It’s amazing what can happen in one month. These photos of our garden(s) are not only a report on the agriculture of our backyard, but an illustration of what is hopefully occurring simultaneously in our own lives. It seems like a very verdant time, in many ways.
But first, the photos.
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I’ve taken a break from writing this week to begin the task of putting in gardens in our yard. In a sense, we not only began to build utilitarian vegetable gardens but also the beginning of my very own kirimahu (ok, so I’m not an ANE King, and I haven’t conquered any foreign realms recently, but I have begun to set some things in order, so I think it is okay for me to begin to plan and plant my own “pleasure garden”). If this last sentence confused you (and you’ll also have to ignore the fact that apparently WordPress is removing the diacritics), then ignore it. If you are vaguely interested, then Doug Green’s forthcoming book “I Undertook Great Works”: The Ideology of Domestic Achievements in West Semitic Royal Inscriptions should be added to your reading list (and it has ALL the diacritics).
Now, on to an annotated photojournal of how we built several garden beds this week.
We started off with a semi-level area of the yard that gets good sunlight. I dug in a frame of cinder blocks that would be 3 ft by 10 ft. We chose cinder blocks so that we could reposition or enlarge the garden bed in the future with less difficulty.
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OK, due to popular demand (don’t ask how this got started, but it has something to do with Mark and Twitter), here is my recipe for Turkey Roll. The stuffing is rolled up in the meat! So, I guess the recipe keeps with the theme of the blog by allowing you the taste of an entire Thanksgiving meal with much less effort. This is not my photo, but it does represent the recipe well. Continue reading
Want to figure out how many calories you burned doing a specific type of exercise? Check out these Health widgets from the people at everydayhealth.com.
I like to swim, so here is my favorite widget. You just select the type of swimming you did, enter your weight (lbs or kgs), and how long you exercised. Hit “calculate” and your result pops up! This image is just a screen shot of the swimming widget. You can use the widget on the everydayhealth.com website, or you can download the code to your own website (javascript doesn’t work within a WordPress blog post, so I couldn’t actually post a live version here).
There are widgets for running, walking, biking, yoga and pilates!
Remember, these are just estimates (and you can read their disclaimer at the bottom of their own widget page).
This collection was actually harder to compile than my digital tools list. I’ve decided to limit this short list to items that help keep me and my office stuff productive.
RadTech ScreenSavrz
This little piece of miracle cloth will keep everything that builds up on your laptop keyboard from getting on your display. Moisten the microfiber cloth and you can clean the display and case. Soaks up spills before they cause a nightmare situation. At $16.95, you can’t afford to be without it. I have the leopard skin version, but you have your choice of several solid colors too. While you are at the RadTech site, check out their Portectorz and maintenance items.
Post-it Brand Flags
I prefer the translucent flags and I use hundreds of them. I mark books, articles, notes. I like to write brief reminders on the flags. When I’m organized I will read a book and notate in different colors as I read (be sure to keep a color key for each book you mark), then I can easily go back and find what I need to type up quotes, citations, and ideas.
WaterField bags
Made in San Francisco, these laptop bags and gear pouches are outstanding. I use the VertiGo (Mambo Combo) and several of the Cableguy and Gear Pouches. Exquisite design and meticulous workmanship. Phenomenal customer service (truly). You may have to save up to afford a purchase, but you won’t have to buy something again for a very, very long time. If you like to keep your cables, cords, and accessories organized and at hand, this is a great option.
[Warning: Do not laugh] Isokinetics Ball Chair
You will have to trust me on this one. A real conversation starter. I sit at my computer for hours and hours at a time and often ended up with sore neck, shoulder, and back muscles. I needed something to help me improve my posture. This chair promotes “active sitting” and I love it.
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At one time I taught an annual unit on Meteorology. We tracked hurricanes and snow storms. We learned to analyze satellite and real-time data. We identified cloud types and atmospheric stratum. My students could tell you how to categorize and rate tornadoes. The headmaster would come down to my classroom to ask the students if they thought we would need to call a snow day in 24 hours. But, at the end of the semester, there was really only one thing I wanted them to remember. After the jump see if you guessed correctly. Continue reading
I admit it. I love to follow the Iditarod. We’re into Day 5 and Martin Buser‘s team has just left the Takotna checkpoint (that’s 419 miles out of the 1131 total miles completed).
This great race across Alaska began with 67 mushers and around 1067 dogs. It takes a lot of training, planning, strategy, and some luck. Even if you are not interested in how many dog booties have to be made, how many pounds of dog food are required at each checkpoint, when a musher takes a rest and when they push on, or how a musher cares for his/her dogs on the trail, you can still learn something from this race.
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You might be living under a rock if you are unaware of all the financial woes of the last year. It is hard to find someone who is not directly affected (or has a friend/family member affected) by unemployment, housing issues, or a loss in the stock market. But even if you are aware, do you really understand what’s going on and how we got into (some of) this mess? The folks at NPR‘s This American Life have boiled down some of the issues and done a superb job of making very complicated systems understandable.
I recommend two episodes in particular. The first is an explanation of the housing/mortgage crisis (The Giant Pool of Money, May 2008) and the second is an explanation of the collapse of the banking system (Bad Bank, Feb 2009). Each episode is 60 minutes (well worth the time) but you can also download a transcript to read at your leisure.
If you like their ability to explain financial things, you should check out their blog, Planet Money, or their podcast.
One of the greatest challenges after a few semesters of Biblical Hebrew is to maintain your skills. Even more critical is to improve your skills! The single most efficient way to maintain and increase your BH is to read! But too many folks never find a way to make that happen. While there are many suggestions I could make (and will in the future!), today I want to encourage you to use one tool that should be in your BH toolbox. What? You have misplaced your toolbox? Get another one started!
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in our Ugaritic class:
There are 10 kinds of people–
Those who understand binary
and those who don’t