Coding v. Gardening

Coding wins.  Coding always wins.  

My big summer project has been writing curriculum for a web development course (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) for a high school.  I really enjoy writing curriculum, but have never done so for anything lower than college level. Additionally, I had some constraints--no textbook and any required software has to be free.  Not have a textbook is a pretty big challenge.  There is a lot of information that needs to be conveyed before one can start developing web pages.

I spent the first month gathering materials and resources.  I chose the topics that need to be covered over the course of the semester and grouped simialar/compatible topics into units. The Web is full of tutorials on these topics, and many of them are excellent, but they all seem to have a major flaw.  The tutorials are topical, all topics are covered, but there is no over-arching methodology for how to put all of the pieces together.  A novice could whiz through the W3Schools' outstanding tutorials on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but once they leave the tutorial environment and want to start creating a website, they are lost.  I decided that the best approach would be to use these tutorials as a textbook--assigning specific topics for each unit, and then integrate them into my curriculum that ties everything together.  I didn't love that part of the development process, so I was able to squeeze the work in while still keeping up with my other tasks and responsibilities.

This month I've spent creating content, writing examples for each unit, and creating and writing the assignments for each unit.  I've completed the HTML and CSS portions of the class and am currently working on the JavaScript.  I really liked the HTML and CSS curriculum development--writing example code and assignments, especially, so this is the point at which it started to consume me.  I took a break between CSS and JavaScript to write the website for the class.  I needed a (free) site from which the class and all it's materials could be accessed by the students, so I developed the website and uploaded the content.  That portion is technically done, except that I keep waking up in the middle of the night with ideas that necessitate me getting up, logging in, and adding to the site.


That, combined with the JavaScript stuff I'm working on, is now impeding my sleep and taking over my life. Cooking, gardening, blogging, sleeping--none of that compares to the glory of writing code, so I struggle to keep up.  I find myself realizing that it's 5:30 (I know that, because the dogs start nagging me at 5:15 or so for their 5:45-6:00 dinner), I have no dinner plan, and the people in the house need food (and given that I make everything from scratch, the earliest they can hope for dinner is 7-ish, if I start immediately).  I would love a life where I could spend 12 hours a day coding and didn't have to be bothered with crap like cooking (or eating/sleeping), but my family doesn't appreciate that approach to life.


I'm forcing myself to do other things today.  I got up this morning at 4 and worked until 9:30.  I'm getting my blog done, cleaning the herbivore room, then heading out to catch up on my neglected garden.  At some point while I'm gardening, I will have to come up with an idea for dinner tonight (I've got nothing so far), and then make sure I stop gardening and come in in time to make dinner. I have issues with gardening, too.  Once I get started, I prefer to work until I lose light. I generally have to be reminded to stop to eat or feed the family.  Rest assured, though, my brain will be JavaScripting away the whole time.  When I get into "development mode", even when I'm not coding, that's all I can think about, and I'm slightly crabby until I can get back to it.

 I am looking for course testers/proofreaders.  I haven't gotten much sleep over the past few weeks (development mode--my brain would rather create than rest, I guess), and I'm far too close to my work to catch errors and oversights.  If you've ever wondered about how the World Wide Web works and would like to try your hand and creating web pages, I have a free course for you. :)  You can take it in its completion, just dabble with pieces, or even just read through the materials, and I would welcome any feedback for potential improvements and especially catching errors.  If you're interested, let me know, and I will send you the link to the course site.

I'm a little paranoid, because launching a website is a big deal.  When I do this professionally, I have a team--other people to test the site, proof the content, and check accessibility, a test server where people from different locations can access the site using different browsers (web pages render/function differently based on the browser and version), access to the dedicated web server on which the site will reside, and some fancy tools that give me metrics about the site/peformance.  I have none of this for this site.  It looks good on the three browsers I tested it on, on the machines that are in our home, but that's not really an adequate basis for going live.  I know that it's not a "business/professional" site, and it's hosted via a free (non-dedicated) host, so I feel pretty powerless and "ass out" with this scenario.

The garden needs some serious weeding, which I will work on today, but that won't even scratch the surface of what has grown in the last week with all the rain and hot temps.  I have a garden assistant (a lovely former student) who is going to work four hours a day, every day this week, and between the two of us, I hope to have it whipped back into shape by the weekend.

I attended Rotary Gardens' Garden Walk a couple of weeks ago, and this was one of the better years.  I really enjoy seeing "real" gardens on the walk.  I have no interest in seeing what some money-hoarding asshole can purchase and pay people to maintain.  I am not remotely inspired by a pool (in WI, really?  What a waste of garden space/habitat!) surrounded by $30,000 of stone work.  This year's walk didn't have the big vanity "gardens" that are on the walk some years, so it was really enjoyable and inspirational.  I will say hands down that the absolute best houses on the walk were the RBG hort. staff members'.  Four of M's staff volunteered this year (or were roped in/peer pressured into it).  These people are gardeners, and it showed in their beautiful, unique, and creative gardens.  I was so inspired that if not for my current coding obsession,  I would be gardening full time.

Check out the green visitor

Once I get the curriculum totally done and loaded, I have to start prepping for my four fall classes.  That's right. I have not even started my own prep yet.  Normally I do that much earlier in the summer. THEN I can transfer all of my energy to the garden.

Below is a "dump" of lily (asiatic and daylilies) shots.

April Update

Fiona, cute as always

Fergus, all better--no head tilt

April flew by.  I think all I did was work.  I have a few pictures from the spring egg hunt and of the animals, but that's about it.  No garden pictures at all--I completely missed photographing the spring bulbs for the first year ever.  If I don't blog things, I don't remember them, so the whole month is kind of a blur.

We did experience some major April showers.  In our basement.  Again.  First our hot water heater died. The first indication we had that anything was wrong was finding 40 gallons of water on our basement floor, because the bottom had a rust spot that gave out. I never thought to crawl under and check, but now I know to keep an eye on that kind of thing.  We got that replaced and got some clean up done, but hadn't returned everything back to normal when the valve on our washer gave out, and we came home to find that had flooded the basement.  UGH!  The plus side is that like our original floods in the winter of 2014, at least it was all clean water, so the stuff that wasn't ruined by getting wet ended up clean.  I'd like to think that everything that could flood in the basement has happened, and we should be set now for many years, but...  I'm still pretty paranoid about water in the house.

I never envisioned when we started the first egg hunt for Dej 23 years ago that I would still be doing them!  L isn't ready to let them go, so we continue to stuff the same collection of plastic eggs with cash and vegan chocolates and jelly beans.  L almost always "wins" with more eggs found, as she's much more aggressive than her sister.  We still have to help and give Dej hints.  Each girl & Russ also get their own basket (the girls have had the same baskets their whole lives), filled with money, candy, and sometimes other goodies (you can see Russ got some kind of manly liquor in his basket).

The animals are always quite certain that any family/holiday gatherings are thrown so that there are extra humans to rub/massage/pet them, so they insert themselves into every activity that detracts from their rightful attention.

We always have an assortment of boxes around the house. The cats love them.

March update

The garden is so cheerful right now!  It's looking very "English Cottage Garden", which is my favorite kind.  I like a garden that looks like it just kind of popped up on it's own.  It's a less-cultivated and more wild look than many people appreciate, but it makes me very happy (and the critters really like it, too).  I don't have any garden pics from March (or April), so this is recent.

In March we adopted two cockatiels (Max and Elvis).  They settled in quite well and started exploring their territory more quickly and fearlessly than most birds who have lived in cages. They laid claim to a particular Amazon Prime box that was part of the bunny/guinea pig box village in their room.  The rabbits and Luna had no problem sharing, as they have plenty of other boxes.  The boys have been playing house in that box for months--waiting for the eggs that will never happen, poor things.  They are adorable together and are always together--feeding and grooming each other and performing elaborate song and dance routines.

Fergus struggled with pastuerella--a horrible, often fatal bacterial infection.  He's six, which is rather old for a dwarf rabbit, so it was particularly frightening.  He was moving in a rather uncoordinated way on a Sunday night, and by Monday morning, he tried to jump off his favorite spot (about 18 inches off the ground) and fell.  His balance was obviously impaired and he was struggling. I had one class to teach in the morning, so I scheduled a vet appointment for immediately following. In a few short hours, he had progressed rapidly and his head was tilted extremely far to the right, and his eyes were jumping and rolling.  I was shocked and sick to see how badly he had gotten in that period of time. We got the diagnosis and antibiotics and eye drops for him, but the prognosis wasn't very encouraging.  He was incredibly nauseated (motion sick) due to the pastuerella invading his inner ear.  He was miserable and unable to eat, and without keeping his gut full and healthy, he wouldn't live long enough for the antibiotics to work.

I couldn't get him to eat anything--he rejected his favorite treats.  I started syringe feeding, and that wasn't going well, because he would refuse to swallow and just let it run out.  I spent hours and hours in there begging, pleading, and trying everything to get him to keep food in. The poor baby was just too miserable to swallow anything.  This is where I stopped blogging, as I was trying to give him round the clock care and feeding, which threw me even further behind in both sleep and work--both of which I was already struggling with.  I am forever grateful for my amazing "animal friends" and their constant support and wealth of knowledge!  My friend, Julie, is the rabbit expert in my life, and she recommended using meclizine (Bonine/some types of Dramamine) to help with the horrible nausea. That took the edge off enough that I was able to get food into him and keep him going long enough for the antibiotics to work their magic.  He quickly started to improve.  

Often the head tilt from pastuerella is permanent, and while I was hoping it would clear up, I wasn't optimistic about the odds.  Within a week, though, that was getting better.  In the photo above, you can see he is still tilted.  Within a couple of weeks, it was totally gone.  He still has the pastuerella in his left eye, but it's managed with drops and cleaning, and I watch him carefully to make sure it's not getting out of control again.

We celebrated the traditional B-D family St. Patrick's Day, with Mark making an "Irish" meal (hash, baked potatoes, corn, Irish soda bread, green beer) and M & the kids carving soap.  The soap boat floating competition gets fiercer each year, with L. wining again this year.  All but three of the boats sank immediately, with the remaining three lingering for almost three long weeks.

I don't have a working 'c' on my laptop keyboard right now. It started working erratically a few days ago, so I took it apart and tried to fix it yesterday.  It didn't go well and isn't working and the key won't stay on at all now. I ordered a new key (but I don't think that's the problem--I think it's a problem with the entire keyboard, but I'm going to try the $7 repair first). In the meantime, to type that letter, I have one copied to the clipboard, and use ctrl-V to paste the copied 'c' every time I need to type one.  It's a pain in the ass.  There were 107 'c's in this post!

Furniture and Flowers

So the big question is always where to start...  Do I go back and catch up the significant events/posts I should have done, or just start fresh from today?  Sometimes (often) making decisions is so disabling to me that I am absolutely unable to act at all. I will start with what kept me awake most of last night and then try to back fill the highlights in other posts.

We got "new" furniture for our family room last night.  The furniture we had down there--loveseat, couch, and huge ottoman--should have been replaced about ten years ago, but I had some trouble making decisions and did nothing. The configuration of the furniture was absolutely perfect for our family/animals and it was (once upon a time) extraordinarily comfortable.  I bought the furniture with the house 19 years ago!  I really liked it, it was comfy, fairly new, a good price, and I didn't need to move it.  When I got new living room furniture, we moved it down to the basement to our family room.

That furniture set was heavily used by countless humans and animals.  Through the years it has become stained, holey, and less than comfortable (springs stick out, weird sink holes that kill the lower back, etc.), and we often talked about replacing it.  It was hard to find something just the right size and configuration.  It had to comfortably accommodate the humans and all of the animals, and fit nicely into the space, and that was not easy to find.

I started shopping and researching, and about five years ago found the perfect replacement.  We custom ordered it and had it delivered to our home.  It was rather pricey, but I figured it was a long-term investment, and was hoping to get 20 years out of it as we did with the other set.  That didn't go so well.  Mark and I will go to our graves forever disagreeing about "The Incident."  He swore that it wouldn't fit in the door--they tried for a time but couldn't get it.  I was (am) certain that it would go if they could get the angles right.  Eventually I got really angry at him, called our daughter, and told them to come pick up the new furniture set for their new house.  They are still enjoying the lovely set.  I declared at that time that I would never replace the furniture, and we would use our current set until it fell apart, at which time we would sit on the floor.

I meant it.  I stuck with it.  Until...L started having a social life.  She was bringing friends home for movies/sleepovers and not happy about the formerly white, holey couch with springs that attack and duct tape over the parts the dogs chewed up.  While I do enjoy sitting stubbornly on a mountain of moral superiority and holding my ground, I also empathize with a teen who has friends who don't understand that shitty couches=moral high ground in an argument, so I had recently been ruminating about replacing them.

Furniture shopping (shopping of any kind really) is quite difficult.  I have to research the companies, materials, political affiliations, etc. The only vote or power we have in this country any more is how/where we spend our money, and I take that very seriously.  I'm boycotting at least half of the major retailers and manufacturers, so shopping is quite difficult for me. That combined with the fact that our big dogs are really hard on furniture, make me lean strongly toward buying used whenever possible.  The bedbug epidemic has made that problematic for me, though.  So again, I've been stuck in the indecision and inactivity on this.

I noticed last week that our neighbors had furniture in the back of their truck in the driveway. It looked like a similar size/configuration to what we currently have, but it was a different color/material.  As it turned out, they were selling it.  We bought it and moved it in last night.

Oriental Poppy

I have to point out that Mark and I moved it into the house, and it was rather challenging.  We really had to work at it and get just the right angle.  While I am not at all spacially intelligent (it's my biggest mental weakness, as a matter of fact), somehow I am good at knowing just how to cram/stack/pile to get things to fit in ways most people would deem impossible.  He was ready to give up, but I knew it would go in if we did it a certain way.  I was right.  I point that out only as evidence that I was right about the last set of furniture, and he was wrong.

Anyway, it's in the family room, and it is comfortable--no sink holes that make me sit at a weird, unhealthy angle, it's clean (and vegan leather, so it's easy to keep clean), and looks 100% better.  It's different, however, and we can't all fit the same way that we're used to.  I can't reach things as easily as I could before, because the sides are a little higher.  It was very traumatic; so much so that I couldn't sleep last night and determined that I would go back to the original old couches.  My family soundly shot that down today. They would rather burn the house down that sit on the gross couches ever again.  They love the new ones, so we are keeping them.  I will continue to move things around and try to tweak and adjust until it works for me.

Same oriental poppy, 2 days later

I was really, really grateful for the easy to clean material last night.  M & I were hanging out down there after a very long day.  It was close to 11, and we were finally getting time to relax and chat.  I was tired, headachey, and thus, not very bright.  I absent mindedly shook my post-workout smoothie, only to discover that I had already removed the lid.  My delicious deep purple protein smoothie went all over the couch, me, the laptop, etc.  It was horrible.  So horrible.  The awesome part was the couch cleanup, though. It wiped right off, we sprayed with vinegar/ water to clean up and prevent stickiness, and that was it.  That would have been a complete disaster on our old (white-ish) couch.

*The photos are from our garden this year.  This is the first year that I haven't posted our garden photos from the first spring bulbs on through the summer.  They're much more interesting that couch pictures.

An old, unpublished, unfinished post...

I was doing so well for a while.  My Dropbox was clear and caught up.  (This is where the students submit their assignments online for me to grade.  I love to see the Dropbox for all of my classes showing 0 items to grade, but that's pretty rare.)  For a brief, shining moment, I was caught up.  Then Friday happened. My C++ programming students submitted the two programs that were due, my Java students submitted their programming assignments, and my MIS class submitted their Excel workbooks.  I am so far in the hole, I feel like crying.  I am grading every spare minute I get.  Additionally the programming students are continuing on with their next assignments, so it takes a great deal of time to answer their questions/emails/and get them "unstuck".  I love my job, and I enjoy these tasks for the most part, but it can get extremely overwhelming. It's especially tough to take when then piece of shit uneducated governor, who makes way, way more than I make and works 1/10 as much/as hard, makes statements about UW professors needing to do more.  I guarantee the cheating dropout couldn't survive my schedule or workload for a week--not even for two days, I'm betting.  I'd love to see his face after trying (and failing) to keep up, he saw the salary

When it rains, it pours, so of course we have sick animals now, too.  Petey (cat) has an anal gland infection.  He had this a few years ago.  We caught it early, so he just needs a round of antibiotics, but wrestling pills into a cat twice a day isn't the most enjoyable task.  More distressing, our Fergus (rabbit) is quite ill with pasteurella.  He may or may not live through it.  It will be a dicey few days.  He's on several different kinds of medication for it.  The biggest risk right now, though, is that he stopped eating (from nausea), and that can quickly become a death sentence in rabbits.  I'm hand feeding him with a syringe round the clock.  He's not very cooperative about eating, so I'm not getting a great amount into him.  I only hope it's enough to keep him alive long enough for the drugs to kick in.  It's hard to eat or sleep or focus on anything, knowing he is so uncomfortable, and his life is hanging by a thread.  I'm tired and quite overwhelmed by life right now, so I'm having a hard time handling this.  I'm constantly on the verge of crying and just want to curl up in a ball and pretend this is not happening.

The only reason I'm able to squeeze in a blog right now is that I'm stuck in my classroom, giving a midterm, and the PC will only boot Windows in Safe Mode.  I don't have the rights/access to fix it, and our IT dept. is apparently gone for the day (WTF?!  We have evening classes that rely on technology).  I can't load Visual Studio or Eclipse in Safe Mode, so I am unable to do my grading.  It's extremely frustrating, because I counted on this chunk of time to get some work done.  I was hoping to grade during my two office hours today, but I had students who needed programming help, so that window was closed as well.  I woke up with a migraine Monday which continues on and feel like yesterday and today have been a nightmare of disasters. Next week has to be better.  Enough whinging.

_______________

I opened my poor, neglected blog today, hoping to force myself to start posting again and found this unfinished post that I had started back in March.

It was a brutal semester.  I got out of the habit and so far behind that it's hard to get back into it.  I'm trying.

The return of "Lumpy Fart" chili

Mark cooked this weekend, which cut my kitchen time a bit (no dessert) but also provided a meal I didn't have to make.  He only makes chili, and he had to make a huge pot of it for a potluck at the gardens.  I won't be going, because potlucks are a) disgusting; b) not usually vegan friendly; c) disgusting.  One less meal to cook is always a good thing from my perspective.  I made the following:

• chickpeas-pressure cooked, packaged, frozen
• potato chips
• chana masala (sort of--maybe closer to aloo chole): I've made this dish before, and it's delicious, but I had some potatoes I wanted to use up this week, so I made a double batch of it, using 3.5 c. chickpeas and 3.5 c. diced tomatoes. It turned out really well, and Luce loves potatoes so much that she's giddy whenever I add them to a dish. :)  I made way too much, so I sent some with Dej.
• shepherd's pie: Mark's favorite, but I fucked it up this time and am so unhappy with myself.  I used unsweetened (good) vanilla (very bad) coconut milk instead of the original. The mashed potatoes had a decidedly vanilla twist to them which I did not at all enjoy. My family didn't complain, so I'm not sure if they were being really polite or truly didn't notice.
• cashew gravy (for the shepherd's pie)

Mark's been gone almost every weekend again and many weeknights.  I'm feeling like a garden widow already this year, and it's not going to get better until somewhere around July or August. I think he's getting very tired/burned out already, because he was unusually crabby/rude last night. I'm still annoyed with him.

L has been a little challenging and hormonal this week, too. I need this week to start getting better really soon!

Last Weds., L & Dej went out to do some shopping and returned with a 30 gallon aquarium, filter, light, rocks, etc.  L set the tank up in her room on Weds. and conditioned the water.  M took L & her friend, Katie, out Sunday afternoon to get the fish--two goldfish.  They're quite cute. She has always wanted fish and is responsible enough to care for them herself.  She used her own xmas/birthday money to fund the endeavor.  I hope it goes well for her. I still retain many childhood scars from some of the nasty things our childhood goldfish did (you never get over going to bed with two fish in the tank and waking up with one bigger one), so I'm fairly trepidatious about this.  I don't like that when they get sick or diseased, the options are so limited for them.  It will be an adventure, I'm sure. 

Last Saturday morning I noticed a little sparrow fluffed up on the ground and became concerned when he didn't move with all the other sparrows when the dogs went running out by him.  Then Damon circled back to sniff him, and the little guy scrambled under a container and tried to hide. I walked over and picked him right up. He was very cold, so I held him to my chest for quite a while. I know he was in bad shape, because he was totally relaxed on my chest (not a good sign with a wild animal!) while I warmed him up.  I gave him some Pedialyte (more animals die in the winter due to dehydration than starvation) then put him in a cage with food, water, warm towels, etc.  He hung out for quite a while, looking pretty docile.  After a few hours, he started to move around, stand up straight and tall, and become frightened and try to hide when I approached the cage. There was nothing physically wrong with him, other than being weak and cold, and at this point he was doing great. I carried the cage back outside (it was fairly warm and sunny by this time), and he immediately got excited and started flying around the cage. I opened the door, and he flew perfectly over to the conifers in our back yard where he and his friends live (or at least hang out most of the time).  He stayed in that spot for 15-20 minutes, and then all of his friends came back, and I lost track of him. I've been carefully monitoring that feeding station to see if he weakens again in this cold, but no problems so far.

The heat lamps and warming pads in our garage are getting heavy use.  We had to replace one of the heat lamps this weekend.  We also picked up another heated bird bath. We have one in the front, but that's so heavily trafficked, we wanted to add one to the back yard.

Poor Charlie has been looking for a snuggle buddy since Basil died. He and Basil were always touching when they slept and often hugged each other as they slept. He is a very affectionate guy, and keeps trying to creep up on the other cats and stealth snuggle them. He generally gets shut down but will still try to creep closer and closer, or slip out a paw, slowly, moving a hair's width at a time until he makes contact with his sleeping snuggle candidate. Sometimes the hand holding is tolerated, sometimes not. He just needs to work on building relationships more slowly.  Tica does not like Charlies snuggling advances. The girls snuggle humans or sleep alone. They boys tend to want to be in physical contact with someone (human, cat, or both) while they sleep. Tica's face says it all. He got close enough to make contact, and she tolerated it but only because I was right there. If I'm not close, she moves as soon as he gets within about 6 inches of her. I don't think he's ever been mean to her, but he's three times her size and it frightens her.
I was back to working alone in the kitchen this weekend.  I made 2 batches of dog food, so I'll be good for a few weeks again.  Damon went to the vet this week (his chronic ear condition took a nasty turn), and he's gained a little more weight, so I'll have to cut his food intake back a bit. I don't want to stress his arthritic back end with any extra weight! I made the following but didn't get to pressure cooking the chickpeas. I'll have to do that at some point this week.

• Spanish rice (to include in the next dish)
• Layered nachos/Mexican casserole (I have no idea what to call this; I just throw stuff together--Spanish rice, black beans, refried beans, tomatoes, spices/seasonings, salsa, topped with Daiya)
• Three-bean tomato curry soup
• Eggplant & chickpea curry (with quinoa)
• (Frozen) chocolate bananas - bananas dipped in cashew butter, dark chocolate, and topped with chopped walnuts & pecans; a delicious, protein-packed, healthy dessert

Damon had his swim appointment Friday, and we brought Sophie along (Dej's dog) to see if she would enjoy it.  She did not love it.  Damon loved it enough for both of them, though. He spend his entire hour swimming--not getting out of the pool at all.  He loved these stuffed chicken toys that she has there (Dunkin Dawgs), and spent most of his swim time carrying around 2-3 water toys at a time.  He didn't want to give up the chickens at all, but would let me take one (as long as he could keep the other in his mouth) to throw for him.  He repeatedly fetched and grabbed the toy without losing the two others in his mouth. It was so cute and quite impressive.  

When it was time to go, we had a lot of difficulty getting him out.  Every muscle in his 111 pound body fought to stay in the pool.  It took three of us to physically drag him from the pool, leaving me extremely wet.  He was so, so sad to go.  He really wanted to take "his" chicken with him and worked pretty hard to try to sneak it out.  Unfortunately for him, I noticed the bright-colored chicken hanging out of his mouth, though he did his best to keep his face pressed toward the door and away from me.  Our next trip to  Mounds will involve hunting for a chicken toy like that.  Damon really likes his toys. He plays with them; he shows them off to guests; he destroys them pretty quickly, though. I'm hoping he loves the chicken enough that he won't shred it so quickly.