animals) tramp dirt down good.

Clay soils are heavy, retain water, are hard to aerate and it's hard to all but the most tenacious of plants to sink their roots in well. Plants like light, airy, loamy soil it's fluffy and soft and crumbly. It;s rich with organic matter, minerals, and it drains excess water while keeping moist. It's what you buy in a bag at the hardware store. How do you turn hard clay soil into soft loamy soil? With time, and a lot of other "dirts".

Soil is a mix of minerals (clay particles,sand, grit, gravel, rocks, shells, etc.) and organic matter (decomposing plants and animals). The amounts of each of these makes different dirts unique. Clay has a lot of very very fine particles of what were rocks, this is so fine that the dust is bad to breathe, and it makes cool stuff when you stick it together and apply about 1400 degrees of heat. Clay is good, silty soil is wonderful stuff. Too much clay, and you have something like what you use to make pottery...in fact, you can. Some soils have too much sand, or too many rocks. Some soils have too much plant matter, which is good for some things (peat, marshy loving plants, mushrooms), but will rot others.

So, for my soil, I needed more organic matter (garden soil and manure) and more large particulate minerals(sand and pearlite). Pearlite is a lot like pumice, it's a volcanic rock ground into small bits. It's the white stuff in your garden soil. Large particles keep the dirt particles for getting to close together, it keeps it full of air pockets and helps water drain.

Last year I added only garden soil and manure. This year the soil was almost as bad as last year. Which explains why my garden didn't do as well as it could have. So this year it's getting a bigger over haul. And next year, when I dig it up again, I will adjust it again. I will keep doing this until I move, or I dig the soil up in spring and it's soft and crumbly and a rich dark brown.

I moved all my starts into the newly made rows and they are very happy today, most of them have grown noticeably. I also put in some seeds. Tomorrow or maybe next week, I will tackle the other half.

And a side note, I move the compost bin. And then I turned the lot it was in into a wild flower bed. The soil there is the same hard clay as everywhere else, but I am not ready to turn this into a new garden bed. Wildflowers are tenacious and strappy plants that will survive in poor conditions. They are also a good cover crop, for now, it will keep weeds out of that area. And they make good cutting flowers.
But I had pumpkins in the compost bin all winter. And the spot where one of them was (the pumpkin is long gone.) has turned into a plethora of volunteer pumpkin sprouts.

There are also two new pics in Photographia.
And if anyone knows HTML for paragraph indents I will be grateful if you share it with me, I hate not indenting paragraphs but nothing I have tried has worked. =P

Updates

New pics in Photographia and Naturalista!

Tired

I have been working hard, taking down an exhibit and packin' it up. So I am tired and pretty busy. But I have finished a few more projects. I took a break from the HP shawl and knitted a beret, Le Slouch , which was fun to knit, turned out great but I, and Matt, are unsure if it is "me". If you like berets, let me know, I may be passing this on.













I also made felted, and needle felted cat toys because all that felted knitting I did is really a lot of material...I still have a bunch of the blue part left, this, I think, used up the pink part. The cats' think they are great. yay. At least I have found some use for this stuff.

I Don't Care How You Feel About Martha...

But how can you not like this stuff? Seriously here.. I Cried. You can find it at Micheal's too.. the possibilities... the itch to add to my paper collection. oooo














And I have tried needle felting and I deem it fun. This little pouch thing was just me messing around with bits cut out from a failed felting project from awhile ago. (It may seem obvious to you, but do not use different yarns when felting unless you KNOW they felt up the same... )
I plan on needle felting some kind of something into my Peruvian felted hat, to go with my Harry Potter shawl, so it's all witchy and stuff. And pretty.

HIs Dark Materials or The Golden Compass is the Next Harry Potter

So I am actually re-reading this now, I'm on the last book in the trilogy by Phillip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass. It is being made into a movie and I have high hopes for it to be absolutely excellent. In the mean time, go try this out and help me find out who my daemon is! Or your own.

OOoo!

Now it's a knitting bag... !
I added a bit to the tutorial page, but not an actual tutorial, I'd need to do this again to know what I'm talking about, this was all by the seat of my pants. I made it up as I went.

Like it?

Make it!