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nasty pile of nutrients
Wednesday, March 11 2015
Today the weather was sunny and temperatures reached up to about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. There was some melting of the snow pack, though it was less than expected. Some of the ice was weakened enough for me to break it into pieces and peel it up from the ground, particularly on the north side of the house (where the ice-covered walkway makes for a somewhat risky path to the brownhouse and greenhouse). I was able to cut a channel in the ice in the middle of that path to drain meltwater ponding in the driveway. Once the snow in the driveway had mostly melted away, I was surprised by how little ice remained beneath it. Before there had been much snow accumulation, ice seemed to be ponding rapidly there; evidently much of that had vanished somehow in very cold weather while it lay buried beneath the snow.
One of the pleasant new developments that came with the thaw was that the last of the ice connecting the gutter to the rain barrel at the northwest corner of the house melted away, allowing them to detach from one another. While there was still too great of a mass of ice within it to allow me to remove the rain barrel from its tower, I was able to snap the gutter back into its hangers in the places where the jacking effect of the expanding ice had pushed it loose. Happily, there didn't appear to have been any permanent damage from sudden freezing of all that ice: the barrel didn't rupture and the gutter wasn't damaged.
The springlike weather had me going out into the yard to do other things. One of those things was emptying out the five gallon bucket that collects urine from my urinal system, which only recently thawed out enough to become usable again. That bucket contained a frozen mass of urine and pine needles, and since I couldn't bury, I dumped it into an accumulating pile of compost, ashes, and dog shit where I intend to make a new patch of garden come springtime. I further added to this nasty pile of nutrients by going around the yard with a snow shovel and gathering all the dog shit that had lain for months in a state of cryonic preservation.
Indoors, I also had a spring-related task. I had three little sunflower plants growing together in the south-facing dining room window after a recent timelapse plant growth project, and they'd managed to grow quite tall since that project. Today I dumped them out of their tiny can, untangled their roots as best I could, and then transplanted them into separate containers. There was also a single Arugula plant stuffed in there; it had been a single mustard seedling I'd found in growing on a shale abutment in the greenhouse back in the deepest part of winter; I gave it its own pot as well. I'm curious how big all these plants will get by the time the ground is warm enough for planting them. Meanwhile, the tomato plant I'd started growing in an illuminated grow box back in the autumn is 37 inches tall and flowering prolifically.
This evening, Gretchen reported a problem with her computer Badger, which is based on a Core 2 Duo P5QL Pro motherboard that has always been a little flaky. For some reason, though, it's mostly been reliable for the uses Gretchen has had for it. Several weeks ago, though, the contents of its CMOS started being lost, and then starting last night it seemed to lock up every time it went to sleep. By "lock up," I mean that its power had to be unplugged or the power button had to be held in for five seconds in order to get it to a state where it could be powered up again. This wasn't a tenable situation, but I could find no solution. I even tried (for the first time ever) rolling back the system to a set point, in this case one from March 7th (it wasn't anything I created). But that didn't work either, suggesting the problem might be a failure of hardware, probably somewhere on the motherboard. (It wasn't the video card; I also tried swapping that out.)
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