The Blue Puppet Maneuver

…and how it affects goats

Stuff, Stuff, Stuffystuff Stuff

The Gay Rights Meme: Yes, I support equal treatment of gay/lesbian/whatever people.

The Price of Gasoline: It’s about $3.80 here for the cheap stuff. How much longer until the sheeplike masses get upset enough to demand something be done? I’m saying November, when they vote Republicans out of office in huge numbers. If the Democrats are smart (not at all a safe bet), they will slap caps on gas prices about 5 minutes after the new president is sworn in.

Origins Awards: Congratulations to all of my gaming industry pals who got nominated. Way to go!

Game Group Conflict: It finally happened…both my gaming groups wanted to play on the same weekend. After much thought, I went with GMing for Group #1. I shall be striving to avoid such conflicts in the future

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Persimmon Cookie On A Stick

…yum yum yummy yum yum

Another day filled with Exciting Garden Adventures. Today, it was all about finally getting the finished compost (about 175 pounds worth) out of Compost Pile X-34 Alpha. And by “compost”, I mean 90% worm castings in a form so fine and nutrient packed that you’d pay about $5.00 a pound for it at a garden store or nursery. Now figure in that it was full of the red worms that created it and you can up that to about $7.00 a pound.

And it’s all sitting next to my veggie garden, awaiting placement on various plants throughout the garden.

Of course, getting this wonderful stuff took me about 5 hours of shoveling, sifting out uncomposted larger chunks and wheeling garden cart loads around, but it was worth it. Hell, it was even worth the sunburn and aching muscles.

Now, over the next 3-4 days, after work, I’ll move the halfway composted contents of Compost Piles K-43 Omega and I-652 Beta into one bigass pile and let the redworms chew it up for a few months or so. The worms will enjoy that.

For those of you wondering, I generally do the “pile it up in the bin and let nature take it’s course” type of composting, rather than the speedier, but more labor intensive “hot” composting method. See, that’s cos I’m a lazy bugger.

Oh, look, another garden pic!

Plants on the hillside

The Kitty Cats VS Gojira And Mothra

…my money is on the cats

Today was a warm and sunny day, so I did a bit of gardening. Nothing like pulling weeds, cleaning up piles of previously pulled weeds and watering everything to make a fella tired.

But not so tired that I couldn’t walk 2 of the 4.5 miles home from the dog park and than walk another mile with Daisy.

Tomorrow we’ll be doing some domestic stuff and maybe go to the movies.

And here’s a garden pic for y’all.

Blue Irises

The Horticultural Whore Is Down

…but not out

Sometimes, even I am humbled before the awesomeness that is Nature.

Today, in a effort to get out of the house and at least do a little something in my garden, I set myself two tasks: water things and set out praying mantis egg cases.

See, every fall, when I’m cutting back shrubs and dying annuals and pruning trees, I check each cutting for mantis egg cases. And every year, I find several. Not wanting to toss them into the compost piles with the rest of the cuttings, I set those branches aside in a sheltered area. Then, once things warm up in the spring, I set the egg cases in among the greenery so they can hatch. Most do, tho some fall prey to spiders or birds. Still, every year sees many mantises roaming my garden, voraciously eating up bugs that would do my plants harm (and some that would help, since the praying mantis is not at all a picky eater).

But in all these years, I have never actually seen the egg cases hatch. Until today.

Today, I went to check the egg case on my clematis and lo and behold, the hatch was on! I must have stood there for 15 minutes watching the teensy little creatures wriggle out of the egg case, hand by a tiny thread as they dried out, then crawl away in search of denser cover. I moved several into the lush native fuchsias that grow at the base of the clematis. A few more got moved to the bay laurel tree.

It’s pretty damned cool to think that many of these 1/8 inch long babies will, by summers end, be 3 or 4 inch long females, heavily laden with eggs that they will lay all over the outside of my house and among the plants in the garden.

Nature rules!

The Adventure Of The One Armed Redhead

…as written by John H. Watson, M.D.

Well, Gentle Readers, my wrist surgery went well. My surgeon removed a good sized chunk of unwanted material and I pretty much slept thru the whole operation, awaking only to ask that the relaxing drugs be amped up.

Now I’m home, typing one handed and in no pain thanks to the effective, yet not recreationally fun, Vicodin that I was prescribed. I can go back to work on Monday, barring some unforseen accident.

And now, I’m under orders from Doctor Wife to get offline ang go rest.

More one handed blogging later.

How To Disarm An Antimatter Bomb In 43 Easy Steps

…with illustrations

Gaming Related Stuff

1: I’m very much enjoying having one gaming group to GM and another to play in. The dynamics of the two groups is way different, which is good because the group I GM can sometimes go off on tangents that have me doing the GM equivalant of herding cats. The group I play in usually manages to keep more of a focus on the tasks at hand.

2: A couple of months ago, Grace and I were thinking we might be able to go to GenCon 2009 (if there is a GenCon 2009), but that soaring dream has flown headfirst into the clean plate glass window of financial reality. Barring the ever welcome winning of the lottery, we are now shooting for GenCon 2010. After that, the future is cloudy, since 2010/2011 is sort of a target time period for selling this house and moving out into the country.

3: I am slowly writing up a roleplaying setting for possibly sale or self-publishing. It has a couple of unique aspects that I’ve not seen in any other setting. No rules attached, just pure setting. Hopefully, I’ll get more of it written up (albeit typed with my left hand alone) during my recuperation from wrist surgery.

4: Hmmm….according to the Boardgame Geek website, my copy of the original EON Games “Borderland”, with one expansion pack, is worth well over $200.00! Cool. I wonder what my original copy of “Cosmic Encounter”, with most (if not all) of the expansions is worth?

5: No zine in A&E for me this May. It just seems so hard to come up with a decent sized zines worth of stuff.

Gotta go to work. More bloggage later.

Zombie Cyborgs From Planet 14

…an Ed Wood film

I have had, for the past couple of weeks, a pinched nerve or something in my neck. The left side of my neck will start hurting and that will lead to a headachce and that will make Doc a cranky and unmotivated boy. Which is a long way of saying that, altho I did stuff today, I could not get motivated to do much garden stuff. Hopefully, after my wrist operation on Wednesday, I’ll have some good pain meds which will allow my a bit of headache free one handed gardening time.

A more permanent cure for my neck problems will have to wait until I can afford to go see our really swell, but not covered by our medical plan, chiropractor.

Game Day Report

We started the Modern Weird Shit RPG series today and things went well. Our cast of PCs include…

An NSA technology expert who has Spider Sense
A very Scullyesque FBI forensics expert who can do Jedi Mind Tricks
A somewhat Mulderlike scientist from the Smithsonian who can do a Vulcan Mind Meld
The CIA’s top field agent/assassin who has the Power To Cloud The Mind

At their first briefing, they were told that strange things were happening all around the world and especially right here in North America. Some of these things included…

The entire 500 person population of a small Arkansas town vanishing for a week, then returning sans memories of where they had been.

A real, no shit encounter with a dragon in Northern California, complete with photographic evidence.

The appearance of roughly 300 small and very helpful robots in a town in Alberta, Canada.

Real live garden gnomes in Amarillo, Texas.

A US Navy jet fighter taking off from Miramar NAS and, 5 minutes later, appearing in the skies over Maine.

They were then given their first assignment: Go to Big Pine, California and find out why all the female residents over 5 years old were building something strange…using skills they had not possessed the day before.

To make a long story short, they found that the women had been mind controlled by an alien intelligence to build a launching station for a high speed jet aircraft that would spread a mutagenic compound (that the women had also created) across an area from Phoenix, Arizona to the West Coast.

The Plot was finally foiled by the FBI agent who Mind Ticked a female Navy Seal into putting some C-4 into the aircraft just before launch.

In the end, very little evidence of an alien nature was collected, with the exception being some bits of a mutated black bear that got blowed up real good.

The popular theory is that all the Weird Shit is happening due to somebody opening up portals between dimensions. In two weeks, the PC’s will get to investigate another happening that may or may not advance this theory.

After the game, Daisy and I took a nice 1.75 mile walk.

Now, I’m gonna eat some lasagna and then maybe write an A&E zine.