Sometime Life Doesn’t Go On

Well I just finished Missing in Action by Peter David yesterday evening. This is the most recent of the New Frontier Series. It picks up right where the previous book ended. I have an even better understanding of the necessity of the note to the reader that I mentioned at the beginning of the review for the last book. This book could make some readers mad.

This book is pretty much non-stop. There is a lot more action and it draws the reader through the story a little faster. Calhoun and the Excalibur are trapped in another universe trying to get home, but really that’s a side plot. The main play is still with the women of the books, Admiral Shelby, Captain Meuller, and Lt. Commander Robin Leffler. They are trying to find out what happened to Calhoun, stop a civil war in the Thallonian Protectorate, and save countless lives in the process. You know, the usual fare. People will be pissed off because, shit happens, the world changes, and people die. And time keeps moving forward, inexorably.

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Giddiness?

For some reason this has made me far happier that is should make a normal person. I was out putting pine needles around my plants in the garden when I found this:


This is the first Roma tomato to appear on my plants. The thing probably started growing before I put the plants in the ground. Now I'm gonna have to figure out how I want to stake the plants up

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Cheaper but not easier by

I had some family come by the house yesterday to help in the yard. If I lived closer to my place of birth this might be a weekly occurrence , but as it is it only happens occasionally. I'll take any help I can get. They brought some additional garden plants by, and they helped mow and trim the yard. then they helped put out mulch in some of the beds. I'm glad they could come by, cause Lord knows I couldn't have gotten it done by myself. I've got some updated pics following in my rambling way.

This is that Painted Maple I bought last year. I's doing pretty good, and I expect it to grow a lot this year. We put some mulch around it, and I plan on watering it some. It has only been in the ground a few months.



This is what the front walk looks like now. I sprayed weed killer on the grass in the enclosed area. It was a Bermuda grass I think, and the rest of the yard is Centipede. That means it always grew three times faster that the rest of the yard, and it was never the same color. It was a pain to mow, and didn't do much for the yard's appearance. So I killed it, cut it short, put newspaper down as a weed stop, and put mulch on top of it. I think it looks a lot better. later I may put in a ground cover or something.


This is the evergreen shrub that was on the house side of the walk. Someone had planted it too close to the walk and the driveway. My bet is that there were two at one time and one died. However, if there had been two of that size there, it would have been quite difficult to get between them. I was thinking of moving it, but the root system was too extensive to expect it to survive the attempt. So I cut it down and ripped the stump out. This is the remains.


In place of that I planted two dwarf Crepe Myrtles that I got at the SC Botanical Garden sale last weekend. They were bitten by the frost, but are starting to put back out again. They will have the nice bronze looking leaves and in late summer they will have the nice red blossoms. I got my Godmother a few a couple years back and they make a nice showing.


Being lazy I had left my fall wreath up for far too long. Well someone took advantage of it and decided to build a nest on it. I've got another nest on a shelf in my garage, and a nuthatch is using a birdhouse next to the driveway. There're babies all over the place over here.


Last Fall I started a fern garden in my back yard. The previous owner had planted some hanging basket ferns in the ground and they appeared to be doing well. I picked up three ferns at the Botanical Garden sale and planted them in the same area. This one is an Eastern Wood Fern I believe. It's an evergreen native. You can see the old foliage under the new fronds. It's doing pretty good.


This is the second fern I got in the Fall. It's a Lady in Red. The stems of the fronds are a scarlet color. It's deciduous, so all this is this year's growth. It's a real beauty.


This is the last fern I got in the Fall, a Cinnamon Fern. It's deciduous as well, and the reproductive stalks are similar in color to cinnamon sticks. You can see one of the hanging basket ferns in the ground behind it.


This is one of this year's purchases. It's a Royal Fern. I put it at the back, because it's fronds can get 5 feet long or longer. I'm anxious for this one to grow.


This one i got at Lowe's of all places. It's a Japanese Painted Fern. I was struck by the coloration, but upon reading up on it, it's a pretty good fern. The only qualm is that it loses some of it's attractiveness in drought. Eh. I'll just have to give it a drink occasionally.


Now I'm off to do more things. A home owner's work is never done.

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A plantin' I did go

Well this week I've been spending a great deal of time working in the garden. In fact several last weekend I spent most of Saturday in there. I finished tilling it on Monday after work. I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from about 6 to 8:30 or later in there planting. I was watering by moon light on more than one occasion. Anyway, I thought I'd put up some pics of all my labors up after the rambling link.

This is a picture from the back of the garden. You can see the asparagus ferns on the left side. You also get a good view of the depth of the garden. It's 25' by 70'. It took me almost 3 gallons of gas to till it. On the bottom left you can just see a couple of the pine logs that were around the garden. I pulled most of them up, because they made t really tough to get the tiller through the garden.


This is a pic of the last 4 rows in the garden. These rows host 4 zucchini, 4 yellow squash, 4 cayenne peppers, 4 green bell peppers, and 4 Brandywine (Heirloom variety) tomatoes. I'm waiting to see how those go.


These are the next 4 rows forward. This has 4 Roma tomatoes, 4 Better Boy tomatoes, 2 Sweet 100 tomatoes, a tomato my dad sent me without telling me what it was, 4 Ichiban eggplants on the far side,4 cucumbers, 3 Banana peppers (sweet), two other sproutlings that Dad didn't know what they were, and some Blue Lake Bush Bean seeds. You can see the asparagus ferns on the far left and the bales of pine needles I'm going to put around the plants to help slow water evaporation. I'm not going to show the other 8 rows; yeah, there are 16 total. Those are going to be 4 rows of corn and 4 rows of okra. I'm staggering the planting with planting half a week or so apart. It spreads out the corn harvest a little. I have so much stuff because 1 I have space and 2 I got this stuff from a place in Union. The guy runs his own greenhouse and sells the plants for like $2 a pack of 4. I went a little overboard.


This is one of the grape vines my Dad sent to me. I think this is the muscidine grape, but I can't remember for sure. He's going to root a few more of the scuppernong grape to bring over. Maybe in a few years I'll be able to start harvesting.


The horticulture students were having a plant sale last week. I usually stop by and see what they have. It's a good place for Mother's day presents. Anyway, they had some spearmint and peppermint on sale for like $1.25 a container. I decided to get one of each. I have space, and mint is usually a plant it and forget it kind of thing. This is the spearmint.


And of course, this is the pepermint.


I'll probably post more stuff as the garden grows or dies. While I was planting Saturday a rabbit came running up and skidded to a halt about 12 feet from me. We stared at each other for a while and then I made a foot stomp to get him to run off. I hope he doesn't eat too much.

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Comes the Thud

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally finished reading After the Fall by Peter David; of the New Frontier Series. This book chronologically is the next book after the first New Frontier book I read, Stone and Anvil. But it takes place three years after that book ended. It also apparently takes place days before the events of the movie “Star Trek: Nemesis”. That is said in the “A Note to Our Readers” at the beginning of the paperback. It also states that 3 years have passed, life moves on, and the Universe changes. Big things have happened to the characters you have grown to love and that’s the way things are. There isn’t going to be a fancy travel back in time ending to set all things “right” with the universe. This is life and the passage of time, get used to it. They did.

First of all, I understand this statement at the beginning of the book. Many readers expect ST books with big sometimes unpleasant changes to come with a time travel fix everything ending. I like the warning, because it stops the wasting of brainpower. People can accept the changes without constantly wondering if they will evaporate later. Secondly, is the timetable placing. For many reasons that would be a signal that the book is almost fanfictiony in quality and the story is almost wishful thinking, but David seems to have an excellent knack for bridging other people’s story arcs and plots with well written and thought out adventures of his own. That’s one of the reason’s writing about a crew no one else writes about is such a great palette for him. Long time readers will see characters are gone that you didn’t expect, some come back that you did expect, people are having real problems with family, and a new and mysterious threat has emerged. A kidnapping leads to a murder, and possibly war. And then it’s continued until the next book. PD why do you tease us so?

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Free time

It's kind of a time sink having a house with a yard to care for, but I'm gonna try. I've got family coming up for the weekend that might be able to help with some of the yard stuff. Plus the Botanical Garden sale is this weekend. Of course I had to make more pictures. They would have been up earlier, but blogger.com seemed to be having a problem with the upload. The pics are after the rambling link.


This is picture of the clematis after it really started blooming . It was beautiful.


Then we had several days of high gusting wind that blew the whole thing down. Oh well. ime to start training it again.


The iris at the end of the driveway, and all over the yard actually, have started blooming pretty nicely. I've got a lot of blue.

But I also have some white in the back and yellow by the kitchen door. I have some dark purple onnes coming in as well. I just wish they weren't quite so scattered. I might have to consider moving them int he coming year.


In a bed far from the house I have a nice red hot poker coming in. It's making quite a show of it. I just wish the pines around it didn't look quite so bad.


It's odd, but I was taking these pictures a little after a friend of mine made a post about asparagus. Turns out I have a little patch of it in my garden. The problem is that it isn't in a particularly good place. I'm going to have to think long and hard about whether I want it to stay there. you can see I started tilling the garden. the soil is actually better than I expected. I put 160 lbs of dolomitic lime on it first. We have fairly acidic soil around here. I'm going to till the rest this week.


I didn't harvest anything this year cause I wasn't sure about how long it had been there, plus it all came in at a spread. So i could have had a sprig every 4 days or so. plus I wasn't sure how long it had been there.


The sprouts look kind of nice though. I'm going to investigate the feasibility of moving them. I'm pretty sure I can dig up the batch without disturbing the roots a lot. Plus it would give me a chance to build up the soil I would put move it to a little more.


I'll probably post more stuff later. I have plants and seeds for the garden already,and I have something special that i need to plant. I think Smitty will be interested in that as well.

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Frost on the everything

So this past weekend saw the temperature drop quite a bit for Easter. We joked at Church that Easter was colder than Christmas. Some of the ladies said they couldn't wear their Christmas finery because it was too warm, and they couldn't wear their Easter duds because it was too cold. What a topsy turvy world we live in. Because the temp dropped into the 20s we now have reports that the peach and apple crops in SC this year have all bit the dust, or frost. The strawberries depend on how well the covers worked. I was anxious to get home and see what the cold had destroyed in my yard. Luckily I had taken a few pictures before I left. So in the ramble you get to see some before and after pics. So follow the link.



This is a pic of the absolutely gorgeous azaleas between the driveway and the house. They were the most amazing red, and covered in blooms.


The frost killed all the exposed blossoms on the top of the plants. At least I got a pic of them.


My dad gave me a maple tree he grew at home. It is a sibling of a maple from my grandfather's yard. I think it is a Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum Atropurpureum) or one of the improved varieties. I planted it near the driveway over a month back and it started coming out a week ago.


It didn't fair so well. Ordinarily I wouldn't be too worried about a tree, but it's recent transplantation causes a little trepidation.


This is a picture of my bifurcated maple growing in the front yard. It was like this when I moved in. It is a filigree (lace leaf) red Japanese maple that I think was grafted to a regular maple root stock. It seems that at some point the root stock sprouted and grew much faster than the filigree, as one would expect. Frankly I like the contrast, and I'm going to use it to my advantage. I'm going let the green maple pump energy into the root system, but in the late winter I will trim it back so that energy is sent to the filigree. Hopefully I can keep them scaled together.


Well the filigree half took a big hit, but the green half is fine. I hadn't foreseen this, but the green half should go a long way to helping pump energy into the filigree to help it recover. I hope.


Luckily it looks like the painted maple I bought in the Fall at the SC Botanical Garden Plant Sale is none the worse for wear. I'm gonna go back this year.


The driveway flower bed started looking really good. Too bad that by the time I got my camera back the sparse stands of tulips were fading. The dianthus in the foreground are doing really well, even after the frost.


The flox however did not fair so well. Last Saturday you couldn't see anything but flowers. Oh well. It'll come back.


Surprising me was the clematis that showed no signs of any damage whatsoever. It's starting to hit a stride in blooming. I've got to try to keep it on the fence rails.


Also the Iris in the yard and the end of the driveway came through without any damage.


This is the red dogwood in the back yard. It's trimmed kind of funny, but the petals came out a pretty dark red on the edges. It got pinched by the frost too.


These two dogwoods are on the other end of the yard from the driveway. I wasn't at home at the right time to get the light right on this picture, so it doesn't do them justice. They were so white you couldn't look at them in direct sunlight. This picture is actually mostly in the shade of some pine trees.

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Work Related

Well I have some work related news. So back in May of last year I started working for the group that works on classroom technology. I worked with a guy doing installs and support. Earlier this year, they hired an evening shift person to provide night support, especially when we can’t get into a room during the day. Then over a month back the worker I displaced was returned to the group, for reasons I will not go into. Well the guy I started working with in the summer, declared last week that he is accepting employment at another location. He wasn’t pleased with the return of the prodigal co-worker, and he hasn’t been happy with the speed of some of the changes. I think the move will be good for him and I wish him luck. That means I will be senior most technician in the group. I count the fellow leaving and coming back as starting over, especially considering the changes we accomplished while he was gone. Anyway, this summer looks to be interesting.

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Literary Consolidation 21 - 30

Or the Reader’s Digest Condensed Edition 3^nd Ed. Well it’s time to reduce the page length again by creating a post of ten books. I’ll give the picture as a link to where it can be purchased, in exchange for using the picture, a little bit about each book, and a link to my original take on the book. Follow my rambling link to the list.

30.

This book starts a 3 book set that covers the crew in the escapades after the starship Excalibur blows up. This would be a good way to start a 3rd season of a TV show.

My Take


29.

This is the second Joseph Ellis book I've read. Both were fantastic.



My Take


28.

This is the second in the Time Odyssey series by Clarke and Baxter. It's almost as much of a page turner as the first.



My Take


27.

This is the eighth in the New Frontier Series by Peter David. It demonstrates that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. At least until the Russians help defeat the Germans.


My Take


26.

This is a great book about differences in the way man and women typically communicate. It's a great way to promote understanding.


My Take


25.

This is the Third in the Sir Apropos of Nothing Series by Peter David. It's great fun and fulfills your pun quota for years to come.


My Take


24.

This is a good continuation of the New Frontier series. I keep recommending it for all ST and SciFi fans.


My Take


23.

This is one of the controversial books by Christina Hoff Sommers. She talks about the origins of feminism in America and how a schism has formed in it.


My Take


22.

This is the second book in Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing series. It's just a hoot, like the first one.


My Take


21.

This is the sixth in the New Frontier Series by Peter David. It's a well developed Star Trek series.


My Take

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