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One of our dogs, Darwin, likes sleeping on the floor. He’ll occasionally sleep on the couch or on his dog bed, but then he gets too hot and moves to the floor. The other dog, Sierra (named after either the Sierra Nevada Mountains as beautifully described by John Muir or the brewery named after the same mountains, depending on whom you ask), doesn’t get so hot and prefers sleeping on pillows or couches… my spot in the bed if I’m not currently occupying it, etc. One of her sleeping spots is on an old pillow in the bedroom. But apparently, it’s not always that comfortable. When we went to bed last night, this was the scene that greeted us. ...

For a guy who uses computers as much as I do, you would think that I would have better machines at home. But really, no. Our last desktop was eight years old before we replaced it. My laptop was an old Thinkpad X31 - maybe six or seven years old. So, for a combination birthday/Christmas present, I got a new (sort of) laptop. I picked up a refurbished thinkpad X200s from the Lenovo outlet. So far it’s a nice machine: good processor, lots of high speed memory, and a big LED backlit screen. Lenovo sent me notice that they were shipping the laptop today and the next thing I knew, it arrived at the office. The advantages of working 5 miles from the outlet. The only problem is that they didn’t ship all of the parts. I’ve contacted them and they’ll send the dock/dvd. ...

Welcome to my Amish rural paradise, water problems are no extra charge. In this month’s exciting installment, K and I note that we are lacking in water pressure on Saturday night before we go to bed. Sunday rolls around and sure enough, no water. My guess was that either the well pump or the pressure switch had gone bad. We weren’t going to be too happy if it was the pump, since we replaced it less than three years ago. I went out and bought some drinking water, checked the rain barrels to see if we had water for toilets and called the plumber. ...

With apologies to Terry Prachett, I feel like I being dragged (dragging myself?) into the Century of the Fruitbat. As I mentioned a long time ago, I don’t care for Facebook. I prefer my blog. That said, many of my friends and most of my family use Facebook. So I’m going to start a bit of an experiment. I’ve downloaded and installed the Wordbook plugin for my blog software (wordpress). Starting with this post, in theory anything that’s published on the blog gets cross-posted to fb. ...

I need another hobby about like I need a(nother) hole in my head. But at the same time, ya gotta keep life interesting. Several times over the past few years, K and I have talked about keeping bees. I think that next year we’ll finally do it. We’re interested in the bees themselves (hive mind! hive mind!), the pollination and the honey, so why not. I’ve read a couple of books and was originally planning to take a class, but the one I wanted isn’t offered until 2011. But hey why let that stop us. ...

I went out to the garden on Sunday and took a look at how the okra was doing. Now I’m feeling somewhat, um, inadequate… as a gardener. Really, who lets okra get that big. I should have been picking them every two or three days so that the maximum size was only 3-5 inches, not 8-12. In other gardening news, I opened one jar of the pickled peppers early (they should still be pickling for another 3-4 weeks), and they are delicious. ...

I’ve mentioned before that I (we? maybe it’s K’s fault!) seem to be cursed with water problems. Since we like our current house, and the well is drawing very acidic water, we’ll probably continue to have water problems. Two of the more recent ones: Two months ago, we started noticing that the average daily water usage (as shown on the water softener) had gone from 60 gal/day to over 100 gal/day in a very short period of time, maybe two days. Needless to say, K and I were more than a little concerned with where all that water was going. So I ducked under the house and heard the water pump quick cycling: on, off, on, off… Well that’s not supposed to happen. It’s supposed to kick on when the house pressure drops to 30psi, and turn off when it hits 40. We called a plumber, because I’ll do a lot of plumbing, but anything like the water pump that combines water, electricity and problems underground is way out of my league. Turned out that we needed a new pressure tank (my guess: the acidic water ate away at the inner lining of the air bladder). Joy. The next month, the power bill came in very high. Our first thought was, “well, the pump was on a lot last month, so maybe that’s the problem.” It came in high again the next month. We started looking for the source, keeping a log of power use and finally, on Sunday resorted to shutting off all power in the house and adding the breakers back one at a time. I should have guessed - the pump was using a lot of power. Went under the house, watched the pressure build to 40psi, the pump cut off and all the pressure drained back out of the lines until the pump came on again. The cycle repeated on maybe a 30 second period with a 50% duty cycle. Yay! my pump was running half the day. This time, the plumber found that there was a leak at the pump itself and all the water was being dumped back down the well. On the bright side, we weren’t wasting water - just power. :-( One fun thing did come out of all of this, we bought a digital, in-house electricity meter.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? When I planted the garden, I put in a couple of banana pepper plants. I seem to recall that my thinking was along the lines of, “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll plant some banana peppers - I love ’em.” Great in abstract, but I don’t actually have any recipes that call for banana peppers. I only seem to eat them pickled. ...

Last night, I realized that K had quite a few baby animals around the house and that I hadn’t posted any pictures. So, without further ado, may I present the cute ones: The first picture is of a young opossum. He and his siblings were in one of our outdoor enclosures, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well, so he’s back inside for a bit. The next set is a group of baby (week old) snapping turtles - note the remnants of the yolk sack. This is sort of an interesting story. The old non-profit had a snapper that died. However, we knew that the turtle had eggs. So we sent the body over to the vet school’s turtle team where they extracted and incubated her eggs until they hatched in August. These are the her babies. ...

I managed to get into the office a bit early this morning, which meant that I also got to leave a bit early (working as a federal contractor definitely has its perks). The only reason I mention this is because I beat K to the mail and when I reached into the mailbox, there was a rather thick envelope with the non-profit’s name (C/O me). It was from the IRS. Well, the only thing that we have out-standing with the feds is our non-profit status. So, I was a bit nervous in opening it. It felt a bit like opening a college application letter. I was really hoping that, like with the college letter, a thick envelop was a good sign. After all, if you’ve been turned down, they send you a one page letter. If you’ve been accepted, they send you a packet of information. ...