Amateur Gardening

As gardeners go I am among the most amateurish, last weekend I went out and bought several plants for some flower beds and my vegetable garden, then spent most of the day in the rain tilling and planting. It all looked pretty nice untill saturday morning when the temperature dropped to 29 degrees and a hard frost fell on all of it. Today it looks more than abit dammaged. Fortunately in the vegetable department it was only my tomatoes that I will lose, none of the flowers look like they will make it. All pros and even most amateurs know timing is important. I enjoy yardwork when I have time to dedicate to it, I always have a nice veggie garden and usualy my flower beds look nice mostly though I find it hard to break that stage where you are not batteling the constant overgrowth and can begin enjoying the gardening part. When you have to do your weeding with a chain saw something is wrong.

Pro Garden Tour

In between gardening chores, Dara and I went on a garden tour in Palo Alto today. Five houses ranging from huge elaborate things to small tidy things. It was fun, but I have to say that I want to see the amateur garden tour, not the tour of "who can spend a lot of money for someone else to make their garden look great." People dressed nicely in general, but I was wearing my dirt-stained jeans and baseball cap. One guy asked me in all seriousness, "Are you the gardener here?" I had to tell him that if I was the gardener, this garden sure as hell wouldn't look like it did.

Slip Slidin' Away

My friend and old business partner lives 2 or 3 miles below Devil's Slide on the coast highway. The highway feels like a strip of asphalt tacked onto a steep hill, and the hill gave way amidst the heavy rain last month. As a result, all traffic funnels through one point to get over the hills. Businesses are suffering (although Dara and I went over there last weekend to do our part in helping the local economy). You know you have a bad commute on the west coast when it's being reported in the NYTimes.

Out of the Murk

After being told the day after McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder that the Mercury News was back on the block, things got a little less murky today when MediaNews bought them. Folks at the Mercury are probably cautiously optimistic now.

The Color Purple

The Iris Lady has many variations on purple in her collection. In her endeavor to rearrange them, she has to identify each one, and since she can't really move the blooming ones until fall, she is having a tough time coming up with names she can remember. The list is starting to sound like a visit to the paint department at the hardware store. Dark purple, violet, mauve, lavender... how many ways can you come up with to say purple anyway? As the high-tech garden boy, one of my duties is to take pictures so we can correlate them to the names. This is actually a lot more fun than digging holes, so I'm not complaining.

Reading List Again

At Mom's request, here is my latest update...

• Africa House, by Christina Lamb. Unusual but true story about an Englishman who built a proper English manor house in the middle of the Rhodesian bush. The writer stumbled upon some of Stewart Gore-Browne's relatives in Africa and his house, and then spent years researching his life and how it all came about. Not exactly a fast mover, but I enjoyed it. It's a unique story that covers life in Rhodesia from WW I through the late sixties. Woven through it is his tortured but unrequited love for his 20-years-senior aunt, his courtship of another woman who ultimately spurned him, and finally his marriage to her daughter, all in the search for someone to share the joy of the great house in the bush.
• Four Against the Arctic, by David Roberts. The non-fiction account of four Russian sailors who were shipwrecked on a barren island in the Arctic for six (yes, six!) years. They went ashore to hunt, the pack ice moved in and crushed the ship they came from. All this happened in 1743, so the details on the non-fiction aspects of their adventure are pieced together from sketchy materials. However, the process of stitching the story together is part of the book, and that is interesting itself. I got this book to read in Chamonix, because one of the people who is involved in the trip to the island in search of clues was from Chamonix.
• Baker Towers, by Jennifer Haigh. A novel about a coal mining town in Pennsylvania around WW II timeframe. Centers around immigrant families working their way up in America, the pull of a small town vs. the lure and opportunity elsewhere. Good family story.
• The Green Age of Asher Witherow, by M. Allen Cunningham. New agey garbage that I was drawn to because it takes place in the West Bay back in the days when they were coal mining. A long trudge.
• Spook, by Mary Roach. After the delightful Stiff, that both Kyla and I enjoyed, I got this one for Kyla for Christmas. She finished it and left it for me. Funny and good natured, Mary Roach travels the world in search of scientific evidence of the afterlife. Highly recommended.
• Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild. This is the same guy who wrote King Leopold's Ghost, another book I enjoyed quite a bit. This time he charts the course of the effort in England to ban the slave trade, starting in 1787 and lasting 50 years. (Banning the slave trade is different than banning slavery.) It was one of the first real activist movements in the world, and the story of how it was done turns out to have established the kinds of campaign techniques we see all the time today. Fascinating set of characters and politics spanning the globe in an age when nothing was instantaneous. Well written and highly recommended.
• Not a Good Day to Die, by Sean Naylor. The non-fiction story of Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. Tora Bora had already taken place, and we were executing one of the biggest military operations against an enemy -- Al Qaida, you remember them, right? -- that we had mounted since WW II. Very detailed account of the planning and the battle. Too detailed for easy reading, it reminded me a bit of We Were Soldiers Once... and Young. With the calls for Rumsfeld's resignation, you can form your own ground-level view of the impact of fighting according to the Rumsfeld doctrine out of this non-political book.
• The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, by John Crawford. Another non-fiction war book, this time about a reservist's time in Iraq. The book has no political bent to it, but sticks to short vignettes of life in the infantry. You can imagine (or you can after you read this) how it feels to be yanked out of college, sent out there on a mission that evolved from the dash to Bhagdad to patrolling the streets among snipers, all the while being given excuses about why you're not being sent home. Always good to hear the good news first hand, that's what I say -- you can't trust the mainstream media!

Along the way (as I think I mentioned in an earlier blog posting), I read Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell. Funny and enjoyable, but she has an even more difficult time suppressing her politics than I do, so be forewarned. Enjoy.

Pacific Coast Irises

Dara's new favorite, Silver Moon. One of the cool things about Pacific Coast irises, other than the many varieties and hybrids and wild colors, is that they only grow in a small band near the coast here, and we happen to be within it.

The current crop, to give you a flavor of the Iris Lady's color mixing dilemma. Click on the picture if you want to see the macro shots taken using the digital camera.

Stem Cell Institute Gets Green Light

As mentioned before, after we passed an initiative funding a stem cell research institute out here, it immediately came under a barrage of lawsuits with the transparent objective of pushing the "every sperm is a potential life" agenda. Thankfully, maybe we can put that behind us and make some progress.

California's novel, $3-billion (U.S.) stem cell research institute is a legitimate state agency, and two lawsuits challenging its constitutionality have no merit, a state judge ruled Friday.

The ruling came a month after a four-day trial in which lawyers with connections to anti-abortion groups claimed the country's most ambitious stem cell research agency violated California law because it wasn't a true state agency and its managers had a host of conflicts of interest.

Score one more for reason, science, and people over ideology.

The Iris Lady

I thought I would post this before Steven did. It is iris season once again and as some of you may know I have a slight fondness for them. We have quite a few and every season I find another gorgeous hybrid to put in my garden. (This year, Silver Moon!) Unfortunately, as I was trying to explain to my husband, I have never really planned out the whole thing (buy a beauty, stick it somewhere) and I need to totally reorganize them because they are clashing. Steve does not see that that is possible but the purples do not look good next to the pale apricots etc. Even some purples do not look good next to other purples and I have 5 different purples at least. I will have pictures shortly so you all can see the necessity. Wish me luck as irises do not like to be moved, especially at this time of year but I need to see the colors to match them, yes? The good news is I have an excellent garden boy who follows instructions cheerfully. Sometimes.

The Sapranos

I don't get to watch much T V. Mostly sports and shows with content suitible for an 11 year old. Every Sunday night Dan is banned from the room while Kirsti and I monitor the seedy underworld of organized crime as told on the HBO hit The Sapranos. It is high drama at its best with just enough humor and stupidity to captivate both of us for the entire hour. It has been a continueing story for 2 or 3 years and this is the last season. Kirsti and I seem to always be speculating on what is going to happen next, who gets hit, who gets hurt, and who gets paid. You don't want to like the biggest lowlifes society has to offer but you just can't help being interested enough to watch them be themselves. For Kirsti it has the added attraction of being filmed in the area where she grew up so she is constantly recognizing landmarks, it has brought back some fond memories of her neighbor Mr. Franco the garbage contractor that lived behind her.

Personal Radio

I've had a couple of people point me at Pandora at this point. I'm going to be giving it a try, so I thought I'd give you guys a preview. Kyla, you in particular, with the poor radio choices in New Haven and spending a lot of time online anyway, might check it out. Basically this is a piece of software that helps you locate songs and artists that are similar to what you like, based on something they call the Music Genome Project:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Based on your limited input (for example, I chose "Allison Krauss" to start), it builds a custom radio station for you that plays music according to your taste and continued input as you listen. It's like your radio monitoring every time you change stations and trying to do a better job. Way cool. Check it out.

Quake Anniversary

Out here we have been inundated not just with rain, but with a mudslide of news about the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake. Today's festivities included eleven survivors -- of the earthquake, fires, and of more than a hundred years of living -- gathering at the traditional celebratory spot of Lotta's Fountain. Given our location, it would make me feel a bit better if our house had been built in 1905 and had survived the earthquake, rather than 1915. Oh well. Whaddya gonna do?

Tree Hugging

When I left NC at 5:00AM this morning it was at least 70 degrees and when I got to Fredricksburg Va. around noon it was 37 and raining sort of a grim reminder that our short vaca is over, but it couldn't have been much nicer the entire weekend was perfect. We didn't get much fishing in but we had a great time enjoying the beach and some other fun activities. I tried to read a really lame book and wound up giving up on it. In my search for reading material I picked up Vanity Fairs latest edition. I have always avoided that mag because of the perfume adds it is just to annoying smelling them while I try to read. Anyway they must have changed their policy or offer mags without odor and I stumbled on one. Al Gore has an essay in this addition I thought was well worth reading. His perception of our enviromental challenges are well stated and seem well grounded in scientific data, thats sort of something evryone has absorbed over time and isn't exactly hot off the presses, What I thought was more interesting and hopefully somewhat prophetic is his positive outlook on our way out of ecological hot water and how weighted it is in opportunity. He took a few shots at bush but mostly it was refreshingly positive. I wanted to blogg it but miss manners must have stepped in. I'm not stepping over the no politics line here I hope, I have recently found some interesting reading on the subject politics seem to swirl around the issue but it seems to be bigger than that. Same issue there is also a great article on surface minning in West Va. Yours in tree hugary; Keith

Miss Manners on Blogging

Someone wrote to her saying:

One friend recently commented in her blog that she hadn't enjoyed the novel she'd just read. To her surprise, the novel's author found the post after searching the Web for his own name and responded angrily to her "review."

Although we are all aware that blogs can be read by any friend or stranger who passes by, our own blogs are so mundane that they are usually read only by our own friends, and we like it that way. We tend to think of blogs as being akin to conversations with friends at a public cafe -- while they might be overheard by strangers, we don't really expect it, or expect strangers to get involved.

Should we instead be thinking of blogs as something more like letters published in the newspaper? Or simply refrain from keeping blogs and put more effort into writing letters? Letters sound good in theory, but in practice I have trouble deriving the same sense of community from them.

For my part, I'd say we've had more interaction on the last year and a half of the blog than we've had in the previous 30 years of letter writing. By the same token, I think it pisses AJ off to hear on the phone, "I already blogged about that, but oh well, I will repeat it for you." Since I was never good at writing letters, I will also say that blogging has cut down on my EMail to family members.

Finally, Miss Manners clearly should have just told her reader to set things up so only contributers can comment on her blog. That just helps people who would probably normally have good manners to keep their opinions to themselves.

Dara the Gamer

When I saw a pointer in BoingBoing about the new Disney online game based on Pirates of the Caribbean, I thought I would post about how Dara might consider this as a replacement to the game she plays, Diablo II. Then it occurred to me that few people know that behind Dara's gentle facade lurks the heart of a hardcore gamer. Her online names in Diablo are DaraDeath for her necromancer character, and Dardarian for her barbarian character. I had to look necromancer up myself:

In fiction, Necromancy is often not a form of divination but a discipline of "dark" or "black" magic used to raise the dead as "undead," typically as zombies under the necromancer's control, though the binding of ghosts and spirits is also common. Necromancers often become powerful undead creatures themselves; in modern fantasy fiction, the Dungeons & Dragons-derived term "lich" (originally a word meaning 'corpse') is often applied to such beings. Necromancers are, in rare cases, capable of raising the dead or restoring vitality to the living, though in some cases the life energy involved must be transferred from another living creature.

You should see the trail of blood she leaves behind her.

Spring Break

It's time for our spring trip to North Carolina. A quick check of the weather showed we should see mid 80s and sunshine so I plan to fish mostly, I am also planning to revive my execise program by either ridding my bike or running. Kirsti and Dan are in on fishing or biking, niether one has an interest in running. I will not be using this time to freshen up my home improvment skills, and I probably won't try Kite Boarding either.

Lying Through Their Teeth

Does it sound plausible to you that you could embed a cell phone in a tooth? If not, then you are more discriminating than Time magazine, which named the cell phone tooth one of its inventions of the year. The full story is a funny example of how two art students exaggerated about their concept by telling people they had a prototype pending, to be productized in a year or so, and this story propagating and morphing in reports of fact by Wired, the BBC, and Time among others.

And speaking of cell phones, someone left me a voice message today on mine. For some reason, I was told I had two messages. When I listened to them, I discovered the earlier one was from Mom saying they could not wait to find out about the polo game and could I let them know what happened. And the message was only delivered a week late.

Shaq Attack

I,m not much of an NBA fan but last night we went to see the Wizards v Heat The Heat just wore down the wizards even though the wizards started off the game in a dominant fashion they just couldn't keep up the intensity and eventualy lost 99-86. No matter whether you follow sports or not everyone knows who Shaquile O'Neil is. The Man is a giant 7'1" and 325 lbs. Its tough to stand out in a gym full of NBA players but he does both in size and play. He totaly dominates the 8' to 12' radius around him particularly under the rim where he mauls anyone attempting a rebound or a shot. The stadium is nice too, its easy to get to on the metro and right in the heart of China Town, we had a nice dinner and enjoyed the sights before the game. Dan lost interest in shaq's autograph when he saw the hord of kids lined up where he was suposed to come out, I always thought autograph hunting was really weird anyway but Kirsti would proudly go down there and fight it out for a chance at his sig.

Re: Buyer Beware

I thought I'd respond in another post rather than comments, mainly because it's easier to edit properly. I am no expert in this area, but that never stopped me from having an opinion. Isn't that the essence of blogging anyway? Dara and I are a great example of people who locate things on the web as a first choice. For example, that's how we got our landscaper who at this point has a very hard to find web site and the guy who did the mural in our house. We tried the online path for bedroom remodeling but were not happy with the people who came our way, and in the end we went with an old guy down the road who said something like "I have too much work to do already, but I'll come by and interview you to see if you're my kind of customer."

The Web Site. You have to start with a web site and a reasonable domain name. There are web site development people who should be able to put one together for you, or you could find someone with some design sense and have them help you pull one together using something like Yahoo Small Business. The other benefit of something like Yahoo Small Business is that they will take care of obtaining the domain name (e.g., www.harrisfrontroyal.com), the "hosting" (providing the actual computer somewhere that hosts your site), and the simple tools to maintain it. I don't think you need to do anything fancy. Maybe just a photo gallery of work, some brief praising comments from customers, and a way to reach you. The biggest problem with a web site is not setting it up, it's keeping it up to date. Personally, I'd keep it simple so that you don't need to worry about updating it constantly or paying someone else to do it.

Online Advertising. If you set up a domain name through Yahoo, the search engines will crawl it and index the content so that people typing in something like "harris builders front royal" will be able to find your site. There's no guarantee where it will show up in the order of hits, though. Whether you want to pay for something like Google Adwords or not, I don't know. I spent a while poking around it, and it looks really easy to do. You should just read about it online, and they have a demo that is nice. As you said in your posting, the end result would be that when someone Googles "home remodeling", based on Google's notion of where the request comes from geographically, your paid ad will show up on the right hand side of the Google search page. Web sites that use Google Adsense (a way for them to make money when someone clicks on an ad that Google serves up for display on a web site or blog) might show your ad as well. You set a budget you're willing to spend a month, and they splatter out ads to match your budget. You pay for the times people click on the ad, bringing them to your web site. Yahoo has a similar service. You could certainly try it out for a while and see if anything came out of it.

Story 'Bout a Man Named Jose

I didn't know that Belize was an oil exporter.

Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz spent millions of dollars chasing black gold in this Massachusetts-size nation located southeast of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. So did Texaco, Chevron and others. Studies hinted at petroleum deposits lurking beneath the jungle floor. But drilling yielded 50 dry holes in as many years.

All that investment can't out-do a little luck it seems.

This tiny country struck oil in much the same way TV's Jed Clampett did in the Ozarks. A few years ago, a Mennonite farmer dug a shallow well in this bucolic hamlet and up bubbled crude.

"It was just like 'The Beverly Hillbillies,'" said government petroleum inspector Andre Cho.

Personally I always thought the Clampetts were from West Virginia, but since the author is writing for the LA Times, I can assure you it's all the same to her.

Milan Sightseeing

Here are a few pics I thought you might find either interesting or amusing from Milan.

This is the Duomo, an elaborately decorated cathedral. There were school groups touring it on the Saturday morning I was there, so I did not go in. The picture is taken from the large piazza in front of it. On the other side of the piazza is the Galleria shown below.

The Galleria is a huge arched space with expensive stores (including the original Prada).

Inside the Galleria. I want you to know that I did not eat at the MacDonald's, but I thought it was a great setting right in the middle underneath the dome and below the painting. Maybe that is Ray Krok frying the first fries or something.

And I had to take this picture since we have been closely following cowboy chic fashion on the blog. This is an entire store in Italy dedicated to cowboy boots.

Buyer Beware

As the housing bubble continues to deflate I decided to take some refuge in the remodeling/home improvement market. This is nothing new for Harris Builders I have quite a portfolio of completed jobs in this area, but lately I havn't done much there. One of the challenges for me is not to waste my time with casual shoppers and deal with the serious and qualified customer. I have spent a little time looking into getting a web site as well as a refferal service that can help to weed out serious leads. I guess I shoudn't have been surprised by the army of bottom feeding middle-men who are equipped electronicaly to drain your advertising dollar. 3 simple e-mail requests for information generated nearly 75 electronic sale pitches. As near as I can tell if you realeased your billing info to some of them it would cost you just to open their mail. Fortunately for me I have a suspicious nature and won't move twoards anything the least bit questionable, the problem is they almost all look questionable. I thought it would be nice if you googled Home improvements or remodeling and designated my area my site would pop up I just didn't realize there are so many ways to get there. I am in no hurry so I plan to move cautiously through this maze of info, this is a great dissapointment to all who have contacted me. I am accepting all advice from my tech savy family. Enough shop talk I have to leave for the Wizards v Heat game Dan is hoping to obtain Shaq's autograph so we have to get there early.

Baby Shower Gone Bad

The few baby showers I've been to have sometimes made me want to kill myself, but this one topped those:

An argument at a baby shower escalated into a brawl in which one man was shot and the pregnant guest of honor was beaten with a stick, police said.

Three people were arrested after the fight, described by police as a "baby shower gone bad."

What will the birthday party be like?

Polo Nationals

I will probably have energy to say something more about the Yale vs. Cornell women's polo game, but for now I think I'll relay the entire contents of the live text messaging between Dara and me that went on during the game as transcribed here directly from my phone:

• Steve: 5-4 yale after 1 chukker
• Dara: Thanks.
• Steve: 11-7 yale at half
  
• Dara: This is so hard. How is she playing?
• Steve: She was playing well until she fell off and was walked on in the 2nd chukker but nobody was doing well in the 3rd as they are now behind 15-11. Ugh!
  
• Dara: Yikes!!!
• Steve: To let you in on the excitement they are now down 1
• Steve: 3 min left
• Dara: Argh
• Steve: Down 2 with 1 min
  
• Dara: Damn
• Steve: 18 15 loss
  
• Dara: Shit
• Steve: Kyla's tearful summary is that they were robbed by the referees and she hates these people
  
• Dara: Hard way to lose

Pretty much sums it up. Kyla played great, though!

Blogging from Italy

I took the long way to Cornell and went to Milan first. I had a meeting on Friday here. I stayed over today (Saturday) so I could see some of the city before heading back to cheer on Kyla in the first game of nationals on Monday. I'll let you know what happens there.

A guy I was with said that everything is better in Italy than elsewhere, but that compared to Milan, every place in Italy was better than it. It's a flat rather nondescript choice of location and at least used to be a big industrial center. I don't think I've ever seen a city as tagged with grafitti as this one. It has a nice subway which I took a few times. Today I saw the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, La Scala opera house, Sforzesco castle, the DaVinci national museum of science and technology, and a few other churches and squares. The castle was cool. I thought the museum was about DaVinci, but unfortunately, it was just named after him. It was overrun by schoolchildren. I had a cup of coffee in the Galleria that cost 6 Euros (that would be about $7.20). Take that Starbucks. While there is no shortage of MacDonald's here, both Starbucks and Pizza Hut seem to be forbidden.

Leaving tomorrow, going through Frankfurt, then Dulles, then Syracuse. Should be fun.