Free In Idaho!

 Today was a “honey do” day.  The girls have been talking about doing raised beds since last summer.  They feel the need for a separate place to grow some of the smaller and finer things on their list…. herbs, baby lettuce, and fancy greens like arugula.  I get the call for some of these jobs (last year’s job was a gourd fence to grow gourds on, which you can see in the picture on the left).

The construction was pretty straight forward.  6 - 2″x8″x8′ redwood planks and a 4″x4″x8′ redwood post, with a little sawing and a handful of 3″ screws, and presto you have a raised bed.  We put it together in the yard and then carried it into the field.  The first picture is Cathy and her friend Rose discussing where to put it.  That’s the trouble with fields, you have so much space you have to discuss where to put things, how many to put, where to plant what, and do we want to put in more rows of cants or tomatoes this year?  This gardening stuff is complicated.  And then you have to figure out how you want to water it… do we want to do soaker hose, or run tubing with emitters?  I don’t know what they settled on.

The second picture is after we got the bed “installed”.  The property is on a slope (near the hills just north of Boise) and the girls wanted it level, so we had to fiddle with it some and dig it in a bit on the uphill side of thing.  The dirt here is quite sandy so it was no problem to get it sunk and ready for filling… about a yard of good foo-foo dirt ought to get it close.  The girls are happy.  And I’m sure the deer are going to be ecstatic!  They won’t have to hardly bend down at all now to chomp out all those fancy greens the girls have planned.  See that chain link around the perimeter?  What you don’t see is where the deer crawl under it where it crosses the irrigation ditch.  We’ve had folks tell us “nah, they can’t get under there” but I guess the deer never got that email…

It was a fantastic Idaho day!  Working with wood, digging in the field, good friends,  spending time with my sweetie, 84 degrees and sunny.  All topped off with home-made burgers and corn on the cob.  I am SO blessed!

So, I’ve been trying to check in on Bill Whittle’s site since last night, and all I get is the blue screen… no, not the MS death screen, the Eject!Eject!Eject! blue screen.  But no words to go with it… what’s up with that?  (note: it was just very slow to load this morning)

And of course, once you’ve been exposed to Bill’s essays, you’re hooked, and you check back at his site nearly every day, even when he isn’t posting but every every two months.  So, because I know he and others are building something new, I checked over at the other url, “just in case” mind you, and whoa, something’s happening here.

The suspense is killing me….

We can all think of instances when someone’s belief system got in the way of doing hard science, resulting in Bad Science.  You only have to look at some of the wackiness in the global warming camp to know that is true.  The other day I wrote a post about puddles on Mars.  Well, this morning I found this follow-up

it turns out the claim is impossible for an entirely different – and much more basic – reason: the terrain in question is on the side of a crater, and is therefore sloped too greatly for water to pool into puddles.

What?  They were looking so hard for proof of something they believe in, they missed the obvious?  Oh my…

But apparently they had, analysing just the smaller images without understanding the larger context of their surroundings – missing the forest for the trees. “I want to retract the claim in the paper that the smooth area we discussed was ’standing liquid water’,” Levin acknowledged on Tuesday. “I am sorry that we made such a large mistake.”

NOW what do they do?  Ah, the obvious

In light of this, we must retract the article.

False alarm, sorry. Hey, did you hear about the new Loch Ness videos? How about the fairy mummy they found?