Friday Garden...

...Drunk Walk.  (Not really, just shots as they come from the camera, taken in no particular order.)

This late in the season, and there are two blueberry buds! 

Flowering bud!

A clutch(?) of ripening 'maters. Reddest one is about baseball size!

Volunteer Romaine! These were from seeds produced buy a plant I purchased at the store.

        Strawberries. 

        About a week and 1/2 ago, I pulled everything, broke up the plants, and re-planted them.  

        The deadlooking ones mostly have green shoots, so the bed will be bangin' next year!

Peppers.  These are the ones that came (for free!) in my order from a nursery in

            New Mexico.  The ones I intentionally purchased did about as well - I have one 

            immature plant in a pot. It will come in when it gets cold, too.

Potted Basil.

Lower pot, Rosemary, which will be re-potted and brought in for the winter.

More strawberries, in a mini-Mexican pot. Plus Oregano!! 

The heavy rains and the weight of the tomatoes toppled the cage, but didn't uproot the plant.

Still rooted!

Horticultural notes:  The peppers sprouted quite well in a mini-hothouse I use. It consistes of water-saturated planting media in a square aluminun cake pan with a plastic lid ('bake and carry'). Pan with lid sits on a warming pad, and water condenses on the plastic lid.  Tapping the lid a couple of times creates 'rain', and the seeds stay hydrated!

Doc Deb and I discussed the interesting growth process pf these peculiar peppers. They sprout, and in about two weeks, hit about 4 inches tall. Then, they 'stall'.  I don't know if they're concentrating on root development (my hunch), but they stay the same height for about a month. Then, blammo, they get about 18 inches tall, and peppers sprout.

More on the peppers soon! (I'm doing a test quiche using them rather than Green Ortegas!)

Almost, But Not Quite...

I wandered into the back bedroom yesterday afternoon, idly looking for where the feed from the junction box outside the kitchen door came into the room, and wondering if I wanted to move the light fixture into the closet (No). I noticed that neither the light switch on the wall nor the light in the closed seemed to have been looked at when Ron and I surveyed the place last month. So, being curious, I  did some disassembly:

The switch looked just fine.

I removed the light in the closet, and found this:

Mostly bare wire. Not. Good.

A bit of ripping and tearing revealed this:

Someone had nailed a bit of scrap siding(?) between the two joists, and ran the wires thru it. This gave him something to screw the lamp base into.  The post in the background was not in use for this.

Further ripping revealed some interesting water damage, Also Not. Good.

 And you can see the wires meandering off into the bay above the ceiling:

So, bare wire from the fixture, over the (lath & plaster) ceiling, thru the joist, to places currently unknown:

My guess is that the debris was originally the insulation.

Those 'grommets' are over the bedroom ceiling, so that was it for me.

About two minutes into the job, I wished I'd worn a turtleneck.
(That's a dark Navy blue shirt.)

I called Ron in the middle of this, to tell him what I had discovered - the bare wire. That was before I pulled out the patch of ceiling and discovered nothing but bare wire.

E-mails to the owner ensued, which pretty much tell the whole story.

This is what I wrote before calling Ron:

As we suspected, the skwirlz did it. (Or that's the way to bet!)

Bored, wanted to look at the (light) fixture in your room to see if I wanted it for the closet.  Got to wondering if Ron and I had looked at the light switch in your room, and at the light in the closet. I noticed water stains in there, too, so.

I unscrewed the switch from the wall - looked fine.  But! when I undid the closet light, well whaddya know? Miles of bare wire. Don't know if it was chewed thru or *just* rotted off, but there is a boatload of bare wire on both leads to the light.

 We had this exchange after I called Ron:

WOW!!! I paid those electricians a boatload of money to find the problem back when. I just knew it had to be the squirrels. Maybe. Maybe not. But I was at least right about the location -- my bedroom.

Thanks for letting me know and thanks for tracking it down. I'll let folks here know...

Ron suggested that I short the two wires in the closet ceiling, turn on the breaker, hook up one pair of wires together, and touch the other two.  I did.

Blammo!

Being a curious fellow, I wondered what would happen if I un-shorted the closet wires, and then put everything back together.  So I did.

There be power! All of the lights and sockets on the second floor work.  I haven't poked around on the third floor, but I don't doubt that it works, too.

The only thing *not* working are the lights on the (first to second) floor stairs. That, I suspect, was a result of the re-wire of the living room.  I believe that it is a *relatively* easy fix, along with recommissioning the XOR light switches at the front door and the bottom of the stairs.

Money and effort just undid themselves a turn or two or four!!

---

Yet, after all of that, I still don't know where the short is, or how all of working circuits are  tied in to the main breaker box in the basement.  And I'm thinking that the whole bedroom ceiling needs to come down for crud remediation.

Bah!

Accomplished Something!

Over the course of the last two terms at school, I have been in some relatively serious self-doubt about my teaching ability, and my "fit" with the school.  Among other things, it has me looking for work somewhere else, and not necessarily teaching.

I have a student who has issues that are affecting his attendance.  He can do the work, he's just not in class enough to really show it, which makes it difficult for me to coach and evaluate him.  He appeared in class last week, and afterwards, I offered to stay after and help him get caught up.  He seemed happy for the offer, and we left it at that.

Yesterday, he was in class for the full time.  I stayed after with him to help him get his projects up to date.  Happily, he was able to get two of the three he needed to do done.  The third is pretty simple, but his computer needed to do updates before he could complete it, so we called it a day after about an hour and a half.  We agreed that he would run updates next time during the lecture/demo part of the class, so he could finish the last missing lab.

He appeared happy to be caught up, and I felt like I had actually accomplished something positive.

Nice change.

Long Time, No Garden

Last time a posted about the garden was late June.  Things have changed.  But first, some of the fruits of my labors:

My very own canned produce.  On the left, crushed tomatoes.  On the right, not pineapple, but also crushed tomatoes.  The yellow tomato plant is going like gangbusters.  The latter is going to be used to make a chicken chili.

The kitchen garden.

The Basil is doing fine, as Basil is wont to do.

The tomatoes are not fairing so well. I do not know why.

Another view.  The Rosemary is healthy.  Unseen but also healthy are the two Oregano plants.

Front high bed.  Pumpking and tomatoes are well, as are a few of the pepper plants (hidden in the pumpkin).

 The Yellow tomatoes, and what I now believe is Honeydew melon

An almost ripe cluster of yellow tomatoes. The are meatier, and a bit less juicy, but they put up just fine. Also, a couple of Peppers hiding behind the Pumpkin.

The last Early Girl.  Some fruit is forming.

Blackberry.  I actually got eat the one that the critters didn't get.  Yummy!

The one red tomato that it still reasonably healthy and producing.

Once again, the Romas are coming in the what I'm calling "flat-bottom rot".  It isn't actually rot, but the bottom part of the fruit is flat and brown.  This has happened for the last two seasons.  One of the tomatoes from the bush directly above also had it.

Google is my friend.

In other news, I got bacon, and made bacon and tomato sandwiches.  Life is good!!