All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go

     Well, this weekend has been somewhat busy, and yes, eventful.  I guess I’m not sure where to begin.  To basically sum it up, I have a garden update, a website update, I washed my car, and went on a date.

     So first item: garden update.  I would like to say that I am still planting flowers.  I finally have the herbs in and two rows of flowers, but I still have more flowers to go.  Time has really been a problem lately.  While the days are extended (I LOVE summer!), I have more projects than time.  As such, the update is really just to show you how my garden grows (ha ha, catch the reference?).

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     An asteroid hit the moon!  Okay, okay, this isn’t big news.  Stuff crashes into the moon all the freaking time.  What with not having an atmosphere and all, it is regularly bombarded by space debris (how do you think it got its cratered face?) and is actually responsible for shielding Earth a little bit.  Through physics I haven’t understood, when something intersects Earth’s orbit, it is more likely to hit the moon (I believe this is the case, I could be mistaken).  Not to say stuff doesn’t come for Earth, but most of that just burns up thanks to our beloved friend, oxygen.  Actually, the atmosphere is primarily made of nitrogen (78%) with oxygen coming in a distant second (21%).  Then there are trace other gases.  But I digress.

     The asteroid that struck the moon was only 25cm wide, meaning I’ve found a couple rocks in my garden bigger than it, but it struck the moon going 38km/s!  This is the equivalent to 17 BILLION joules of kinetic energy, also equivalent to 4 tons of TNT going off (see article).  I wish I could lob some of the rocks I have at the moon that fast.

     Anyway, this fascinating article came to me via NASA’s Science News mailing list.  If you think it’s just for nerds, think again!  Well, now that you’ve thought twice about it and come to the same conclusion that it is for nerds, embrace your nerd-ity and sign up for it.  I’ve gotten articles about terraforming Mars, comets, planetary alignments, new extra-solar discoveries, and developments on the mission to go back to the moon and set up for a month long stay.  This article partly deals with that since we’re still finding out just how much space-junk collides with the moon so the astronauts can avoid becoming swiss cheese.

     So here is the article, it’s not terribly long so read it.  Plus there’s a short clip showing the explosion (it’s not dramatic, but still cool):

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/13jun_lunarsporadic.htm?list784223

     You are all probably dying for another update on my gardening project, aren’t you?  What?  You’re sick of reading about it?  You never liked reading about it???  I should’ve guessed, but you jerks!

     Ha ha!  Really, no need to call the psychiatric ward.  It’s just been one of those days.  Anyways, the extension to my garden has been dug, fertilized, and tilled for over a week now, I just haven’t had a lot of time to go out and work in it.  Between working everyday until five, napping (days start early, usually around 6:30am and I still have a hard time getting myself to bed before 11pm, at the earliest), and something that vaguely resembles school, I find myself short on time for much of anything.  Not only that, but it’s right around the hottest time of the day when I get home from work (a little past) and going out there just to sweat profusely over a minimal amount of effort is something of a psychological deterrent.  I understand that often the first foot from the ground is the hottest, but this can be ridiculous!  Sometimes I wonder if I don’t have at least mild hyperhidrosis.  It’s really embarassing.

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     So I took over chronomaps.com from Hilton, seeing as how he decided against the project for now.  I’m working on getting it to be a genealogy website for my family (and really anyone who’s interested), but it’s a long ways from being anything that useful yet.  I have installed a forum which will be used (hopefully) for discussion amongst family members and researchers, but for now it is just an open forum.  Why not go check it out?  You know you want to. 

     You can also access it by going directly to www.chronomaps.com.  Just so you know, the index page there sucks.  I threw it on there to have something and I haven’t had time to make something more presentable.  I only installed the forums because it’s a (relatively) quick process.  I’m not as cool as Hilton and didn’t create my own, but grabbed a copy of phpBB, which is a pretty robust and cool forum if you ask me.

OK, just a brief notice. Most of you have probably seen the “blog verification” junk comments. Apparently these were a forerunner to the deluge of spam my blog was about to receive. Someone in Amsterdam has recognized my obviously excellent writing style and has chosen my blog to be the one to extend his (terrible) advertising campaign. The problem is that I don’t exactly have a large audience… Either they haven’t noticed this or they figured I would acquire one soon enough (I mean, you just can’t keep writing this good a secret for long!).

So now in order to comment you’ll have to login. I actually have no idea how this works, other than I have a little option that says “make users login and give me their soul in order to comment”, or something like that. I’m not really keen on putting up this extra hassle for any of my 3-5 readers to comment, but I’m also getting sick of baleeting all the $#*&^! junk-posts I keep getting. I’ve had to baleet ~15 of them in just the past two days alone!!!

Hopefully this will stem the tide of unwanted garbage befalling my fair blog and that you’ll understand. When you get to be this popular and famous, you’ll have to take similar measures as well.

     Okay, well the revisit of phase three has been finished.  It was quite a bit of work and I noticed that this section is a lot rockier.  In fact, it was surprisingly difficult to dig into.  I’m certain the patch I first dug up was used as a garden (see past posts for photographic evidence of this) so it had almost no rocks to speak of.  In fact, I think I discovered the spot where the rocks were deposited.  It was right at the end of the new section I dug up.  I’m glad nothing with deep roots will be growing in that setion.

     So my carrots, lettuce, and spinach have made no appearances.  It’s been plenty of time.  Weeds have grown in their spot, but none of them.  So I got on to this wide Internet of ours to find some tips.  Well, the first thing I noticed was the recommended pH.  I found various recommendations, but they were in the range of 6.0 to 6.8.  Mine is at 7.5.  In case you’re not familiar with the scale, it runs from 0 to 14, with zero corresponding to something like battery acid (extremely dangerous stuff, never mess with batteries!) and fourteen being some heavy duty cleaners.  Lye is really alkaline, up there on the scale but I don’t think it’s at the top.

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     Remember that little battle droid that Luke Skywalker was sparring with on the Millenium Falcon while training under Obi Wan to become a Jedi?  The little orb thing?  MIT has built one (sort of) and it’s on the ISS!

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/01jun_spheres.htm?list784223