A springtime ramble

I noticed today that my homepage has the sad “sorry I haven’t been writing” message, so I thought maybe I’d try writing a bit. This will probably be one of those odd rambles that I subject my readers (?!) to from time to time.

We are being graced with the fabulous weather that sometimes comes thru this time of year. High 70s – low 80s, sunny sometimes with a high milky haze, occasionally a bit of wind, especially in the late afternoon. It’s great biking weather, and makes my commutes rather delightful. Even in the morning when I’m not all that awake. It’s supposed to stay around until late next week, although I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a dip of cooler wetter weather sooner than that.

I’ve been working quite a bit in both WordPress and Drupal lately: volunteering with the ENA & with the Friends of the Olympia Library, doing WordPress sites, and working on a big work project in Drupal. (When that last is done, I’d like to write more about it.) I find that I’m impressed with the slickness of WordPress and the insane capabilities of Drupal. I seriously just used a fairly standard template for the FOL site, and they’re really happy with it. On the down side, some of the changes to the templating system wrap my brain up in knots. It really should not have been that hard to put a “Home” link in the navigation! And I’d like to widgetize the ENA site. Oh, there’s lots of stuff I’d like to do with that site, but I don’t know how much of it will actually happen.

My volunteering isn’t just being the web gal…I’m now Secretary for both of those organizations. It’s a good position, honestly. Mostly, it’s just typing really fast for an hour or so once a month. What’s not to like? With the ENA, I also put together the last newsletter (in OpenOffice, which was moderately insane, but came out ok) and organized the last Garden Walk, which was last Sunday. I was all in knots about that last, because I procrastinated so hard on actually getting the gardens set. But I think people had fun, and four gardens was about right. Five would’ve been too many! IMHO, the last garden was a bit far of a walk from the others, but it was so lovely!

Maybe by this time next year our garden will be put together enough that I wouldn’t mind other people looking at it. This morning we got a cubic yard of topsoil and shovelled it into a few raised beds. Tomorrow we’ll be planting. I think those will be all corn. I already have peas, spinach, broccoli, lettuce, radishes, arugula, and nasturniums planted in containers. The lavendar is in bloom, and the smell wafts up into my bedroom window. Everything seems to be doing all right in the south garden, although a couple of transplants are looking a bit raggedy. I think I’ve even ordered beneficial bugs enough ahead of time to keep the aphids in check in the front trees! If I could accomplish anything in the garden this year, that would make me most pleased and proud. The trees are lovely and the shade is delightful, but when the aphids take over…. Ew. That’s all I can say about that.

The back, on the other hand….

It’s not entirely switching the topic to say that I’m pondering writing an essay about field bindweed. (Also known as perennial morning glory.) If you’ve looked at any of my recent links on the topic in delicious, you’ll know that it is the most insane invasive weed ever. I’ve been thinking for a while that I want to try writing non-fiction in a more serious way. I noticed that most of my reading the last couple of years has been non-fiction. (Check out my Goodreads list for the last year. Out of about 60 books, less then a dozen are fiction.) I remember somebody (who?!) saying that it makes sense to write what you like to read. So…time to try non-fiction? And my observation is that I like history, natural history, politics, books that range all over but tell a story centered around a theme. (Joseph Priestly; traffic; happiness; photosynthesis, etc.) Field bindweed has been a constant in our life since we moved into our house. Makes sense, then, to try my hand at writing about it. We’ll see how that comes out. When I’m done with this, I’m off to the library, and maybe I’ll do some more research there.

What else is going on? I’m twittering a lot, and finally unprotected my feed during SXSW. (@epersonae, btw) I don’t know that I’m ever going to write a big wrap-up post. SXSWi ’09 happened to fall in the middle of a pretty bad funk. The event itself was amazing in all sorts of ways, but before and after, not so much. At this remove, of course, what stands out are the social moments: Dylan, Andrea, Ralph and I in the Radisson lobby talking; Fray Cafe; the MetaFilter meetup; dinner with Simon & Thomas. Also, Dori Smith is a delightful human, and helped turn what was otherwise a really low day entirely around.

My other creative impulse of late, besides the bindweed essay, is to use Drupal to write myself a life-tracking web app. Put together all the bits and pieces that I like in other apps into something all my own. Maybe I’ll even do some crazy stuff with graphs. 🙂 I’ll probably use CCK fields and Views to do most of it, so if anybody’s interested, and I actually do it, I’d be happy to export stuff for others to use.

That’s probably enough of that for now. Time to get back outside and enjoy the day!