Apparently I Still Have A Blog

And I haven't posted anything to it since April of 2009.

Recent Plant Acquisitions

I exercised my employee discount at work yesterday and purchased four northern high bush blueberry plants and six strawberry plants. The blueberry varietal breakdown is as follows:

• Vaccinium corymbosum 'Elliott'
• Vaccinium corymbosum 'Toro'
• Vaccinium corymbosum 'Darrow'
• Vaccinium corymbosum 'Duke'

All of these are of the northern high-bush type. Ideally, I wanted to get varieties that produced small to medium sized fruit as that's what's best for baking. Sadly, we didn't sell any that had that particular trait. Apparently, for the average consumer, bigger is better when it comes to blueberries.

For the strawberries, the varietal breakdown goes like this:

• 3 Fragaria virginiana x chiloensis 'Rainier'
• 3 Fragaria virginiana x chiloensis 'Tri-Star'

An interesting side-note about strawberries is that the common strawberry bush is actually a hybrid of the north american and chilean strawberry. The american parent provides the taste and the chilean parent provides the fruit size.

Glad Tidings

I've managed to secure a position as a software tester with a local 3rd party insurance benefits provider. Oddly enough, on the same day as I was offered this job I was also offered a position as an A- contractor at a certain "software giant in Redmond." I engaged in a fair bit of fretting about which position to take, but in the end it came down to the software testing position being more likely to provide me with the basic skills I need to make good progress in the career I'm trying to create.

So yeah, I'm sad that I won't be working at the garden nursery anymore but I'm excited to be getting started in my new "profession."

Red Robin Menu Widget

Red Robin has this cool web widget that lets me calculate the nutritional content of items on their menu. I had myself a chicken caeser wrap with an extra side of fries last night. The information about my meal that the widget gave me was as follows:

• Calories: 1634
• Grams Fat: 78
• Grams Fiber: 14
• WW Points: 38

Saturday night I ate the second half of the pint of Ben & Jerry's I bought on Friday night. I've been eating two of those big chocolate chip cookies everyday on my breaks at work. I've been eating like this for the last pretty much since I started my new job. I'm not eating tons of junk food every day, but I'm definitely "splurging" a whole heck of a lot more than I have in the last year.

Here's the rub, though. I've been getting so much exercise from my new job that I've lost weight the last two weeks and there's a good chance that I'll manage to lose weight again next Saturday.

It's kind of crazy. I guess the added bonus of this job is that I can eat a lot more food now than I used to.

What I'm Planting This Year

As far as the previously published yard plan is concerned, I'm only executing a small fraction of it this year. This will likely be the only section I'll ever execute, in fact. I'm a renter and there's just not a lot of incentive to pour time and money into the yard unless I know I'm going to be here long enough to really benefit from the investment.

All I will do is install the vegetable garden and the strip of sunflowers along the southern border of the property. Yesterday, I used my employee discount for the first time to get myself a number of seeds. I purchased:

• Italian Roma Tomatoes
• SMR-58 Pickling Cucumbers
• Tyee Hybrid Spinach
• Waltham 29 Broccoli
• Autum Beauty Sunflowers
• Soybeans
• Russet Norkotah Seed Potatoes

I may plant some strawberries as well. I'll have to decide on those pretty soon if I'm gonna pull the trigger on that one.

Right now, the next step is to lay out the borders of my beds and dig up the sod in those areas. Gosh, sometimes it seems like the only landscaping task I execute with any regularity is digging up sod.

What I would do . . .

. . . if I lived in this house for the next ten years and had the spare cash and time.

"LA Port Import Traffic Collapses in February"!!!!!!!!

Normally, I'm a big fan of Calculated Risk. I've been reading that blog for quite a few months new. Probably since at least mid-September. That being said, I have a minor quibble with the entry of the above title.

I saw the post's title, looked at the graph and thought, "Oh crap!! Things are getting worse!!" When I got to the list of reasons posted for the decline I immediately latched onto bullet point five for comfort:

Due to the lack of volume and Chinese New Year, Maersk 6700 TEU/week vessel did not make any calls in LA during the month of February (which is traditionally a low volume month).

If you look at the other years displayed on the graph, they "all" have a saw-tooth pattern to them. It's not crazy to assume that sometime in the very near future the derivative of the volume flux through the Port of Los Angeles will switch from negative to positive.

Heh. I just used "derivative" in a sentence.

So yeah, things are worse. That's a big delta from max to min. But, it shouldn't continue going down for at least a little while.

I'd also like to point out that the Loaded Out curve has an uptick in it for the first time since the middle of last year. Is this uptick the result of seasonal adjustment making the graph less accurate (it happens sometimes) or is it an actual uptick? If so, does that mean something? I, for one, would like to know.