Why it's fun living in Pullman

It's kind of fun living in Pullman because a few times a year I see this thing go by out my kitchen window. It's harvesting the wheat on the hillside behind our place.


Also, a few times a year that thing drives down the road in town and causes a really big traffic jam. That's not so fun.

The End.

Horticulture

I kind of slowed down on the posting because I started school last week. I'm taking my first horticulture class. I really like my teacher, Dr. Lohr. (She's also the counselor who helps me plan out my class schedule.) It's fun to learn about the plants, but it's also a lot of new stuff to learn in a short time. We have a class website that I use a lot to work on learning the plants with their names and what they look like. If you're into plants you can check it out too!

http://classes.hortla.wsu.edu/hort231

This week we are learning the first plant list: Annuals.


The lab last week was kind of fun too. We all had to introduce ourselves in front of the class using the microphone. I think it's funny that some of my teachers use a microphone in class. The biology teacher has one of those little ones stuck on the collar of his shirt. There are about 300-400 kids in that class though, so it probably would be hard to hear without the mic.


Anyway, one of the goals my teacher has for this horticulture class is to teach us how to speak in public. It's kind of nice that I've already had practice with that through church things. Most of the kids in class had never spoken into a mic before.


The other thing we did in lab was study a few plant samples (in our group of 3 or 4 people) and discuss the differences and similarities. I thought it was fun, but I also kind of had to laugh. I could imagine a lot of people saying, "Well, they all have green leaves, and they're different cause they're not the same plant. Big Woop." It takes a special kind of patience to spend 30 minutes inspecting two plant branches and find something in the tiny details like, "This plant has slightly longer petioles than the other plant."


The other thing about this class that is cool is that if I do really well on the first two major exams I can skip the final. We have three major exams in class and she will drop the lowest one. That would be a big load off my shoulders to not worry about the final in this class...then I could spend all my time on studying chemistry--which I'm sure I'll need a lot of time for that.

Death and Destruction

This is the last picture of Fred and George when they were both alive...



I tried putting them in a paper cup so you could see them better. They are joyfully swimming around in circles, which happens to be their favorite past-time.


Yesterday I changed the water in the bowl so Fred and George would be more comfortable, (and it looks a lot nicer too). When I put them back in, they did their usual annoying thing of swimming against the thermometer so it moved and turned and I couldn't see the water temperature. I decided to just take it out of the bowl because I was tired of trying to move the bowl around to see the temperature. At the time, they were both swimming against the thermometer from opposite sides, and when I pulled the thermometer straight up out of the water they crashed into each other. It was kind of funny. They just swam at each other nose to nose for a minute and then one veered off to the side and got out of the way. I noticed from time to time that they would run into each other again and do that same thing....like they were blind or something.

Well, this morning when we got up we found a horrifying, well, really just gross disgusting site. They apparently had a battle to the death while we were sleeping, because one was dead. The live one was eating the dead one straight in half. Gross! (And I just cleaned their water! Now it's going to be all dirty again.) When I got home from school today, the live triops was A LOT bigger, and the dead one was completely severed in half....the head is floating around partly eaten and the tail is resting at the bottom. Gross! I can hardly stand to look at it because it's so sick. Hahahhahaha! I was thinking of trying to scoop the dead body out of the tank right away so it wouldn't foul the water, but if the other guy wants to eat it up, well, I don't want to intrude.

This is George, returning to the scene of the crime...



...taking a few more bites of Fred....



Yes George, it's a sad cold lonely world now. You've eaten your best friend and now you have to deal with the consequences.




Just thought you might like to know how the triops were doing.

Triops Update

It's kind of hard to get very good pictures of these guys because they're in a fish bowl that distorts the view, and they swim around so incredibly fast! They like to do back flips forever, and just swim around frantically most of the time. Sometimes it seems like they're looking for food and can't find the pellets I just dropped in.




They also have a strange fascination with the thermometer. They keep swimming up against it and pushing it around in the tank so I have a hard time seeing what the temperature is. I have to keep the temp between 70-80 degrees. I do it by turning on or off a little light that shines on the bowl.
I decided to name them Fred and George, after the Weasley twins because I can't never tell them apart either.

Cool Bug

Everybody else is showing off the cool bugs they find so I will too.


I almost grabbed this guy when I was pulling weeds on the edge of the garden. He flinched as my hand came towards him and I realized he wasn't part of the vine. I watched him crawl up into the garden and stand in different poses in the pumpkin vines. I was surprised at how fast he can move! Sometimes he'd just go so slow, and then suddenly have a burst of energy and whip around into a different place and position.


I'm pretty sure he's a praying mantis. I didn't think so at first because he's kind of small, and when he just stood still with all his legs stretched out, he looked more like the little stick-bugs I used to have when I was a kid.

Little Baby Triops

For my birthday, Summer and Glen got me Triops. I thought it was a joke at first because I had never heard of anything like this. They said that you stick it in water and the eggs hatch and they grow into little animals that swim around and are fun to watch in the water. I was thinking they got me a new bath toy, like the sponge toys you stick in water and they "grow."

Anyway, I figured out what they really are soon after and have been waiting for the perfect time to start taking care of them. I wanted to be sure I wasn't going to leave on vacation for a week and cause them to die while I was gone. I got this little scene set up for them and we put them in the water Friday night at midnight. The light is shining on it to keep the water at the right temperature. It also says to put some foil to make a shady place for them. I decided to just cover the top with foil for the shady place, and to make sure nothing foreign falls inside. (These are sensitive little guys.)

This morning I just noticed one of them has hatched! It's too tiny to take a picture of. It would just look like a speck in the water, but if I watch closely I can see the little tiny thing moving really fast in the water! It doesn't move around a lot, it just moves really fast in a tiny space. Fun! I can't wait til more hatch and they start growing more. I'll put up pictures when they get big enough to see.

Little Sewing Project

I was fed up with this shirt. I really love the shirt actually, but the sleeves were annoying because there was a small part that was too tight. I thought for awhile, "Maybe if I loose 10 pounds I can wear this shirt comfortably." Ha.
So I finally got up the guts to try making some adjustments to my shirt.

The shorter sleeve is the one that I fixed. The longer sleeve is the problem. I don't know if you can tell, but around the edge where they sewed that end piece it gets really tight. I tried doing a few other things that didn't work, so I just cut it off as a last ditch effort. I'm glad it turned out well and I like it! I have a red shirt that is the same as this one, so I'll fix the sleeves on that one too.


This is the old sleeve:




And this is the new sleeve:



This is the red shirt--I just finished fixing it. The material is really stretchy, so I kind of pulled and stretched it as I sewed the hem so it would be loose. I really like how it turned out!

I love a gloomy day once in awhile

The last two or three days have been building up to this. It was hot and muggy and the air felt heavy and I kept telling the sky, "Just come on and rain already." Finally the storm came and it rained hard all night, and then when I woke up it was a glorious gloomy Bremerton kind of day. That's when I felt inspired to work outside and fix up those tomatoes. I also like this weather because I can go outside without worrying about crazy bees dive-bombing me and buzzing around my head. They love to make their nests just under the edge of our roof, so they are always buzzing around on the deck during the day.
I hope you can enjoy a gloomy day sometime soon too!

Tradegy Struck, but I overcame

Haha, I know, it sounds dramatic. I couldn't bring myself to take a picture or post this right after it happened, but I'm over it now. I made the last garden post Sunday morning. When we got home from church it looked like there had been an explosion on the back deck. The tomato frame was broken and bent, and pieces of it had been flung in all directions. Amazingly enough, all of the tomatoes except one were perfectly ok. The frame broke in a way that all the bags were still hanging on it. One end of the pipe was on the ground and the other was resting up on the rail, so the bag with the biggest tomatoes was hanging about two feet from the ground, and each one down was hanging a little closer. The second to last bag was sitting upright on the ground and the last one was on it's side smashing one of the plants. I kind of wanted to cry, but I also wanted to laugh because that smashed plant looked so funny--like a cartoon. It's hard to tell from the picture but it was just flat like a piece of paper.

I'm happy to say that after about 6 days that plant has recovered and they are all doing well. It really is a miracle.

This is the idea that I came up with yesterday. Now it seems the most obvious thing to do. Greg built this shelf for me to put my flower boxes on last year. (I had a bunch of strawberries growing there.) The boxes fit fine on top of the rail so I just moved them over and used the shelf for the tomatoes.


Greg was worried about how we would get to the tomatoes that grow on the other side, but I can reach through the rail pretty easily. If I have to, I can jump over the rail and stand on the other side. (I'd be standing on top of a storage unit.)


I hope I don't have any more problems now with these tomatoes. Unless it starts snowing or something, I think they should be fine now.

First Tomato of the season

Finally the first tomato is ready to eat! There's another right behind it. Unfortunately two tomatoes is not enough to make our salsa yet.

Garden Update

This is our homemade topsy turvy. I hadn't hung all the plants yet when I took the picture. These bags are pretty heavy and the frame likes to sway back and forth, so we tied it down to keep it still. We especially wanted to do that because of all the crazy wind we get around here. The house seems to be blocking it a little, so that's good.


I planted a bunch of flowers here. I know, it's kind of late to be planting new flowers, but they popped up just two days after I planted them! I'm hoping they will keep growing fast like that and give me some pretty blooms before winter comes.


This is downstairs now. You can see that the squash vines have found their way out of the garden. That's good though. I knew there wouldn't be enough room in the garden, so I planted them all in a way they that they could grow and spill over the edge....then they can grow as much as they want through the gravel and other stuff.


I don't know what everything is here. Well, I have a list of what I planted, but I lost track of where it all got planted. I'm waiting for everything to show it's fruit so I can figure it out. ("By their fruits ye shall know them") I'm also working by process of elimination. I know what some of it is now.


This of course is the yellow crooked neck squash:


This is a cucumber coming along--they grow fast!


This is zucchini:


And then I don't know what this is. I keep waiting and checking to see if the fruit has developed anymore so I can figure out what it is.


This is all supposed to be cantaloupe or honey dew melon...but it appears I made a mistake and put some kind of squash plant in with the melons. (They all look so similar when the plants are young!)



Something weird has happened though. I planted a bunch of garlic and it never grew. It was weird because the garlic had actually started sprouting before I planted it, so I thought I'd see the little green tops coming out of the soil in a few days. It's been a few months, so I decided to dig it up and see what's going on. What I found was a few roots here and there, and no garlic! The part I planted is gone! I dug up over half of the area where I planted garlic and there's nothing there! I don't know what happened, but if you've ever heard of this or know what happened feel free to tell me. Maybe those crazy ants ate it, I don't know.

It's too hard!

We got a puzzle awhile ago and worked on it for hours and hours! After about two hours of looking and trying and not finding another piece we both kind of gave up on it. I kept asking if I could put it away and Greg would say, "No, we're going to do it! We can finish it."


Finally tonight I suggested we work on the puzzle again after we finish our chores and Greg said, "That puzzle is stupid! It's too hard!" Hahahhaha! He finally had enough I guess, so we're going to put it away and try getting one that's a little easier. I'm glad because it's looked just like this for about two months now! Hahhaha!