Get Learnin’ On Pickin’
We are still members of our farm. Last week we got a bunch of turnips, some garlic, and some peas.
One of the opportunities we've had available to us as members is the ability to go pick fresh asparagus and strawberries. We've never done it, because in our heads it was just too far to drive, and possibly wasn't worth the effort. This year we wanted to do it because we thought it'd be a fun activity for us and the wee man. We weren't wrong - but we weren't entirely right.
Google Maps puts it at roughly an hour and a half a way. I think that those directions are based on the fact that a lot of the roads to the farm weren't paved. Well, now they are - we got there in little over an hour, which required us to take various county roads that traveled in straight cardinal directions.
You see those nice clean rows of veggies behind Owen? Our strawberries weren't there - they were in a weed-filled field. And by weeds I mean undesirable plants that you could smoke if you were really inclined to.
There were tons of berries in there, but the rows were hard to discern, and there was a lot of weeds to fight. We ended up with a pretty good haul, but only made it halfway through our row before Owen decided he was done stumbling over weeds. He was a good sport and made it quite a ways and impressed many of our fellow pickers - but any strawberries he picked did not make it into our box, so he wasn't very helpful - the moocher. They all went directly into the mouth:
I think we're going to keep doing this annually. It's pretty fun, and I think it may be somewhat valuable to teach the kids that strawberries don't actually come from plastic clamshells at the grocery store. We're far away from that lesson, but it probably won't hurt to start early. He wasn't bothered by bugs or weeds or scratchy plants - which was really cool to see.
The farm also takes volunteers to do farm work - this is something else I'd like our family to be a part of in the future. Again, it'd be neat to have the kids associate that food comes from somewhere and is a lot of work.
The whole album from the pickin' experience can be viewed by clicking on our bounty below:
The Importance of Two-Fisting
It's important to watch TV with all applicable remotes handy.
Father’s Day Present
Anna got Owen and I matching-ish shirts. They are Colorado Rockies Dresses with the number two on them (for the player, not the act). Owen's says, well - you can see. Mine says Daddy.
You can imagine how big my dress is.
This one, it goes to fifteen
Fifteen months. Crazy.
At first we went to start taking pictures, and it was like this:
And then we went outside to take pictures and it was like this:
And then eventually we were able to make it stop with this:
More Stalking
I rode my bike to work. I took this path:
View Bike to work in a larger map
Which is about two miles longer than it needed to be because I wasn't paying attention and missed the bike path that is just north of C-470. Oops.
Click on the red dot denoting the end for some statistics, and look at the elevation graph. The ride home is going to be waaaaay uphill. Hooray!
The 14th Month
Things I should've posted but haven't:
Pants aren't allowed in my house. Take heed.
Radio Silence
It's been a while since I've posted. This is because I tried to upgrade the software that powers the site to a different version.
Usually, upgrading the software is straightforward, and a product of me getting very tired of the nag message every time I log in. I usually read the changelogs to make sure nothing will break. This time I did not.
The latest upgrade requires the database software to be upgraded. I didn't read this before upgrading, and as such, every time I tried to log into the site, it greeted me with a message saying my database wasn't the right version, and that I sucked horribly at reading changelogs.
Since I can't actually control that, I took the "let's wait and see if the provider upgrades" strategy, which hasn't paid off, so I rolled back the upgrade.
Not that I have much to say, anyway.
What exactly constitutes this?
I don't understand. Should you not fill it with metal? It's a paper cup!
Ribs Gone Tropical
The Meatwave: Ribs Gone Tropical.
This link isn't so much for sharing it is me bookmarking it so that I can make these at a future date.
A Long Post About Television
On or around November of 2009, my father-in-law offered to give me his old TV, a Sony KDS-R60XBR1. It's a 60" 1080p display that has the odd characteristic of not being able to actually accept 1080p inputs - but for the price of free plus shipping, little details like that did not matter to me.
The TV is a DLP, which is short for Digital Light Processing, which is short for - you need to replace the bulb every once in a while. When we got the TV, it hadn't been replaced in some time, so the picture was very dull and the color seemed to be a bit off, most notably tiny bits of yellow staining were occurring in the middle of certain scenes. Eventually, we replaced the bulb - which I purchased new off of ebay, and everything seemed to be hunky-dory.
But wait ... there's more!
Fast-forward to April, during the first round of the NHL playoffs. Traditionally, ice hockey is played on a white sheet of ice, and the Caps wear red, white, and blue - as do les Habitants. With the new bulb, the TV had degraded to a point where, during ice hockey games, both teams appeared to be skating on a lake of pee in pee-soaked jersies. The yellow staining of the picture had gotten worse and worse and worse. Episodes of Lost were ridiculously yellow, as any actor appearing on our TV would seem to have advanced symptoms of jaundice.
Having bought the bulb from ebay, and having done quite a bit of research beforehand, I assumed that we had gotten a counterfeit. Counterfeit bulbs are apparently quite a problem in the DLP aftermarket, and I figured - eh, I've been dinged. I ordered a new bulb from Sony directly at about twice the price, and stopped worrying about jaundice because the problem would soon be over.
Only it wasn't. I put the new bulb in the TV and everything was still very yellow. I took the bulb right back out in order to return it, since the bulb wasn't the problem. I did some very advanced google searching - "KDS-R60XBR1 yellow" and the first link I got hit with was this one. Apparently, this is a common problem much like the Xbox360's Red Ring of Death - Sony installed bad color blocks on the televisions, and they fail. Some people thought about banding together for a class action suit against Sony - and Sony offered to just settle with each owner of the TV individually. Father-in-law had no idea, and I don't blame him - neither did I.
I'd be more upset, but as indicated, Sony is attempting to settle with each owner of the faulty set individually. According to that page, they were offering to replace the faulty color unit for free - that's all I was seeking.
Because the unit was so old, they instead decided to offer us a "significant discount" on another Sony TV. About then was when I figured we'd have to buy a new TV - Sony usually has pricier models, or I figured they'd be trying to get rid of some cruft models they had piling up. Instead, I was surprised, they offered us their top of the line 52" Bravia for $300, a 55" Bravia for $200, or another smaller TV I didn't even consider, for $100. Oh, and we have to promise to not sue.
As far as I can tell, the difference between the 52" and 55" were, well, three inches (giggity) and the fact that the 52" had a bunch of stuff we didn't care about, such as ambient light and network capability. So we're going with the 55".
In conclusion, we're going from a 60" 1080p DLP TV with no actual ability to receive 1080p signal from say, our network-enabled blu-ray player, and looks like this:
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| From 2010-05-14 (by Eye-Fi) |
Which makes Owen and daddy:
By the way, that's just static - Craig commented that it looked like we are showing a picture of grass. Also, those menus are supposed to be gray.
To a 55", 1080p, 120Hz LCD - much better than the faux 1080p TV, and at a very good price.
Our upgrade path is crazy, since the significant portion of TVs in our house are from my father-in-law. He gave us the 50" 4:3 480p capable HDTV built in 1998 first, then jaundice-vision, and is now indirectly responsible for us getting our next TV - again at significant savings. Neat.