Every year that I can recall that we’ve dyed Easter eggs, we’ve used Paas dye.
Today I finally decided to figure out what the heck Paas does every other time of year when they’re not selling egg dye, because honestly, I have no idea what the heck else they do, if anything. I’ve never once seen a Paas product that wasn’t Easter egg dye.
The answer is, they don’t do anything else.
The end. I was hoping this post and research would be more interesting, but it’s about as interesting as the fact that the Paas company makes dye.
So we decided on the 2011 Toyota Sienna. Check out this link for an idea of how it is to drive.
We opened up an equity line of credit with our credit union in order to buy the van. This gives us price negotiation flexibility, and the rate was actually lower than the car loan rates we had available to us. Plus, we can write off the interest!
On Wednesday I e-mailed a few dealers in the area to ask a few questions and let them know we were interested, thus opening up the negotiation process. I e-mailed three different internet sales reps at three different dealerships. I have received zero replies. I guess they don’t want to make the sale?
First, I will admit that Colorado vegetable gardening is probably way easier than most other states’. We don’t have a lot of bug, pest, or moisture problems. We’ve been supremely lucky here in that we can spend a full day planting stuff, then spend minimal time maintaining it, and yet we still get a really good yield. It’s very nice.
Sure, we could do a lot more and possibly get better results, but our hands-off approach has worked so far.
The bad thing, of course, is that our growing season is so short. We can’t plant until May, and our first freeze occurs in late September or early October. We get three less growing months than most other regions in the country.
Since we’ve decided – or more correctly, when I overruled Anna’s motion to have a fire-pit – to start planting veggies I can say that we’ve learned an awful lot about food, plants, and farming. I can tell you why cilantro is a pain in the butt, yet so inexpensive to purchase. I can tell you ten different ways a tomato plant can fail. I can tell you that cucumbers grow like weeds, even if you don’t water them. If you like tomatoes, there is nothing better than going to a cherry tomato plant that grew naturally from the seed of last year’s batch of cherry tomatoes and eating them fresh off the vine. I can tell you that Plants that attract bees guarantee garden success. I can tell you how to make excellent compost, and how having foxes that visit your backyard are very helpful in gardening endeavors.
I can also easily say that during our summer and spring months, we eat much better in that we eat so many fresh fruits and vegetables. It doesn’t seem like there’s much of a downside to having a vegetable garden, unless you factor in the risk that it could completely fail. It hasn’t happened to us yet, but it would definitely be maddening to have a spring’s worth of effort yield zero results.
I would fully support any educational program that taught kids how to garden, how plants grow, and where vegetables actually come from – and how much work it can take! It’s useful knowledge – probably more useful than a lot of the stuff they teach kids in school these days. The only downside here is that vegetable growing requires patience, which a lot of kids don’t have. But those that stick with it – I can imagine a child cradling a tomato all the way home to show mom and dad.
So when I read an article that features a quote like this:
“As you know,” she wrote, “food-bearing plants attract pests. Maryland law restricts the use of pesticides on school grounds. Therefore, planting of food bearing plants is prohibited by MCPS.”
I laugh. Any chance at learning is ruined by the chance that what… a rat could show up? And then possibly bite someone and then the school district could be sued? Our society is ridiculous.
Who knew?
Whenever I see prism like colors on meat, that meat goes into the trash, even if it passes the smell test. Something about animal flesh turning colors that look the same as a shimmery oil puddle is off-putting.
Our neighbors gave us half of a Honeybaked ham recently. I ate some just about every day until it started looking like me lucky charms. Turns out we could’ve put it in a casserole or something, and likely survived.
UPDATE: I have the feeling that this story will be the first of many. Also, $700k in debt? Holy hell!
Being owners of a Prius, lots of folks ask us if we’re afraid that at any minute when we’re driving it, we could die. I’m not worried about it. Anna is starting to panic a little bit because every time the news comes on, some Toyota or other has been involved in some kind of incident that the perpetrators of those incidents claim is the infamous “glitch”. Nobody knows if it’s actually the glitch yet, but most folks just assume these days that once you drive a Toyota, you just may not stop!
Bullcrap. I don’t for a minute believe that many of these folks are actually experiencing the glitch – especially this one. It’s become a convenient excuse for driving asshattery that we don’t normally hear about because it happens so often. It’s news and a viable excuse now because – anytime a Toyota is involved – it somehow isn’t your fault anymore.
This post breaks down the math about how statistically likely it is that we will be affected by the Toyota glitch.
if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million—2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.
Basically, driving is just as dangerous as it’s always been.
It’s a bit ridiculous how Toyota is being dragged through the mud, Congressional hearing, etcetera. It’s a crappy problem to have, and they should feel some business pain about it, but it’s completely overblown by the media.
We’re confident enough that it’s not a problem that we’re actually considering the purchase of another Toyota, possibly soon. So take that!
I don’t know why this never got published. Pushing it through now!
This made me pretty happy when I watched it:
For multiple reasons. One, I have a similarly aged son, and if I ever accomplished anything like that, you’re damn right I’d have him there with me and be tearing up. Two, the kid isn’t paying the least bit of attention to his dad, and instead to the commotion and confetti.
So it isn’t just that I’m boring, or Drew is boring, it’s just that, well – everything else is more interesting to babies.
This is a long article regarding our current space program. I’m very pro-space program.
I think it’s important to have a frontier, and to seek it.
As you might know, even though Google has done some questionable things lately, I’m pretty much all-in with their services. Their strategy worked – offered me a bunch of free services, and now it’s too painful to separate from their magical teat.
Now there’s this Google Buzz thing, which I think is supposed to be a competitor to facebook. It looks like it’s pretty much seamlessly integrated into Gmail, which makes it very easy to use, since I’m already in there. I use Google Reader pretty exclusively for my internet news and kitten photo gathering. People could already follow me in Reader, so I imagine Google Buzz makes that a bit simpler for non-Reader types, or at least makes it easier to absorb new people into Reader.
It’s both kind of awesome and kind of scary that one company is going to have so much power over users’ day to day lives. With very little effort, Google could figure out exactly what my daily routines are each day (GPS on my Google Android phone, Google Latitude, geotagging on my PicasaWeb albums) and tailor advertising specifically to what I do and care about. That’s incredibly cool from a tech perspective. From a privacy perspective? Eek.
For instance, I ran that My Tracks program on my way to work this morning, just to see the route and distance I travel. Google now knows that, between six and seven in the morning during a weekday, I go to a particular building.
As does any hitman you may have hired to off me. Dammit!
I should do this next time we get a dusting like you folks on the east coast.
Cool.
But I wont’ have dancing wallpaper:
I’m still learning how to use the dang thing. I’ve gotten pretty handy with it, but there’s still plenty of “WTF” moments that occur.
