mdehners | Reading

Between rains this afternoon, the neighbours' weeping trees were felled. Now there's significantly more light coming omto the kitchen window, though the change would have been even more noticeable if they hadn't had them severely pruned back last year. One of our camellias had grown an offshoot that climbed high into one of the trees; that's now waving about in the wind. Spoke to the neighbour through the U-shaped cut in their fence that had been made for a large tree branch; she says they won't be demolishing their old chicken house, which the cats like to lie on. Around all of this, we walked around the park in intermittent sun, and I unsuccessfully tried to get the dog to walk past the front meadow in misting rain. And I swept up the tree debris and fed the compost monster and the greenwaste bin bits of differing density.

I'll miss those pretty trees.

weofodthignen

The dog woke me up later than usual—it was still grey outside because it was raining! More promised all weekend, and after sun alternating with clouds all day, in the evening the wind came up and it rained again. So I'll get out of watering the lawn for a week or so.

weofodthignen

The weeping tree over the fence from our compost bins is to be chopped. Turns out to be 3 Maytens, something I'd never heard of. The filet mignon folks are replacing their garage. Pity. I wish they'd keep at least one of the trees, they weep beautifully. Though for the last few weeks they have been shedding an ocean of tiny yellow flowers.

weofodthignen

The first iris is in bloom in the semi-wilderness in back.

The neighbours who appear to feed the cats filet mignon put a large, cylindrical black plastic cat house in front of their house for the taking. The lady explained to me that Grey One used to sleep in there but nobody's touched it since. I carried it home and set it up in the corner at the top of the driveway, behind a wheelbarrow. Mama Violet, who never goes over to their place, went through a phase of hanging out in that corner and still likes the top of the driveway, though she prefers the bushes. Maybe she'll use it. I'll launder the cat bed it's lined with (fuzzy leopard print, very swish).

winterfirelight posting in

gardening

It's been busy times in the garden! I got the last of my cold-stratified seeds planted last night. On Sunday we took on the big project of replacing the old wooden bed out by the street that's been slowly rotting away and was full of grass anyway. It's all concrete underneath, and the bed was too shallow to be able to plant anything substantial, much less anything that I'd feel comfortable harvesting. In it's place we put in four 2x2 corrugated steel beds that are much taller, and there's space for another 3-4 small beds of that size if we decide we like how these first ones are working. Still some cleanup to do from that, but otherwise it's looking much better.

I've gotten the feverfew, oregano, and thyme settled in those new spaces, with the last bed ready for the tulsi seedlings whenever they're big enough to transplant. The nights are still getting quite cold, so I'm waiting a while longer before making the little things have to brave the weather. It's supposed to be a temperate variety that can handle our cooler temperatures, but I've previously only grown the more tropical tulsi, which makes me a little more cautious than I maybe need to be. I'll be curious to see how the varieties differ.

The elecampane officially survived the winter, which I'm very happy to see! I thought for sure I had lost it. It's much slower to wake than the rest of the garden. I'm not sure if that's just how it is, or if it's a function of the place where it's been planted. It seemed to lag behind other plants in growth last year, too, but I imagine the second year will tell me quite a bit about how it feels where it is.

There's plenty of maintenance work to do in the garden, but in terms of plants, it's back to a waiting game. All the big plant sales and swaps won't happen until May, and none of the seedlings are quite ready for transplant yet, so I shall bide my time and be patient. I still haven't quite decided where everything will go, or what else I'll buy when the sales come along. There's a real risk I'll run out of space, but at least the soil is amended and weeded and ready to go. Hurrah for warmer days!

Current Mood: chipper

rebeccmeister posting in

gardening

This is largely cross-posted from my personal blog, since I figure a lot of us spend a lot of time thinking about soil quality and composting! I love worm bins because they can be made to work for all kinds of lifestyles, including people who live in apartments, since a well-managed bin does not smell and can be designed to fit in all kinds of spaces.

I think I'm reaching the stage where there's something of a steady-state for managing my new-ish worm bin bench. To begin with, by myself I generate around 1 batch of kitchen scraps a week that can go into the bin. My kitchen scraps mostly include spent coffee grounds, banana peels, apple cores, and vegetable trimmings from whatever I happen to be cooking that week. Eggshells now get handled separately, and citrus goes into the yard compost outside because citrus is toxic to worms.

( photos and description below the cut... )

angrboda posting in

gardening

The below is a crosspost from my own dw. Has anybody else experimented with a garden journal? What sort of stuff did you write in it?

For Christmas Husband gave me a nice Critical Role notebook as 'something to go with', so I have been vaguely pondering what to use it for. I have now decided to have a go at making it a garden journal.

I have no idea how one does that. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm basically just putting stuff in there and seeing where it goes. I don't even know how long I'll be able to keep it up,* but we're having a go anyway. So far I've put in a list of what's in the different beds off the top of my head, I've put a todo list of tasks I'd like to get done during the spring (lol!),** and I've put in a number of ideas for how I would like to do the terrace pots and a list of other plants I might like to try and plant.

It occurs to me that it might also come in handy when we go to the garden center because I can take it with me and look up what I was considering, which feels far more attractive than a note on my phone, and I could potentially also put in things that I saw at the garden center that might be interesting later on, especially if I remember to also bring a pencil.***

This decision coincides, or is probably partially born from, the effort Husband is currently making to get through a vast stack of garden magazines that have piled up. We tried putting them in a specific place, so that they weren't always lying around on the dining table. This worked splendidly for me because it was more tidy, and not at all for him because the magazines tended to just accumulate and he'd never actually get around to looking in them. So now the magazine storage situation is a bit unclear. Anyway, he's making his way through them, tearing out the pages he wants a closer look at, and I got trough after him and do the same.

On one page, I was mainly interested in a small bit in the bottom third, so in a fit of inspiration I cut it out and glued it into my journal. I had a bit of leftover hobby glue that was still good, so I used that. I discovered that the paper is really too thin for this to be an ideal solution, but on the other hand, I'm kind of enjoying the tactile way the paper has gone a bit crinkly now where it has dried. Might acquire more unsuitable glue and do it again.

---

*But it is giving me some opportunity to use highlighters. I have far too many highlighters. But they come in so many colours, and you obviously have to have one in each colour. I mean, obviously!
**If I do a third of them, I'll call it a success.
***Not a pen. A pencil. And definitely not a mechanical one. An old fashioned one that you have to sharpen. I've been favouring them for years now. I think it has something to do how it feels to write with it.

weofodthignen

Rain forecast for Friday. Hope we get it. Meanwhile the temps have gyrated back to kind of chilly, but it's sunny. The housemate says I already have a red neck. Hmmph.

arlie

State Farm has a garbage-quality autopayment system.

Six months ago, they failed to process my autopayment. I'd had to change credit card numbers to contest an unauthorized charge, from a company I'd never heard of, possibly "partner" to some other company I do business with, acting on their behalf. The credit card company declared the transactions to be legitimate, without any explanation to me, and left me with a change of account number to clean up afterwards.

Getting back to State Farm. I hadn't updated that auto-pay, so it tried to use the old card, and failed. I got an email, telling me to deal with it myself, but not immediately, as the bill wouldn't be payable online for 1-3 business days. Since the autopay was scheduled for the renewal date, I'd presumably be uninsured until they allowed me to pay it. Or I could call my agent, who, they claimed, would be able to help me.

I waited out the slow batch update delay, added the new number as a new payment method (the old one couldn't be updated in place), made it my preferred payment method, and [paid the bill. Their UI either offered no way to update the auto-payment, or implied that my new preferred method would be used.

There may have been some other interactions. These are what I remember, supplemented by State Farm's report of my payment history, as seen on their website today.

This morning, I received a similar notice that my autopayment had failed, and manual payment would not work for 1-3 days. They'd used the older, non-preferred payment method.

I may now have successfully set it to use the right card, but of course they won't do that automatically until the next bill, 6 months from now.

I've put an "appointment" in my calendar to check their website again in 3 days, when they will hopefully allow me to pay this bill online.

If I'm really lucky, this update of my autopayment method won't be conveniently "lost", leaving me to handle the same nuisance 6 months from now.

Fuck you, State Farm. May your CIO (presumably in charge of web programming) and CEO both die slowly and painfully from an incurable disease. Or since that's perhaps a bit excessive, may they both find themselves stuck with service providers just like them,and wind up spending 22 hours a day deleting unwanted emails, fixing problems that never should have happened, returning unordered merchandise, and discovering when they try to use it that their insurance doesn't cover what they thought it did. And may their afterlife, if any, involve all the same things, except perhaps more so, in the manner of Dante's Inferno's handling of sellers of fraudulent medicines.

p.s. To be fair, State Farm has not pulled the "nope, this isn't covered" thing on me, and I did "total" an elderly car insured with them a few years ago. Their claims people were in fact polite, efficient, and informative. It's their web site and their billing I'm angry about.

weofodthignen

Remember this car crash on 13 March? A Friday, I now come to notice ... A little more than 3 weeks later, half a block away, a driver managed to collide with a parked car yesterday, mucking up its rear corner and damaging hers enough that there was a streak of fluids headed toward the kerb, then back out again; who knows how or why, but apparently the car wound up in the middle of the road. Then the streak takes a sharp turn and becomes a flood as the car was hoisted by the wrecker and pulled to the kerb. We got the intel from someone in a facing house, who casually picked up a small piece of debris from under the bay window while speaking.

Hopefully nobody hurt; there were reportedly kids in this car, too.

arlie

My taxes are done.

The capital gain part was unpleasant, and the beta import function made numerous errors, leading to me retyping much of the information. (Its issues were a mix of copying some but not all of the relevant lines, and mistaking subtotal lines for additional transactions. It made these errors on statements from two different brokerages - the only ones where I had capital gains details.)

There's some possibility of additional errors, without the scaffolding I'm used to, but both the feds and the state have accepted my forms. The overall numbers are reasonable, any glitches would be in the details.

Money to pay my taxes due will be taken from my chequing account on April 15, by which time the money I transferred to cover this will have arrived.

Total aggravation: less than I usually experience from Turbotax.

Total $ cost: notably less than with Turbotax.

I won't be using Turbotax again.

In more surprising news, the Big Ugly Bill increased my deductions, and thus reduced the amount of tax owing. That doesn't change my political opinions about whether the bill was good for the country in the longer term, but it does give me a conflict of interest.

I'm also amused, in a sick kind of way, to not remember reading anything about the extra $6 K deduction for older people (my age), reduced if their incomes are above a threshold (mine was), but in my case at least not reduced all the way to zero. I suspect my news sources of not wanting to mention anything good about the bill, but I may simply have ignored it on the assumption that my income would be too high to benefit.

weofodthignen

I walked by the rail line today. The fig tree hedge is shedding green fruits all over the pavement/sidewalk. No idea how one might go about eating them.

arlie

This section is for nuisances, small aggravations, learning curve,and problems that are probably fixable, but not yet fixed. Compared to the other two posts, it's all small stuff. But many a mickle makes a muckle - and there's a lot in this category.

I'm posting it a bit late, and may have forgotten some of the things I intended to include two weeks ago.

Canonical has (a) decided to use snaps for key components of their linux distribution (Ubuntu, Kubuntu etc.). As the developer of the snap packaging system it's also decided to make snaps forcibly update themselves. Firefox arrives as a snap, and has new versions approximately every two weeks.

This blew up on me a week and a half ago. I posted https://arlie.dreamwidth.org/532599.html at that time, so I'll omit farther detail here.
Mozilla has gone all in on Chatbot support. This is quite controversial among Firefox users, some of whom have flamed Mozilla up down and sideways on their forums.

I'm rather disgusted myself. I encounter enough human-written lies, damn lies, and confabulations; I don't need an extra serving of confabulations ("hallucinations") from my web browser.

Checking out alternative web browsers is on my backburner, but I don't expect to find anything substantially better. Chromium has Google cooties all over it, giving me a serious feeling of caveat emptor.

( Read more... )

weofodthignen

Today was beautiful: sunny and with a breeze to offset the heat. The dog spent much of it outdoors, and in the early evening started taking me on a real walkies, toward the park, for the first time in weeks. Then she spotted an old gent. coming towards us, and turned around mid-block and led me home.

ysabetwordsmith posting in

gardening

April 2026 is National Native Plant Month

Please help to spread the word that the month of April is Native Plant Month and plan activities in your community to make a real difference by planting native plants, removing invasive plants, and teaching others about the importance of native plants as a source of food and habitat for wildlife.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

weofodthignen

The temperature bounced up again (though only to the 70s, today) so I mowed in back, where the native grass clumps all went *boing!!*. I should bite the bullet and start ripping them out one by one.

mdehners posting in

gardening

Soooo,the 1st of the Dwarf Columbine plants I started from seed last yr has come into bloom. Not so dwarf but all deep Blue!!!! There are 2 others from those seeds that have buds and can't wait to see what they'll be.
Only the Yellow Wallflowers survived last Winter and are Blooming. Some of the Sweet William's I started last yr are showing pre-buds. Looks like only one Sanguisorba survived so I'm going to move it to a less Shady spot with less competition. I've been too busy with seedlings so I'm behind a number of chores in the garden. I'm lucky I was able to plant the Fig and the Mulberry last week though they arrived at an inconvenient time to plant by the Moon(my project this yr).
I can't believe that my Mint didn't overwinter. The Roman Chamomile is about half it was last yr too.
Cheers,
Pat

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Lenoir City(Nevermore;>!)
Current Music: Heilung Radio

weofodthignen

It was beautiful today, but only in the 60s. Bracing.

The tent is still in place under the road viaduct, and a second one has appeared around the corner of the concrete support.

arlie

The following is a lightly edited stream of events report of attempting to use FreeTaxUSA:

Account successfully created on the Mac, using Safari. Used a throw-away email ID in case of persistent spam.
It was able to analyze the pdf produced by Turbotax containing my 2024 tax forms, and import that information sensibly. No errors found (yet).
After some days, and at least one Safari crash, their Safari window had disappeared. Attempted to relogin on linux, using Firefox.

Their login had a pop-up on both the user id and password boxes, covering the popup from ProtonPass which would have given me my login details. Looked those up by starting to login on Safari. Once I typed my somewhat obfuscated user ID on Firefox, the unhelpful pop-up went away, and I was able to click to get Proton Pass to supply the password.

I think the pop-up provider here was FreeTaxUSA, not Firefox, but I'm not absolutely certain.

On the good side, they were willing to let me see my password, unlike many sites that "know" their web page is used only in public places, complete with dodgy shoulder surfers.

( Read more... )

arlie

The universe continues to eat my free time. Now it's working on eating my money as well. But that's what you get from owning a house.

Yesterday morning my housemate mentioned that the bathtub drain was slow, and it might need attention soon. Then I went to take a shower. It was slow all right - I wound up wading. Then there were gurgles, and things came up from the drain into the tub. Mostly ugly black stuff; one soaked piece of dog kibble. At some point, the laundry machine drained; I think that water wound up in the tub with me.

I got out of the tub, and dried my feet and lower legs with a different towel than I used to dry the parts of me that had not been submerged. Then I called a plumber. They looked at the situation, quoted me a price, and brought out their snake. Routine repair - probably a pipe full of hair. Or so we hoped.

No such luck. The snake hit obstacles which tried to grab its end. The plumber had trouble getting it to retract without breaking off.

( Read more... )

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Reading

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D.O.P.-T. (yesterday)

Spring Has Sprung!

Worm Dirt Harvesting

Starting a garden journal

D.O.P.-T.

Name and Shame: State Farm

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FreeTaxUSA Part 2

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Moving to Linux: The Ugly

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National Native Plant Month

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Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy! ;>

D.O.P.-T.

FreeTaxUSA

Expensive excitement: no computers involved

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April 2026

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