Happy father's day, Dad. For some things my brother has learned from Dad, check out this photo album.

My brother Mike has started a podcast, which makes four that are hosted here on Brendoman.com. Here's his first episode, and here's the feed you can use to subscribe to it.

   

I caught a catterpillar nibbling on my parsley in my garden. Emma and I put it in a little jar from a bug hunting kit she has and it became our pet for a few days. Then it formed a cocoon and after a few weeks a butterfly came out.

Oh, yes. Temporary tattoo paper for my inkjet printer. Emma gets one or two tattoos a day (part of her potty training), and now I can make some custom ones for her. Homestar Runner tattoo? A picture of her friend? The sky's the limit. I may even have to make a Brendoman.com tattoo. If you have any requests, just email me the graphic and I'll put it on one of the pages.

I’m feeling a little introspective tonight…we’ll see where this goes. I’ve been thinking a lot about my character lately—where I’ve come from, what examples of good humans surround me (and have been around me in the past) and about what I’ve done with what I know. I think it all boils down to my reaction to the playground injustice. (You know the story—you are on the playground, minding your own business, some idiot does something stupid and then, there you are, up against the wall for the rest of recess because the teacher decided to punish collectively.)There are two types of people in this world: one type accepts this punishment calmly, realizing that, at one time or another, he or she probably caused an incident resulting in recess grounding and that this is some sort of payback method; the other type screams ‘unfair’ and proceeds to tell the whole story, every minute detail, in order to escape punishment or to somehow render the whole world right again. I’ll let you guess which type I am. (Hint: it’s not the first one.)

If you still don’t have a clue, here’s some more evidence:

I can be a femi-nazi. I get worked up over the most inane things if they are even remotely sexist.

I’m angry. I’ve been working on this for at least 10 years, and it seems to get worse. I just need the emotional release I get from yelling or something. Unfortunately, I always seem to let it go around others.

At least once a week I want to completely submerge myself in a television drama (usually 2 or 3 episodes—thank you TBS—last summer it was Dawson’s; this summer it’s Ed) so that I don’t have to think about how much I suck. Or how much other people suck. Or how little of anything makes sense.

And that’s just three—I think if I thought of more I might have to watch TV all night.

I guess the point is that I think I am stuck in perpetual playground mode, and I’m the little girl everyone loves to hate—the tattletale. What more is a tattletale than someone who thinks her existence is more important than anyone else? The crazy thing is that I’m working so hard to perpetuate an existence for a person that I don’t even like.

By the way, this is Sara, not Danny. Please don’t call him tomorrow and ask if he needs to go to the nuthouse. As for me…you all have come to expect this by now.

We ate our first cutting from the garden tonight. I harvested both the Simpson lettuce, buttercrunch, spinach and India mustard. I also pulled a green onion. We made it into a salad with some fetta cheese and ranch dressing. I thought it tasted alright. And I haven't come down with a flesh-eating virus (yet). I planted a couple of cucumber plants this week and they're starting to come up now.

I've got my brother Mike set up with his own brendoman.com weblog. Check it out and leave him a comment. You can find pictures of him here. Stop in at his new site and leave him a comment. If you RSS, then you may want to subscribe to his feed.

Mike has uploaded some photos from his visit over the weekend. There's some very good stuff. He made a whole album with pictures of Dixie, my parents' new dog. His new camera lets you stitch photos together into a panorama. And, of course, he has some good ones of Emma.

We had some nice rain here over the weekend, and my garden is coming right along. Most of my greens have sprouted and are filling in nicely. The carrots seem to be doing well, too, even if only four out of the eight seeds that I planted have come up. So far I haven't seen any sprouts in the square planted with nasturtiums, unless this is not a weed. The birds have enjoyed eating my basil and parsley. Since my cat wasn't keeping them away, I had to install an owl decoy, which I happened to have in my garage. Dad had this in his hangar to keep birds from building nests in his plane, but it didn't work. And one day we were down there with Emma and she said she wanted to keep it. When she asks dad for something, she always gets it. So she carried it around our house for a few weeks like it was a baby. Then it went into the garage until now. It seems to be helping; the two remaining basil plants may just survive.

A couple of Saturdays ago I built a garden box, hauled a truckload of horse manure and mixed my soil. For the next several days I watered the soil and turned it until it seemed ready to be planted. I used some string and nails to divide it into 16 1'x1' sections. I numbered them in a notebook so I could keep track of what's planted in each square. The grid below shows how the garden is layed out. The north side is on top, and if you look at the pictures you can see the school in the background. The school is to the north of us.

And here's what I have in each square:
1. I'm planning on putting a tomato plant here.
2. Planning on cucumbers here. Both of these will be climbers, so I need to build something for them to climb on.
3. No plans for this square yet. Any ideas?
4. Planning on putting a pepper plant here.
5. India Mustard.
6. I hope to plant marigold seeds this weekend.
7. I put in four basil plants from the greenhouse yesterday.
8. Parsley (from the greenhouse).
9. Carrots
10. Butter crunch lettuce.
11. Onions (from sets.)
12. Oregano (from the greenhouse).
13. Seeded Simpson lettuce.
14. Bloomsdale spinach
15. Chives (from the greenhouse).
16. Planning on planting nasturtium seeds. The leaves and the flowers are edible, so it will be a fun one for Emma.

So far it's been fun and relaxing to come home from work, look things over, water a bit and pull some weeds. The onion sets sprang right up, but the carrots I planted a week ago are a little slower. This picture may show them finally sprouting, or maybe those are weeds. I really have no idea. When I was putting out the parsley yesterday a sprig broke off, so I took it inside and when I cooked some ground beef for dinner I added some chopped fresh parsley. Emma usually hates little green things on her food, but when I told her what it was she said she loved it.