mud between my toes

[dragonlady7]

Was moving sod while wearing sandals. Inevitably, dirt fell into the sandals, and now is mud, between my toes. Eurgh.

Have been perusing Burpee.com and White Flower Farm's website. It's like crack. My shift yesterday was slow and boring and very untaxing and so I stood at the end of the counter with a printout of the OmniGraffle chart of my back yard and plotted where to plant things.

The genius of White Flower Farm is that they sell not only single plants, but also "collections"-- and this is brilliance because I am a person who wouldn't know what to put with what, so they sorta do that for me. For instance, here are a few of the collections I covet:

• Fragrant Iris Collection: they're pretty, and they smell really good. Who could ask for more in flowers? Also, the Perfumed Garden Oriental Lily Mix operates on the same principle.


• Three Months Of Iris Bloom: this one's planned out so that when one variety stops blooming, the next starts, so you have something showy in your garden throughout the entire season.


• Summer Fireworks Asiatic Lily Collection: hybrid lilies chosen for striking colors.


• Beefeater Tulip Mixture: Red and yellow multi-blooming tulips for a whole powerful mess of really striking tulips to "stop traffic".


• White Flower Early Spring Collection: four different varieties of early, white flowers. They have numerous collections like this, of flowers sorted by color, which is just brilliance if you ask me. (This one is also cool, tho' would be a bit much for my taste: Nuit Blanche Tulip Mixture combines black and white tulips.) Much more my speed: Rhapsody In Blue Bulb Mixture, which is just a bunch of blue flowers, which they suggest planting among daffodils to set them off.


• Crescendo Hemerocallis (Daylily) Collection: Daylilies chosen for striking shades with a long bloom season.


• This one is true brilliance. Daylilies & Daffodils: A Collaboration of Color. The idea is that daffodils bloom early, daylilies then bloom all summer, and they thrive in identical conditions. Stick a whole bunch of them together in a pile or border or something, and then you can pretty much never touch it again, because they're both perennials and will come back on their own. You've got a garden that can just sit there and be left alone and be absolutely gorgeous for, say, 20 years, with minimal intervention from you. F*$(*@ing geniuses, these people.

I could go on, but won't. Suffice to say I am dying of covetousness because I want the irises and elaborate lilies and shiny things, and it's not pretty to be me and not have $500 and three acres. I wish I had more local gardening friends-- I'd split a couple of the larger collections which are better values but I don't have room for all of. My mom did that with one of their daylily collections a while back, with her best friend down the street, and both of them are just swimming in gorgeous lilies.

But. My birthday's coming up. Right in time to place orders for fall plantings. (I never thought the date was convenient before, but the end of August is indeed approaching the fall planting season.) So if I can whittle it down I can ask Mom for some of it. I just... well, the whittling-down is beyond me.


In other news, Z still hasn't heard back from the newsweekly about being a computer geek. Which is unsurprising, given that they work monday to friday. He wrote them an email thanking them for the interview and expressing his hopefulness to work with them, and they answered, "Thanks!" and that's been the end of it. But, that was Friday afternoon.
Hopefully they're at home this weekend whacking off to the thought of having such an overqualified computer geek and fantasizing about all the server administration and multimedia multitasking they're about to get done, and are handcrafting a beautiful job offer to send him Monday morning, but I suppose we don't actually want things to get that weird so I should stuff my abrupt crudity back into whatever alcove it just unexpectedly emerged from. Whoa there.

But, meanwhile, Z finished up the release candidate of his Gmail Notifier, and put it up on VersionTracker.com. So far he's had over three hundred people download it, and here's the part that he's excited about:
Several people have reviewed it, including About.com, and not one but two people have actually donated money to him. (He has a little one of those little shareware notice thingies saying if you love this pay me to convince me to spend more time on this sort of thing.) The suggested donation is $5, and somebody gave him that, but some other dude randomly gave him $25, so he's pretty psyched about that.

Check that out, I have links in my post like a real blogger! And I didn't just have Z send them all to me instead of looking them up! (only some.)

There's tremendous interest from Japan in the Notifier, and Z feels really bad that there's no japanese in it, no Japanese support or help or anything, or even recognition that Japan exists, so I just wrote out "I am a pen" in Japanese for him to use to acknowledge that he knows about it and is powerless to translate.

Anyhow. I agreed with him that he was far more awesome even than bread which has been pre-rendered into edible and convenient portion sizes prior to purchase (which was, if you recall, a brilliant innovation).