It’s been about an aeon or so since I last did a garden journal (last one tagged any thing to do with the garden was bundled in with a homeschooling post from 2013 as the kids helped J plant some stuff during an unexpected communication outage). Quite a bit has changed since then. First and only very vaguely related because it’s out there, J finally got me a new clothes hoist (the old one is collapsible and the catch to hold it open broke some years back but we were able to make do and it has been collapsing a LOT more frequently recently especially when there was a lot on it). Youngest brought the concrete bags in and had the old one dug out in about ten seconds (only a slight exaggeration), after which he and J erected the new post and left it overnight for the concrete to dry. The following day J got Eldest and I to help put the top on (I didn’t do much) and then he strung it.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Due to stuff (some it was the parents coming up to visit for a couple of weeks, some is that business has picked up dramatically), I haven’t been keeping track of the homeschooly stuff. Also we’ve been finding better things to do than sitting and doing bookwork, so it’s a really good thing that’s not the core of our homeschooling program (I need to write one of those for next year by the way, and also a booklist). So here’s some photos of things it occurred to me to point a camera at.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] The skate ramp is skatable! Okay so this is a slightly older picture but it was a good opener :P All but one of the backs are up (the thing that will prevent skaters and skateboards from ending up in the raised bed or in the neighbour’s yard) and the whole thing is now covered in both layers of skin and has been reinforced and all those good things. Now it just needs a paint job (and I know someone who is good at painting that I would like to rope in to help).

First 11 chicklets of the season have hatched. Few more clutches coming. There’s a blue chicklet! This one was smart and set up in The Brooder

Happy Father’s Day to all the people that do Father’s Day! We had JJ’s dad, my uncle and one of my cousins over for lunch. My uncle offered to cook the fish so we pulled 6 trout out of the tanks. I’ve been observing that some of them were pretty big when feeding them, and one of the ones that Tao pulled up was quite large. Big rainbow trout from the aquaponics tank, being held by father in law and patted by 3 year old

We finally bought a NAS, it’s living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router). I’m currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata). Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it’s 53Gb and going to blow out as I’m shooting RAW.

Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the moderator department, which meant I completely forgot about the moderation until the new moderator rocked up on my door towards the end of my work period. Oops. Fortunately I work from home and can make up hours easy, and I hadn’t gone out to pick up my shiny new computer yet, though I had gotten dressed to do so. So all she saw was that my place is a mess, which is about normal and I don’t clean up for anyone!

It’s all happening. The garden is going nuts, we’re going to go through a stage of not having to buy so many veges, and we’re turning into those old people that like pottering around their gardens (though I don’t do much of any garden work as I seem to have a knack for killing plants). This morning, as we were going around to see how the garden was going (the zuchinni is huge, all zuchinni plants have gotten bigger since the last post), when we encountered this fellow practising kung fu on a mulberry leaf:

This one crowed directly outside the window and sounded like he’d been recorded and some sound technicians had remixed and resampled it and added some reverb and echo and all that (can you tell I don’t know anything about sound?) and played back what a demonic possessed rooster would sound like if a film maker ever had need of a demonic possessed rooster crowing.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Not quite intelligent enough for a coherent post, so have lots of captioned photos instead. Homeschooling art and English: storyboarding with Mummy (who was working on AR storyboards)