Tank two

This one was a breeze, because Lawrence and I filled it via teamwork last night.

Four broccoli plants, plus a Swiss chard
(both favorites of mine).
And of course the central ornamentals...

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" (attributed to Freud):
I wanted an airy flowery plant that would not shade the others in the tank.  Hopefully this cigar plant will do the job.  The yellow flower beside it is a thryallis.

I hope to run a row of onions around the back side of the tank this weekend.  And some garlic.

Sky's the limit, Part III

A late afternoon shower treated us to a spectacular rainbow...

They never look as dramatic in photos
as they do in real life.

Definitely my pot of gold!

...followed by an equally impressive sunset.

White crape myrtle in silhouette.

One little one down, two big ones to go

The "baby" stock tank got completed today.  This one was earmarked for herbs, so it now contains two varieties of oregano, rosemary, lemon mint, sage, Indian curry plant (very hard to grow), and a hacked-off basil that's telling me it wants to come back from its root ball (here's hoping it ain't lyin').  And of course the beautiful ornamental centerpiece from Faith's Garden Shed "Naturally".  I promised Cayley before we moved here that we would plant lots of flowers.  The flowering plants are for her. 

 I'm actually in the middle of writing a step-by-step entry for other folks who might like to try stock tank gardening, so I won't repeat any of the configuration details here. 

Suffice it to say that I'm satisfyingly tired, like I actually got to use my muscles today... even this small tank required me to move about 1,500 pounds of soil and crushed rock from Point A beside our front yard to Point B, in the tank itself.  Nice workout.  Wish I could do this kind of thing every day... waitaminute, I can!  I still have about another 7,800 pounds of material to move into the other two larger tanks! 
:-)

Reduce, reuse, re-psych-le

I got really spoiled in one conservation-minded respect during the seven years we lived in Pineloch: we were part of the City of Houston's recycling pilot program.

From http://www.houstontx.gov/solidwaste/automatedrecycling.html

Pineloch became the third-best neighborhood in th'big bad city for participation.

We got a 70% participation rate EFFORTLESSLY, for one simple reason: they supplied us with functional receptacles.

Here you see former Mayor Bill White, who by rights SHOULD have won the Texas Governorship a few days ago, pitching the program beside one of the City's signature green roller-carts.

In sharp contrast, THIS is the piece of crap that I now have to deal with in League City:

We can never use these when it rains.

We can never use them when it's windy.

They don't hold very much.

They don't hold larger objects at all.

They can't be stored outdoors.

They are difficult to carry when they get heavy.  The elderly, children and the disabled can't really move them around at all.

Furthermore, the, um, contract personnel who operate League City's trash collection service have not accepted other forms of presentation.  You apparently can't place your recyclables in clearly-marked bags (the plastic bags themselves are recyclable) because they won't pick them up.  And they won't pick it up from cardboard boxes, despite the fact that the boxes themselves are recyclable.  They will only collect the small amount that people manage to cram into these sucky red plastic containers.

I'm tired of seeing poorly-managed recycling shit strewn all over this neighborhood and the last one (Lawrence's, before we moved here - it was also in League City). 

I'm also tired of seeing it spilling out all over the inside of my house every time it rains and I can't put it out (like this week - we had between six and eight inches of rain mid-week).

For these reasons, I decided to try an experiment in containerization.  It's actually not possible to PURCHASE a proper recycling roller-cart unless you spend well over a hundred dollars because they are distributed almost exclusively via municipal contract, and not sold individually.  Therefore, I had to MAKE one:

So, OK, my six bucks worth of spray paint smeared and oversprayed a bit and I need to touch it up so that this, formerly our spare trash cart, now looks official-recycling-cart red rather than Alison-is-trying to-skull-f*ck-the-trash-men red. 

But the point is, it's RED, which is the official color of recycling in this city.  They SHOULD pick up our recyclables from this, should they not?  Right??  Should this not be sufficient to psych them into it??

And by the way, it's not that I have too much time on my hands, because I seriously don't.  But I've always had far too much energy, especially for the doing of goofy stuff.
;-)

Suburban survivor

"Gee, that's a funny looking leaf structure," I thought as I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye while making the morning's rounds.

But a leaf structure it ain't:

It's the full length of my index finger, and slightly fatter.

At first I wondered if perhaps it came from outer space, but it's actually the biggest damned caterpillar I've seen in my entire LIFE.  A quick Google of the terms 'Texas giant green caterpillar' revealed it as the precursor to the rustic sphinx moth (manduca rustica), the name having derived from it's sphinx-like pose, partially shown above. 

It's a formidable creature by any measure.

I don't think I'd like to mess with that stabbing apparatus on its back end.

This is the giant moth that it eventually morphs into - they can have wingspans up to six inches!  This is real Silence of the Lambs stuff here. 
(pic from Wikipedia)

I scooped him up into a glass jar so that I can show him to Cayley and Lawrence later.  It was 43 degrees out and he was in a torpor when I found him - I hope he survives. 

His capture begs two questions:

(1) Where the hell did he come from?  As I noted in a previous post, we are basically emerging from a scorched-earth environmental scenario here, a vast zone of acreage that was plowed down to bare earth, literally stripped of every single blade of grass just one year ago at the start of development.  I'm always impressed at the way Nature takes it back here in the subtropics, but this is remarkable.  In all of these surrounding yards with their sterile, monocultured, pesticide-laden landscaping, my lantana was probably the only edible plant for quite some distance.  How he (or the original layer of his egg) found it in all this wasteland is impressive. 

(2) What should I do with him?  I don't want to off such a magnificent creature, but he has already eaten about half of my lantana, and I don't think there's enough material left on it for him to make it to chrysalis stage.  Maybe I should do my usual blogosphere search, find out what food I could substitute (the Wiki description suggests that they eat only a narrow range of stuff), and raise him to moth-hood.  That would be an entirely different experience - hatching out a moth with a six-inch wingspan! 

Inc.-r-edible!

I've blogged before about the Academy-Award-nominated documentary Food, Inc.  Imagine my unbounded delight when today there comes this particular permission slip from middle school:

For those of you in other cultures (meaning, anywhere but here!!), yes, that's an excerpt from a permission slip and it's needed because teachers, the degreed professionals that they are, have been deemed to be un-fit judges of what movies gifted-and-talented twelve- and thirteen-year-olds should watch.  It's all part of the greater nanny state theme - nothing so consequential as a movie that has been already rated as appropriate for this age group by a respected independent organization can be left to individual professional judgment, because that's just too damned risky.  So parental consent is needed for each and every one of them.

Anyway, I was tickled by this; I think it's an important film and an appropriate choice in this educational context.  Given the prominent role that Texas has played in the industrialization of our food system, it's not necessarily the safest choice for a public school teacher to make, either.  In general, I am net-negative on the whole GT magnet school experience that Cayley is having right now.   As I mentioned in another recent entry, while the idea of this GT program is on the right track, the execution nullifies a lot of the value by simply going too far: too many performance demands and too much homework essentially turn the learning process into a soul-less assembly line (very much analogous to the soul-less assembly line that our food system has become under the current industrial regime... it's an eerie parallel now that I think of it).  In significant measure, I suspect that Cayley is going to remember not the depth and breadth of these educational years, but the stress and toil that overrode the quality of the content.  But every once in a while, the curriculum includes an original choice like this film, and I become a bit more hopeful about the potential for lasting value.

Scaaary neighbors

The girls got together for trick-or-treating in our neighborhood last night.

They went under their own recognizance, as they are more than old enough to do this, even on a night of mischief. 

But at one point, I got a cellular call from Cayley, who was highly agitated.  "Guess what one guy was handing out for Halloween?!" she barked indignantly.

And I started thinking to myself, uh-oh - a trickster instead of a treater.  Perhaps a rogue teenager?  Maybe seeing older girls and therefore handing out prophylactics?  Cigarettes?  Candies designed to reflect and celebrate the general morphology of male genitalia?  Other goodies along these lines?

"What?" I asked her, swallowing hard.

"BIBLE VERSES!" she shouted in disgust.

Awe-some!  What a great way to appeal to two Muslims, a Jew, and a UU, eh?
:-)

Anyway, other than that extremely minor affront, a good time was had by all, and our home-based discussions of both religion and our management of social expectations with respect to it will surely continue.  Yyyyup.