St. Baldrick's Donation Winners & One More Chance to Win

So, did y'all think I forgot about drawing the prize winners for the St. Baldrick's donors?

Well, I did get around to doing it this morning. I entered all the names here (one chance in the regular drawing for each $10 donated or one chance in the grand prize for each $100 donated), clicked Randomize, and chose the name at the top of the list.

I did this for each drawing and came up with...

Jimi
-for her choice of one item from my shop

Kristen- for the grand prize-
-anything from Aurora's shop
-one of Jenny's prints
-a full set of grocery bags. (I'll even let you pick the fabric! Or, you could swap this out for one of my aromatherapy necklaces.)

And thanks again to all of you that either donated or posted about this (or both). We really appreciate it!

For those of you that didn't win, you still have a chance. Just leave a comment here guessing the weight of the hair they cut off (total for the three of us). Whoever gets the closest will get a set of Aurora's upcycled, cork stitch-stoppers.

Just to help with the guessing, here's what Aurora's pony tail looked like; mine and Jenny's were a bit more puny.



Congratulations to Jimi and Kristen and good luck to the rest of you!

Lasagna Gardening 2008

Here’s what I was up to this last week.

I've sheet composted an area of grass (15 feet by 25 feet) that’s to become this year’s vegetable garden. Sheet composting is also known as lasagna gardening and is basically just composting in place, adding all the layers spread out where they'll eventually be for the garden.

And special thanks to Finny for all the insanely early gardening inspiration. And, yes, her pictures of seedlings were like garden porn to me, especially as I looked out at my celibate, snow-covered yard.

(Before and after photos)

I guess I've described the process fairly well here and here (layer well-soaked newspaper, composted manure, leaves, hay), but I’ve figured out one little change that I hope will make a big difference, at least in terms of the rate of decomposition. This time, I soaked the hay in buckets of water for between 30 minutes and several hours (actually some of them up to 24 hours) before adding them as the final layer.

I've had the hay sitting out in the elements for a year or two so I’d hoped it would be fairly rotten, but here in Colorado, apparently, things don’t rot. They just desiccate. I figured that soaking it first would help it to hold a decent amount of water when it was layered in. In the front yard the layers did, eventually, break down into compost, but I need this garden to get a move on (last frost date is in less than a month and I’ve got okra to plant).

The thing I didn’t anticipate was how gorgeous (to me anyway) the soaking liquid would be.

After sitting for awhile, it started giving off a fairly nice, composty smell and the water turned dark brown and foamy. I think that it actually formed a good compost tea because of the fact that there was so much air trapped in the stalks. Normally, when you make compost tea (yes, I’ve done it; it’s a bit of a pain, but worth it if you’ve got plant funguses) you need to run a fish tank bubbler through it to keep the biological activity on the aerobic end of things. This is important because if you get the anaerobic bacteria breeding (those that grow in low oxygen conditions), it’ll get ripe and nasty, which obviously is not a good thing.

The other thing about using hay is the fact that, as I believe Dig this Chick mentioned, hay tends to have weed seeds in it. Straw would work better. And shredded straw would be even better than that. But, hay is what I have (free from CraigsList) so hay is what I’m using. I’m actually hoping that any surviving seeds will be kick started into growing by the soaking. Then the tarps that I’ve covered the whole thing with, in addition to keeping all the moisture in, will hopefully kill off any sprouting seeds. Really, though, anything that grows out of this will be so simple to pull that I’m not terribly worried.

I swear, as this composts, the ground becomes like crumbly, chocolate cake (like this from last year) that you can easily poke your fingers into for planting.

I hope I hope I hope.

(Note- All photo credits, except this last one, Jenny Gay. Thanks, Jen!)

Picture Sale

I just popped in to tell you about a great photo developing sale over at AdoramaPix. I'm not sure how long it'll last, but I have a feeling it will only be through this weekend.

They're all on vacation for Passover (which I think is a very cool thing- the whole company taking an entire week off in the spring) and they come back on Monday. Which also means that any orders that come in while they're gone will take an extra couple of days to process. But, I'm totally OK with that for half priced printing.

8x10's are only $0.99 (normally $2.29) and 16x20's are only $4.95 (normally $9.95). I think the bigger ones are only available in the Endura Lustre. And it also looks like there is some great pricing in the Endura Silk as well. Also, you get 25 free prints when you sign up for a free account.

Jenny's bought some pictures from these guys in the past and they're very good quality. They explain why they're better than most here.

Personally, I'll be going through some of our pictures to put up on the walls. Since we've moved in, Jeff and I haven't been able to decide/agree on what art to put up, so our walls remain empty. And we've been here almost 4 years.







These are just a few of the ones that I'm thinking of putting up in a couple of groupings. They were easy to choose because I think they'll make nice collages of different sized pictures. All of these, by the way, were taken by my very talented sister.

The first group was taken in our hotel room in Tennessee and the second was taken at the Tennessee Aquarium.







Beyond those, I still need to decide which of my favorite pictures to order.

And yes, I am aware that I was just explaining how many pictures I already have and ordering these is not exactly deCluttering, but there you have it.

Misty, Water-Colored Memories

I have to admit it. I've got a lot of old pictures. Not only have I inherited all of my mom's pictures of us as kids, but quite a few that were my grandma's as well. And yah, I, myself, have taken plenty to add to the chaos.

I've got boxes of them. The biggest problem is that everytime I sit down to organize and scan them, I get distracted by how fantastic they are. Not fantastic as in Wow, look how great I look or What perfect composition, but more like Oh my God, I remember that! and That was so much fun!

When I was looking for a picture of me bungee jumping, I did just that. I wanted to post this picture then, but needed to double check with Rachel first.


This is a non-photoshopped picture of the two off us about ten minutes after jumping out of the hot air balloon that's in the background. It was a sort of misty morning, which explains the apparent unreality of the balloon.

Rachel wrote on the back of the picture, "Wendy, we were awesome!!!"

I'd like to think that we still are.

DeCluttering While Increasing my Dependence on Technology

I don't know about the rest of you, but I never use our phone books anymore. The only circumstances that I can foresee needing them is in the event of a power outage, when I wouldn't be able to access the oh-so-helpful, everything-I-could-possibly-ever-need, storehouse-of-information that is the internets. Occasionally, my in-laws will ask to see a yellow pages and I will kindly direct them to our computer, but I think they're adapting nicely.

I've saved several phone books for present wrapping and yet-to-be-determined craft projects (because we can always use paper), but mostly I recycle them. Which, I know, is the lesser of evils. I'd prefer not to see them at all.

And then, fortuitously, Aurora forwarded me a link about how to opt out of their delivery. I had to actually pick up a phone, make a couple of calls and speak to real live humans, but it didn't take long, like 3 or 4 minutes max.

DEX- 1-877-243-8339 (option 2 when I called)
Yellow Book- 1-800-929-3556
Verizon- 1-800-555-4833

[Actually, she sent me this link like a month or two ago and I'd completely forgotten about making the calls until I was reminded of it this weekend while Jeff and I were cleaning the garage (inspired by Chile's Cut the Crap, Declutter-a-thon that I've been participating in for weeks before I knew she was even doing it). Jeff said about the yet to be recycled pile of phone books, something along the lines of... "you can get yourself on a list to keep telemarketers from bothering you, but you can't stop them from delivering phone books". Hummm. That sounds familiar. Don't I know a way to actually do just that?]

So, I've made all the calls this morning and will now be forever phone book free.

I am now going to follow up that helpful information with thoughts about how dependent on technology I have become (you know, in an unhealthy way, not the phone book saving way).

As I believe I've mentioned before, I'm a walking contradiction.

You may have noticed that last month I agreed to participate in a Technology Free day (once a week) that was suggested over at Elements in Time. I know how easily both the computer and the tv can suck away time that would be better spent living life.

While pondering this, I've thought of a lot of situations in which my brain expects technology to save the day, instances in which I've become mentally dependent. I've talked to my siblings about this and here's what we've come up with.

1) I have a DVR on my tv (which is basically like TiVo, in that we can pause, rewind and replay anything we're watching). Because of this, I expect to be able to do the same thing with, honest to God, people.

2) My brother Tommy was standing in the pharmacy, scanning the shelves for a particular cold medicine and he had the urge to use Control F (find) option to locate it. I, myself, have often felt this way with printed text. And, seriously, wouldn't that be great for lost keys and glasses?

3) Jenny's had instances in which she would love to have a Control Z (except she says Command Z cause she uses a Mac and all) to allow her to undo whatever she just did. I must not make the kind of life and death decisions that she does because this has never occurred to me.

4) I can think of quite a few art projects (or household chores) in which Copy & Paste would come in extra handy. Yah, all that effort and thought I just expending on that last thing, could I just quickly repeat it again and again? I've folded one basket of laundry, now just copy it with a Control C and now apply right here to the next basket of laundry with a Control V. And done. Oh, there's another basket of laundry, well Control V again.

Oh, the genius of it.

Happy Earth Day

Oh wow, I have spent way too much time on the someecard site this last week.

Their motto is "when you care enough to hit send". They are so much better than the other ecard sites out there, especially if you have a warped sense of humor (which I do). I find almost everything on it hysterical. And, best of all, they're free.

So, since I don't have the email addresses of all my readers (and it'd probably end up in your spam folder anyway), I'd like to wish you all a happy Earth Day.


PS- Dig This Chick, I think you'd especially like this one.

BlogRolling

Good Morning! How are you all doing this lovely spring day?

I, personally, am sore from a weekend of yard work. I still need to finish up a couple of projects later today and then get some pictures loaded, in case you're interested.

But since it's still chilly outside and the projects involve lots of dripping water (I'll explain later), this morning I've spent the last 2 hours, honest to God- 2 hours, creating a new randomized blog list from BlogRolling.

I hadn't updated my list in quite awhile because it was getting pretty lengthy and I didn't want to make it any longer. For that reason, I've been looking for coding for a randomly updated list.

With this one, every time you refresh the page, 9 new blogs come up. I'm so happy with it. Some of the links even have descriptions if you mouse over it. Halfway through loading the links, I realized that I might like to put in the profile names of all my blog friends, like Elsita has done, but am still undecided. I guess it would be more helpful to have the blog type show up when you mouse over it.

Does anyone have opinions on it? Does anyone ever click on my blogroll?