Adventures in the Garden

I have spent all day Monday and half of Tuesday working in the vegetable garden at the back of my lot and in the front yard flower beds. I have to say that I can deal with the noxious weeds afflicting me, but I didn't see anything in Geneses about hellish, unseasonably hot weather, damnable winds, and abominations of desolation, bugs, that is, afflicting and tormenting the poor, amateur gardener, me.
Only half the thirty foot row of carrots sprouted, and I reseeded the empty end of the row. Not much came up in the reseed. Peas came up so sparse I think I will just till them under. The potatoes, beets, and onions are doing very well. I replanted the parts of the five rows of corn that didn't sprout. I try to plant according to the old rhyme: "One for the worm, and one for the crow, one to rot, and one to grow." Apparently I need to double that recipe.

This is the east end of my 2100 square foot garden (facing south) as it looked the first of May. White onions, potatoes, beets, carrots, broccoli/cabbage, and purple onions in thirty foot rows. I really don't love onions that much, but years ago before the houses were built behind us the field was rented by a Japanese farmer. When he planted onions, we had very few bugs; when he planted field corn, we were plagued with the abominable creatures. Two rows of onions don't seem to ward them off though. It must take 50 acres of onions to do the job.

Another view of the east end of the garden on the first of May with five rows of corn, a row of peppers and a row of pole beans still in the ground and just watered. I didn't plant tomatoes and zucchini  on the west side of the beans until May 15th, the traditional safe day from late frost.

Some species of invisible bugs ate my first showing of beans down to nubs after I struggled to keep them alive under the scorching sun. I have heard that marigolds are a natural bug repellent, so I had planted lots of marigolds in and around the vegetables. The abominations devoured the marigolds down to dirt level as soon as they made it to three or four inches high. So much for that bit of wisdom. I applied a general spray for insect control and replanted. The new beans are just starting to break through the soil. I feel like I need to go out with a magnifying glass to see if I can spot any abominations before they eat the new crop.

On June 11, I was half way through strawing the potatoes before mounding the dirt up around the plants. I have read anecdotes that potatoes will grow in the straw and will be easy to harvest. We will see if that rumor is true.

When the strawing was finished, I tilled the ground between the rows and raked the dirt up onto the potatoes and irrigated. Exhausting!

This is my Lambert cherry tree. If the birds don't strip it clean before the cherries are ripe, I should have a bountiful harvest. The birds have already cleaned out my mulberries. Drat! I am one of the few poeple in the world who likes mulberries. If you look closely, you can see old CDs hanging in the tree. I have been looking for reflecting tape, but no stores are stocking it this year. The flashing tape frightens the birds and they stay out of the fruit trees. The CDs flash sun light through the tree branches and seem to be working as well as the reflecting tape.

Utah Scottish Festival

Spent about five hours yesterday at the Utah Scottish Festival and Highland Games. My daughter Emma, danced in the competitions. Though her ankle gave out on one of the dances, which caused a slight wabble at one point, I thought she was wonderful in the Highland Fling and Sword Dance. She didn't place in the top three of any of the dances. Sad, but she's a trooper. She does have boxes of trophies and medals for Irish and Scottish dancing already, but it is always nice to be rewarded for a fine performance, which I think she gave.

Emma and life-long friend, Sarah Lindsey. before the competition.

Look at these flying feet!

The Highland Fling

The Sword Dance

This is one of the many booths at the festival. It was advertising the Colonial Festival in Orem during the 4th of July week. I didn't take any pictures of other booths because they were too crowded with celebratory people, and I was too far away from the pipe bands and other entertainment to take a good picture with my phone.

I renewed my membership in the Utah Scottish Association and put my name in for the kilt drawing, which I never win. Gale force winds started up in the afternoon and was filling the air, and my eyes, with dust. If the dance tent hadn't been ancored to huge cement blocks, the wind would have blown us all to Oz. Several clan booths were uprooted and scattered about, and many a kilt was flapping in the breeze. At least it wasn't pouring rain as in several of the past years.

2012 Graduation Mail Art

I sent out twelve congratulation cards to 2012 graduates that I have worked with in the past four years. Six to West Jordan High young men with whom I have worked in the Venturing Scout program since they were 16. They are very nice, hard working young men from whom I expect great things in their future endeavors.

I sent the other six cards to Jordan High School graduates who were former students of Mt Jordan Middle School and were 9th grade student body officers for whom I was advisor. They too have turned out well and have bright futures ahead of them.

Memorial Day 2012

Today my wife and daughters continued our thirty year tradition of tramping through the Moroni, Utah, cemetery to visit and decorate all my wife's progenitors and kin who have passed on. We also visit the Salt Lake City Cemetery (on Saturday) and the Nephi and Mt. Pleasant cemeteries. When all our children were little, we picnicked at the Fountain Green park and played game with some of my wife's cousins and their children. Now we go to my wife's cousin David Blackham's home in Mt. Pleasant for a big pot luck lunch and mini family reunion. There are between 30 and 50 attendees each year. I am one of the shirt-tail relatives. All my ancestors are buried back East. I have been planning to make a cemetery trip through Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky and Texas for a long time, but I haven't made it yet. Maybe I will have to take the trip in bits and pieces.

Saturday at the Salt Lake City Cemetery: Rachel, Rebekah, and Chris with a pot of mums.

Monday at the Moroni Cemetery: Rachel (L) and Chris contemplate Martha Robinson Blackham, a member of the ill-fated Martin handcart company who was rescued by her son, John Blackham, who had already emmigrated to the Salt Lake Valley.

A beautiful day in the city of the dead.

Discussing the Blackham family history at Ray and Daisy Blackham's grave site.

May Mail Art

I have been sending out mainly post cards this month with postcrossing and swap-bot, but I have done a couple of decorated envelopes. The first is a post card swap and the other an ATC swap. The envelopes were an extra. The design motif is the same for both, but each has a different stain on the paper.

I also decorated one newsletter envelope for an old high school friend of mine.

I have twelve graduation cards in process of decoration, and I am running out of time.

Did She Really Say That?

I am not sure what can be said about the character of a person who willfully misquotes another person in order to mislead an audience. Is he at heart simply dishonest? A liar? A politician? But I repeat myself. I refer to President Obama paraphrasing the statements of Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) at a speech before college students in Colorado.


He said, “I want to read a quote. This is from a Republican congresswoman. I didn’t really understand this. I’m quoting her. She said that she has ‘very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt because there’s no reason for that.’ She said students who rack up student loan debt are just sitting on their butts, having opportunity ‘dumped in your lap.’”

Did Rep. Virginia Foxx actually say that? The president said he was quoting her, actually said he was reading a quote. Did he think that no one would check out the facts?  Here is what she really said with the words the president chose to edit out or rearrange in italics:

“I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ You don’t sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap.”

So, what she really said was that she has little tolerance for people who accrue outrageous amounts of school loan debt. Now, I had some school loan debts when I received my bachelor’s degree in 1973, but most of my college was paid for, not by student loans, but by hard work and sacrifice. It took me a little longer to finish, but I made it. I had no school debt in 1980, when I finished my M.Ed. My daughters had more debt when they graduated than I did. Since graduation, they have almost paid off their loans by hard work and sacrifice. Evenso, none of our student loan debts were anywhere near what Rep. Foxx was talking about, and the president neglected to enumerate in his “quote.”*

Jean Rostand said, “A lie may be less false than a carefully chosen truth.” The only truth in the president’s rendering of Rep. Foxx’s statement is that she said something about student debt; the rest is a lie. The real tragedy here is that most of the college students who cheered the president and booed Rep. Foxx will accept his words as Gospel truth.

*Just a note from National Review Online:
“According to a recent study by the New York Fed, 94 percent of student-loan debtors owe $75,000 or less. (Forty-three percent owe $10,000 or less.) So, Foxx was talking about a very small percentage — 6 percent! — of the student-loan debtor population, not all students. But by omitting that crucial phrase — and Obama did not acknowledge he had omitted any of the quote — the president made Foxx appear to be lambasting all students who graduate with debt, not the small percentage who graduate with $80,000 or more.”     Katrina Trinko

Artist's Books Class

Well, the semester is winding down and the final projects were turned in last Thursday. I went to class to turn in my book, but I didn't stay for the critique because my grandson was in Primary Children's Hospital following scoliosis surgery. He was not doing well, and we were spending as much time at the hospital as possible. He did improve enough to go home Saturday evening, but he is still in great pain and not eating because he is miserable with all the medications that make him throw up. Here is grandma and grandpa visiting the poor kid last week.

Anyway, I didn't mind missing the critique on Thursday. My book is what it is, and I don't think I need to defend it. The viewer will like it or not. I would probably have some criticism on the materials and the printing process: zerox copies on manila drawing paper. I like the way the prints look on the creamy yellow paper, so I used it. The concept was another use of an Eadweard Muybridge series of action photos but in a form that allows the sequence to be altered and viewed in non-sequential patterns. I titled the opus: LOCO-MOTION: