Potatoes In A Can

We are growing potatoes. In a trashcan. And so far it's working. I read about this somewhere in cyberspace and thought it looked like fun, so the boys and I are trying it. Oh, and we planted them on St. Patrick's Day. That's the traditional day for planting potatoes.

The boys drilled holes in the sides and bottom of an old trashcan. Then we put some dirt in the bottom of it. Then we cut up two potatoes that had started sprouting eyes. We cut about an inch square of potato around the eye. Then we placed those squares of potato with the eyes in the trashcan and covered them with dirt. Then we walked away and promptly forgot that we had planted potatoes.

Not really. We checked on those things constantly, and after two weeks, just as we had decided that our spuds had either rotted or had been genetically modified to not reproduce, we saw sprouts. Glorious sprouts.

Now those sprouts are growing like crazy. We need to keep a careful eye on them though, because we need to keep dumping dirt on top of the plants whenever they get too tall. Let me explain.

Potatoes grow from sideways shoots that grow out from the main stalk of the plant. So, if we just let the first potato squares grow, the stalks would get tall, but only the shoots that the stalk sent out under the dirt would grow potatoes.

So, you wait until the stalks get about 6 inches above the dirt, then you cover everything up with dirt again. Then the stalks will grow up again through the dirt, but in the meantime you've added more space for the stalks to send out more shoots under the dirt. So, you keep doing this until the trashcan is filled to the top with dirt. After that you wait until the tops turn brown and fall over. Then you dump out your trashcan and harvest your spuds.

Here are pictures after twice being covered with dirt, and I covered them again last week but didn't take pictures yet.

Orange You Glad I'm Honest?!

Yesterday was an interesting day. Andy and I had a few errands to run, but we did a little shopping too, and generally had a very nice day. On Sunday we had gone grocery shopping at Safeway and I had gotten a large box of oranges. When I got to the cashier, I noticed that a couple oranges in the box were moldy - yuck! I told the cashier that I didn't want them and was getting ready to tell her that I didn't want a replacement, either, but before I could say it she had called the produce manager and was asking for someone to bring me a replacement box. After a minute the produce manager arrived and he took the lid off the box and we inspected all the oranges to make sure they were all okay. Then the box was put on the bottom of my shopping cart which was being loaded with my bagged groceries. Sunday evening I was thinking about those oranges and I didn't seem to remember the cashier ringing them up, so I got out my receipt to look. Sure enough, those oranges were not on the receipt. I knew I was going out Tuesday morning, so I decided that I would go by the store and see if the same cashier was there and try to pay for my oranges. Well, the cashier wasn't there, so I talked to another one. When I told her what had happened, she looked at me like I had three heads. Then she said, "And you want to pay for them?" When I told her yes, she said she needed to call a manager about this. She picked up the phone and turned her back toward me and the conversation (her side, anyway) went like this - "There's a lady here who says she didn't get charged for her oranges and now she wants to pay for them. Yeah, oranges. Yeah, she didn't get charged. Yes, pay. I don't know. She says she wants to pay for them. Yeah, I know. Okay. Bye." Then she turned around and said that "management" had said not to worry about it, and Merry Christmas from Safeway. While that was very nice and I am grateful, I can't shake the feeling that they thought I was just a little looney and just wanted to get me out of the store! Oh, well. At least I don't feel like I'm eating ill-begotten oranges now!

I worked it out with the post office about carrier pickup for my packages for eBay. It turns out that they do indeed pick up packages here, but since our carrier is a contracted one and not actually a USPS employee, the web site wasn't letting me enter information for pickup. The postmaster here told me to just call before 10:00 on any day I needed our mail carrier to pick up packages and she would get them when she delivered my mail. How cool is that?! I have two packages to go out today, so I called the post office and said I had packages for pickup, they said address, please? I said my address, and they said thank you, your packages will be picked up when your mail is delivered. End of conversation. That was easy!

Tomorrow night we are going to Outback Steak House with Jerry's mom and having our Christmas with her. This is the third year we've done this and it seems to work out pretty well. She usually spends Christmas eve and Christmas day with her other children so a few years ago we just decided to get together, have a nice meal out, then do the present thing back at our house afterwards. I haven't been to Outback since last Christmas when we went, so I am looking forward to it. The boys and I sometimes fracture words and turn them around just to make funny different words, and last year in the car on the way to dinner we were dissecting the words "Outback Steak House" and one of the renditions became Steakback Outhouse. So, now that's what we call it. I never claimed to have a normal family!

Nuts To You

What an interesting day. Tom started his new job today. He left at 4 AM to be sure he was there on time. He called at 5:25 to let us know he had arrived. It was a little worse getting home, though. He said he took a wrong turn somewhere (Albuquerque?!) and ended up in Alexandria and had to figure his way out of there and back on the beltway. He is working for an HVAC company and right now they are finishing up work on a rec center in Fairfax. Tom said he helped build a catwalk on the side of the building today that will be used to access the new units that were installed earlier. It's too early to say if he likes it or not - the initial jitters haven't worn off yet.

Sometimes the boys tease me about what they call my "family orientation". I am a stickler for eating dinner together at the table with no television on, and I try at least on Sundays for us all to eat breakfast together. I am also known for initiating "family pizza and movie nights", "video game time", where all of us compete against one another, and other things which really bug them sometimes. Oh, well - there will be time enough for everyone to be off on their own doing their own things. Right now we are blessed enough to all be in one place, so I think a little (or a lot) of "togetherness" is nice! The boys didn't see it that way when I initiated a "family split-and-stack-firewood-for-the-whole-winter day". Anyway, in true "family orientation" spirit, I made everyone get up to see Tom off to work this morning. Yes, at 4 AM. To be honest, I think everyone kind of had the jitters, because all of us had trouble getting to sleep and it really wasn't difficult waking anyone when it was time for him to leave. Jerry gave him last-minute map checks and I made sure he didn't forget his lunch. One day very soon, we PROMISE to treat him according to his age - but not today! I don't expect that he'll have the same send-off tomorrow morning, but you never can tell with this bunch.

In science Andy was learning about Venus (the planet - not the woman!). The atmosphere is so thick there that scientists use radar to "see" the surface as they can't get a clear picture through the thick clouds covering the planet. As an experiment, I had to make up a model for Andy to map out using a kind of radar. I crumpled newspaper into a small box and then poured plaster over it, creating hills and valleys in the box when the plaster dried. Then I made a numbered grid on paper and covered the box with it. Andy had not seen the box and so didn't know what was in it. He had to mark a stick (we used a wooden kebob skewer) with measurements, then poke the stick through each grid and mark the measurement on a corresponding paper. By using the measurements when he was finished, he was able to make a "picture" of what was in the box based on his measurements. Then he took the paper off to see how close he was, and he had mapped our Venus-in-a-box perfectly. The experiment took a while, but it was a lot of fun. Low-tech, but it worked!

I wonder what it means when the nut trees and pine trees are VERY productive? Does it mean a harsh winter or something? Yesterday Andy, Hilda and I picked up shagbark hickory nuts that had fallen from the three trees near our driveway. We have never seen this many before. Most of the time the squirrels get just about all of them and we are lucky if we get a few. Not this year. We picked up an entire bucketful, plus a huge Tupperware bowlful, and Andy and I went back out today and filled a cardboard box top with several more. Looks like we'll have nut bread this year! While we were out today, Andy and I noticed that there were lots of pinecones lying on the ground, too - more than I can remember seeing in a long time. Today was a beautiful fall day and we really enjoyed being outside. Andy wanted to do his lessons outside, so that's what we did.

Jerry is hard at work on his truck. The motor on his brown truck (his baby) had finally died, so he ordered another one which finally came in and he has been hard at work putting in the new engine. A while back Jerry was working on a house when the man who lived across the street came to the job to ask if Jerry would give him a price to put siding on his house when he was finished that job. Well, they started talking and it turns out that this man painted vehicles for a living and Jerry just happened to need new paint on his baby, and so they worked out a deal - siding for paint. Shortly after starting on Jerry's truck, the man found out that he had cancer. It took him a long time to finish the truck because in between he needed surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation. Jerry felt badly and kept telling Lonnie that it didn't need to be finished, but Lonnie kept at it, and he finished painting it. It was two-tone, brown with beige down the middle, but Lonnie got the brown done and was going to get to the beige later on, but he just got too sick to finish it, and we felt terrible that he was pushing himself to finish. We brought it home as it was, and I guess it will stay that way unless Jerry decides to paint the beige himself. Sadly, Lonnie died a few weeks ago. His wife called here a few days before and said that Lonnie was asking for all of his friends to come visit him, as he knew he wasn't doing well. Lonnie was a good guy, and Jerry really misses him. Anyway, soon his truck will be back on the road, with a new engine and new paint.

Whew - long post this time! I really should start posting more often and maybe each entry would be shorter!