To The Surbiton Manor Born

Planning the garden is a bit of a chore. Most of the seeds are purchased. The  beds are planned. The dates for planting are entered into the calendar so that we'll see them coming.  This is the sort of thing that one does, along with planning vacations, when the snow is waist-high and the wind chills are double-digits below zero. Debating numbering the beds. Even in a small restaurant, it's helpful to know what's going on at "Table 6." I think the same might be true out there. This year, the fun will start just after St. Patrick's Day - March 18 - when we plant cauliflower in the greenhouse.  It is something to anticipate.   

An example of petro-masculinity and, basically a symbol of the lack of mental health care in the U.S. Why is this a self-sufficiency issue? Self-sufficiency and responsible efforts to steward the environment should go hand in hand. How was this politicized? I'm honestly a little bit incredulous, because it seems like something everyone could agree on: We've got one planet. We need to take care of it. It's wise to be able to take care of yourself and your loved ones because modern life is fundamentally built on thin ice . Computer systems will always crash. Data will always be leaked. There will be disasters, wars, floods, economic recessions, depressions, pandemics.  If there's one thing COVID-19 taught me, it is that you will be swept up in the events of your time, and you are nothing but a drop of water in an ocean. If there's going to be a wave, you are going up or down in it and you've got very, very little to say about it. Because supply chains are so frag

  The new Petri couch - Winter is inside time The weather continues, unsurprisingly for January, to be loathsome. This time, there's a soaking rain falling from a dark grey sky that's made it feel like dusk since the sun came up. But there are bright spots. In the last little while, we've made some nice upgrades indoors, and one of our previous improvements - trading our old gas stove for an electric one - turned out to be prescient. I'm earning that inscription on my tombstone, "I told them so."  On the indoor front, we got a lovely new couch. It really ties the room together.  In the news this week: " A US federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves | CNN Business " At last, the Consumer Product Safety Commission caught up with facts that have been known for a while, and with us, and suggested taking a look at gas stoves. I recommend reading the article above for the details. It was a bit of a struggle, which I think I recounted on the pages

We had a massive three-day snow event last week, and it is cold enough that it isn't going anywhere for a while. The stuff is heaped up everywhere.  I have spoken before about the difficulty of keeping the solar panels clear. This week we generated almost nothing, because there's at least a foot of snow on top of them. It's not that I don't want to clear them, it's just that doing so takes a tremendous amount of time and effort, all of which is over your head, leaving you with fatigued shoulders. After you use the tiny squeegee on the end of the 30-foot pole to pull down a foot of snow off of a panel, you discover a 1/2-1/4" of ice that no amount of feeble scraping will remove. After great effort, I've managed to liberate about half of the panels. I will continue to make the effort, one at a time. And the weather seems to be on our side, with 30's projected for most of the week. If we can get any sun, we should be generating again relatively soon. We