At various times today I repotted four tomato plants into large gallon-sized pots, a huge upgrade from the 12 ounce cans they'd been growing in. In gallon-sized pots, though, the plants had overgrown the available space in the south-facing window of the dining room. Lucky for me, I happen to have a greenhouse to move them to. Sad as it might seem, that greenhouse has had only a single kale plant growing in it all winter long. By the end of today it was looking like a proper greenhouse.
Temperatures today reached up into the low 60s, but it was never much better than mildly unpleasant. I spent most of my time up in the laboratory working on my latest billable hours project (and running a parabolic heater to stay warm in the house's shadiest room). Being the sort of tool I'd built before, it was relatively easy to develop it on my Tableform platform.
This evening Sarah the Vegan came over and Gretchen made a pasta with artichoke red sauce. The three of us ended up watching Jeopardy together, partly because Sarah is so amenable to watching television and it's a normal thing for us to do when eating dinner.
Today I heard a song by a band called The Wombats called "1996" on Indy Pop Rocks, and it was so compelling that I paid for and downloaded the whole album from Amazon. The Wombats have a synth-heavy pop-rock sound, and those synths sound a bit retro to my ear, though it's in keeping with a certain strain of contemporary British pop rock (the Wombats are from Liverpool). More interesting are the lyrics, which tend to reach a little deeper and be a bit more self-critical than even most indy-pop. For example, the Wombats have a song called "Girls/Fast Cars" which might wander into Mötley Crüe territory if it weren't for lines like "I like girls...girls and fast cars/You too will feel this shallow when one melts your little heart." It's simple and stupid and brilliant all at once. My favorite song is still "1996." It seems to center around a vividly-remembered proto-sexual semi-adolescent experience in that year, with delicious mentions of sheep cloning and telescopes along the way. I love songs that grow out of that kind of nostalgia, even if the honking and croaking of the synthesizers reminds me of all that I hated in 1980s pop music.
