Everything you need to know about fertilizing with Epsom salts. I will be doing this soon. It won’t hurt, and it might help!

Do you know why Epsom salts are called Epsom salts? I thought it was probably named after some person, but actually it’s because it was found in the well water of Epsom, England. I learn something new every day.

OK. I won’t really miss the movie channels too much. Austin is getting Retro Television Network, and I will be able to watch some ridiculous old horror or sci-fi movie or any number of silly vintage TV series any time I want to … in high definition. By “vintage” I mean the TV shows and movies of my youth. Star Trek, Family Affair, Mission Impossible, and just all my favorites! So cool. Can’t wait for it to start broadcasting here. There’s a placeholder now, so maybe it’ll be soon!

The Monkees in hi-def. My heart quivers in anticipation. I’m serious. I was so in love with the Monkees. All of them.

Suits of armor for cats and mice.

It’s really pretty. In fact, I would love to have a set of samurai armor for Ronin. It would be hilarious to put it on him and watch him fall over unable to move. Not that he isn’t a very strong cat, but just a simple collar renders him completely incapable of movement … because there’s SOMETHING ON HIM! Still, I would love to see him wearing armor. It’d be a hoot.

I have finally found a reason to want a Wii, and amazingly, it isn’t even a game. It’s the WiiFit. Using the Wii with a special attachment to improve balance and strength … and to exercise. Of course, I don’t need hundreds of dollars worth of electronics to do the exercises I already do, and there really aren’t that many games for the Wii that I feel compelled to play, so I doubt very seriously we will ever get one. Both of us are still pretty happy with the Playstation 2 … and we are massively broke anyway. Being massively broke has a way of keeping us from buying all kinds of bright and shiny things we just have to have.

In other news, if you are a man dressed entirely too nicely for my neighborhood and carrying a notebook and a bunch of papers, and you have a small child wearing a suit (a SUIT) knock on my door, you will find no one home. You are selling something, and that something is most likely god. Well, I already have some god, and I got it for free. Thanks anyway. Move along. These are not the souls you are looking for.

And … we just got our new electric meter. I’m not 100% certain I am thrilled about the new meters. Sure, they will be more accurate than a human being reading numbers and writing them on a piece of paper, since it will all be sent automatically to the main office, and it will be great not to have to deal with grumpy meter readers tromping around my yard anymore, but listed among the “enhanced features” that will be “coming soon” is “energy management” … and I have found no explanation at all what that means. Anything they don’t explain in detail tends to be something they would rather you forget all about.

I know what “energy management” means when Austin Energy is talking about it’s free thermostats. It means they get to decide I don’t need my heat or air conditioning right that minute, because everyone wants their heat or air conditioning right that minute. We had one of those thermostats at the apartment, and I distinctly recall the installer telling me it had “energy management” features. The end result of its energy management was that more often than not, at the hottest time of the day, my air conditioning would turn off for 15-20 minutes without me asking it to do so. In a house, the AC being off for 15-20 minutes when it’s hot outside isn’t a big deal. When you live in a shoebox, the AC being off for 15-20 minutes means your shoebox ends up being as hot as it is outside, and then you use just as much energy as you just saved to get it cooled off again. Please note, we have not had them install one of those thermostats at the house, and when I read something from Austin Energy telling me the fancy new gadget they just attached to my house is going to include “energy management” features in the future, without any further explanation of what that means, it makes me feel a bit of concern.

This new meter is also going to phone home every time it registers a power outage at my house, and that may be a fair trade-off for whatever evil they have planned for the future. I hope the pinging from our house every time there’s anything resembling a rain drop on our street drives them insane. It isn’t a problem on our property. That’s been checked. It’s street level, and all my complaining has done no good at all. They just don’t seem to care. Maybe now they will get the message loud and clear that something is amiss with the electrical system on our street. Or not. Maybe that’s an “energy management” feature too.

I’ve been having problems motivating myself to get up off my butt today. I still haven’t done the dishes, and now that the trash bin is blessedly empty of two weeks worth of refuse, I suppose I should take out the trash and do the stupid dishes. I’ve wasted enough of the day sitting here at the computer doing nothing at all.

I just laughed so hard I almost woke Lin up in the other room. You have to see the flying dildo. Really. You do!

Politics in Russia look interesting, to say the least. Maybe the US needs some flying dildos too!

Sunday night, while I was not sleeping due to the pain in my mouth and the stress of having to go to a dentist, I discovered Dental Fear Central. I spent most of the night reading it all and going through the forums discovering I am not the only one so terrified of dentists and dental work. I completely credit that site and all those other people’s stories for my being able to so calmly call the dentist the next morning and actually making it into the office. I didn’t feel like I was alone in the way I felt, and sometimes that means everything. As I sat there Monday waiting to hear what was next for me and my teeth (and trying not to freak out), I reminded myself of all the people who had posted on those forums … how scared they had been, how embarrassed they had been, and how they had pushed through it and things got so much better. Those stories really were my rock that day.

I wanted to point it out, because apparently there are a lot of people like myself who put things off too long out of fear and embarassment, and maybe one of them will run across the link and find it as useful and consoling as I did.

I plan to join the forums and join the conversations. While I am feeling so very positive about the upcoming surgery, because my rational brain knows that once it’s over my quality of life is going to improve so much, I am, of course, still freaking out about it all. It’d be nice to have a support group of people just like myself to just talk with about all the fears and thoughts racing through my less rational brain, and I also want to thank them all for giving me just the boost of courage I needed to get this ball rolling.

I also want to thank my friends, family, and blog readers who have been listening to me whine and cry for about a week now. Everyone has been so supportive and understanding. I feel a little silly now for not having admitted to any of you years ago my crushing fear of dental work. I had it in my head everyone would think it was stupid for someone who otherwise seems to be intelligent and at least somewhat “with it” to be afraid of something as mundane as dentistry. But no one has thought it was stupid. All of you have been just fabulous, and that really gives me courage and strength as well. So thank you.

There is sure to be more whining and crying for some weeks yet. We’ll all just have to get through this together, I guess. I swear, I am not going to try to bore you to tears with it all. I am going to try to be as open and free with my thoughts and feelings on what’s going on, not so much to ease my own nerves, but because maybe someone else will run across what I am posting and discover they aren’t alone either. It’s awful to feel scared, alone. I might still feel scared, but I don’t feel alone anymore. That feels pretty damn good.

Just wish my teeth were feeling pretty damn good. My plan to only take one Tylenol-3 a day in the evenings has not worked out so well today. After I got done with the shopping and some of the housework, my mouth felt like it was on fire. The ibuprofen wasn’t cutting it at all, so I took a pill, laid down on the bed, and then I got a lot of really restful sleep. Sleep is good.

If you need me this afternoon, I’ll be on the porch watching my plants grow or at friv.com playing flash games … or napping. But first, we have to make the trek across town to get food at the farmers market. Neither of us wants to go, but we haven’t been in about a month, so we kind of have to go.

Those peppers I posted a photo of just yesterday? Doubled in size this morning. And that Better Boy tomato plant? Grew another three inches. Everything is really taking off! Makes it so exciting to step out on the porch every morning to see what’s changed!

Better go make us some more coffee. We need a kick in the butt something bad this morning. Zero motivation to do anything.

What happens when a thunderstorm collides with a volcanic plume? Look at the first thirteen photos in this set. Be prepared to be amazed.

Just posted this at Metafilter, so of course, I have to share it here too.

“What the autistic 12-year-old can’t express verbally or in social interaction he can show through his carefully cut out geometric shapes assembled into characters in a paper collage.”

It’s another Sunday night, and I am, as usual, doing what I am always doing at this hour on a Sunday night … finishing the laundry. I’ll never learn to start it earlier. I might as well just accept the inevitable and get on with my late-night laundry doing.

Since I have to stay awake a bit longer to wait for the last load in the dryer to finish up, I have been reading about natural fertilizers. I know the plants that aren’t doing well need more nutrients. I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on an organic solution to the problem, and I really don’t want to spend any money on a chemical and non-organic solution to the problem. I was just about ready to break down and buy Miracle Grow tomorrow, but then I decided there had to be some household thing we have plenty of that would be natural and organic and work just as well. And … of course … there is.

Coffee grounds. More here.

Coffee grounds are an excellent fertilizing mulch, and apparently also good at repelling snails and slugs (even, joy of joys, possibly killing them). Well, we have the coffee grounds. Some of them get tossed on the compost heap, but admittedly, most of them just get thrown away. Not any more! Tomorrow, all used coffee grounds go out to my plants. Any leftover brewed coffee can be too, though there usually isn’t much of that around.

Also, crushed egg shells mixed with the dirt, at planting or worked in later, add calcium. This reputedly helps protect against Blossom End Rot on tomatoes and gives them a growing boost. Sprinkling the eggs shells around plants can help deter slugs, snails, and cutworms, who don’t want to crawl over them, as well as deterring those pesky neighborhood cats who want to pee and dig in flowerbeds. They don’t like stepping on them either, or so the rumor goes. Eggshells have all sorts of uses. Just so happens, I have a whole bunch of clean, dry, and crushed up eggshells I was hoarding for that canvas and then decided not to use. How convenient for me!

Tomatoes also seem to love milk, and it may combat powdery mildew.

And finally, here are some ideas for natural pesticides, which I am sure to be needing eventually as well.

Laundry is done. Time for folding it up and then … bed.

Dinner was different tonight. It’s the first time I made these! They were very tasty.

Take that Freebirds! No more do I have to drive to your location and pay you ridiculous amounts of money for ridiculous sized burritos!

So I don’t lose these links at Delicious, where I send links and never see them again … plans for making home wind turbines for energy production.

Build a Model Turbine: Ride the Wind!

A Home Power Plant - Wind Power Generator

There’s a post and conversation going on at Metafilter about how shoes are ruining the human foot and the benefits of going as barefooted as possible. I’m only taking a break from the housework I am trying to catch up on, so I haven’t gotten to read the links yet, but I did skim through the comments. I find myself amazed by the number of people who are grossed out by the idea of not wearing shoes and walking around with naked feet outside.

I do not wear shoes. If I added up all the time every week when I have something of any sort on my feet, even during the winter, it would at most amount to an hour or two a week, depending on how many times I have had to drive somewhere and go into a retail establishment or restaurant. Even then, at most, I have on a pair of plastic gardening clogs or some other sort of slip-on shoe … that I slip off whenever possible. This has been the case with me since I was born. My feet like to be free.

By far, year-round, I am shoeless, and my feet are some of the happiest feet I know. The toes are all straight and even, I have never experienced corns, bunyons or ingrown toenails, and I can’t remember the last time I had a blister, but I know it was caused by wearing shoes. To be sure, I have calluses, but only on the bottoms of my feet, where humans should have thicker tougher skin. The tops and sides of my feet and my toes are all callus-free. Have you ever looked at the feet of a woman who wears women’s shoes all the time? My feet have never looked like that, and they never will. I will be spending more time sans shoes than with for the rest of my walking days.

The overwhelming complaint in the comments about going barefoot seems to revolve around stepping on gross things like dog poo or bugs and so on. Well, sometimes that happens. It usually only happens when I am not paying attention to wear I am walking, but when I somehow manage to step in something gross, I walk over to the nearest water source and wash my feet off. Do these people wash their shoes every day when they get home? If not, all that gross stuff they walk through willy-nilly, because they don’t have to pay attention to where they are putting their feet, is still there being gross on the bottom of their shoes. Meanwhile, my feet get a good washing, and any grossness they may have encountered in their barefooted day is gone down the drain forever. I have never seen anyone washing their shoes when they get home. I’ve never even heard of anyone washing their shoes to remove the accumulated grunge of the day. It’s as if they think the soles of shoes are magic and don’t collect the same kinds of stuff that a bare foot would! Well, they do. Ever notice how dogs and cats sniff around on the soles of shoes when you come in from outside? That is because there’s stuff on the soles of the shoes. Gross stuff. Gross stuff that people don’t wash off of them.

The other main complaint is a worry about stepping on pebbles, rocks, hot asphalt and other things that might hurt … a fear of getting an injury and possibly bleeding. These are some valid concerns for the novice barefoot walker. A foot accustomed to shoes is soft, weak, has no sole. In the beginning, a person with feet like these has to watch where they walk. It’s as simple as that. If you see a piece of glass, don’t step on it. It requires a person to actually be aware of their surroundings, all the way down to the ground. I see this as a good thing. I like being completely aware of my surroundings.

Once the novice barefoot walker has walked upon open ground for a few weeks, those pebbles, pieces of glass, and hot asphalt will stop mattering as much. Unless something is particularly pointy, I don’t even notice them anymore, and even when I go stop down fully on a sharp stone, it doesn’t break my skin … it just dents it. Amen for thick soles!

Also, after a lifetime of not wearing shoes when out in the world, I would like to say that I have only had one actual injury to the bottom of a foot that led to any amount of bleeding. It happened when I was 7 years old. I stepped on an unseen nail. I sniffled about it for the three minutes it took my mom to put on some Bactine, and then I was right back outside running around like a wild child, having learned the lesson to be slightly more careful about where I put my feet. I’ve stepped on other nails and sharp bits of glass since that summer, and just like pebbles, all it ever does now is put a dent in the sole of my foot. The more a person goes barefoot, the less likely it is they will suffer a foot injury from having stepped on something.

The comments I found particularly hilarious were those implying (or flat out stating) that the human foot is an evolutionary mistake, a weakness. The human foot, in its natural form (shoeless) is not weak. We have made them weak and soft by wearing shoes. My feet and toes are strong. I am almost as capable of grasping things with them as I am with my hands, and when doing any sort of climbing, I can’t even imagine doing so with shoes on. Those toes are very, very useful. They were designed to be useful. Too bad so many people don’t use them.

And then there was a comment saying that feet stink when they come out of shoes but that bare feet stink all the time. That is simple stupidity, and without knowing anything else about the person, I can tell they have never actually spent any time at all without shoes on. My feet don’t stink. At the most, they smell like dirt and grass if I have just been outside, and it isn’t like I wash them multiples of times a day. Sometimes, I don’t even wash them every day. It’s true. Unless I have stepped in something that requires foot washing or I am taking a shower anyway, I often go days without washing my feet. Just the thought of that is probably grossing some people out, but I swear to you, my feet are never really that dirty … and they most certainly don’t stink. In fact, I am more likely to go out of my way to wash my feet after I have been wearing shoes, because yes, they do then have an odor about them.

I can’t prove to you they don’t stink, since we don’t have smell-o-vision yet on the internet, but in closing, I will share with you a photograph of the bottoms of my feet, the very feet that has not actually been washed for about four days and have been all over my yard, the street and inside my house.

See … not icky, not gross, not even especially dirty. Nothing there but healthy, happy feet!

Now back to the damn housework.

Just so the world doesn’t come to think I only fall into hopeless love-lust with utterly unattainable, larger-than-life fictional, sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns, I will now confess to you two of my other current man-crushes: Michio Kaku, a theoretical astrophysicist who is entirely too hot for his own good and Cornel West, an American scholar who just needs to speak to set my heart a-thumping.

So see … it isn’t just utterly unattainable, larger-than-life fictional, sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns. It’s also utterly unattainable, larger-than life and smarter-than-all-of-us, intellectual older men without guns too. Luckily I found myself one of those all-too-smart older guys without guns, and unluckily, living with that sort is far less entertaining than watching them on TV. Unless you have ever had to tell someone you really don’t care about whatever overly complex theory of everything or mathematical formula (or whatever they are fixating on at the moment) they are babbling on about in minute detail, you can’t possibly understand.

Which is why I watch fictional shows starring sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns. Sometimes, the brain needs a break.

Lin: What do you want to watch first?

Orb: Anything Who related takes precedence over all other programming. Let’s watch all the Sarah Janes first.

And so we did.

I won’t say anything specific, in case there are people who care and haven’t seen it yet. The Sarah Jane Adventures show is cute. It’s good for the early time-slot, and if I had children, they would be forced to watch it. I would describe it as wholesome and sending good messages, perhaps particularly to girls. I’ve only seen two episodes though, so what do I know. It’s cute. It isn’t a show for my demographic. I may grow to love it. Who knows. I’ll keep watching, but I suspect it might end up being just a little too cute for me.

OK. I’ll admit it. My refined TV viewing tastes require sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns. If there are explosions … all the better. I do not expect to see too many sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns on The Sarah Jane Adventures. I may be wrong. It’s just a feeling.

Dr Who started up again tonight, so we watched that next. Does London have to have a crisis every Christmas, and does the Doctor always have to be in the middle of it? Yeah, well, it’s Doctor Who, so of course I liked it. There were a few things I thought were completely stupid, and one thing that actually made me a little angry. I started losing interest in Doctor Who when Rose went away. Also, Captain Jack Harkness got his own show, and well … sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns.

Battlestar Galactica was what it was. I haven’t really been into it for a while now. I’m just hanging on because it’s ending and I want to see if they find earth or get killed by the Cylons. I’m not even sure I care enough anymore which fate they face. Just tell me the end of the story now so I can stop watching this violent soap opera disguising itself as science fiction. Great story. Too much graphic violence … not enough sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns.

Personally, I can’t wait to see the Torchwood season finale tomorrow night. It’ll suck to have to watch reruns, but it’s been really interesting this season, and I can’t wait to see what cliff they leave us hanging off of in agony!

Well, I can’t watch educational TV all the time. Might as well have sexy, sensitive, intelligent, and well-dressed men with guns, right?