In-A-Gadda-Da-Winter

EGBDF

Our tale begins two nights ago when Riley received a package full of art and music supplies for her upcoming semester that begins two days after Easter.

Among the rest of the bounty was a dreaded recorder—which, as you may remember from your grade-school days, is basically a low-rent plastic flute that may legally only be utilized to play "Hot Cross Buns" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Now, Riley may be a pot-blanket-owning Breaking Bad fan who's halfway to being a cartel kingpin in the crystal-meth underworld; but, she's not an animal... so, when she asked if she could play a recorder concert for us, she kept it clean and stuck to the legal route...

...although she must've been in an Iron Butterfly sort of mood, because I'm pretty sure she dragged out "Hot Cross Buns" to a duration of 17:05.

My ears were bleeding about 18 seconds in; but, I let it go because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. (Plus, I knew that meant chances were good that the noisy downstairs neighbors' ears were probably bleeding as well—which is a win in my book!)

Apparently, this outlet in our kitchen wasn't much of a fan either...

We wouldn't realize it for another two days when it was too late, but he was so traumatized by the experience that he actually ended up taking his own life :(

And so, when Athennia and I came out to have breakfast before she left for work Thursday morning, we found that this poor guy had cried his last tear: His little green LED had gone dark, taking the other two outlets in the kitchen along with him—including, of course, the one that had been powering our refrigerator.

Luckily, my mom is the best mom in the world, and she jumped right out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn to pop over with two giant coolers and save the day. And I accompanied her back to my parents' house while Athennia called out of work to stay behind and wait for one of our maintenance guys to come take a look.

NPK

So, faced with the potentiality of being stuck at my parents' house for the better part of a day, I took the opportunity to knock out some pre-season chores in the garden.

And, since I have a bunch of pictures that haven't made it to the blog for the past six months, I'm taking the opportunity to post them now while they're suddenly tangentially relevant!

There hasn't been a lot going on in the garden over the past few months—at least to the naked eye. But I'll try to make things interesting anyway.

Our last major haul was on 30 September...

...and, by the last week of October, I had ripped almost everything out except for a jalapeno plant, the basil, some scallions, and the Vietnamese coriander that were all still jammin' despite the cooling weather...

But the tomato plants, my various bell peppers, and everything else were all just pissing me off by that point; and so, they got the axe. And all that organic material meant it was time to start filling up the compost pile for the winter.

This was 22 October...

Over the final week of October and into November, I spent a few hours here and there gathering leaves at my parents' house, and things filled up pretty quickly...

Of course, you can never get all the leaves...

See these here? I don't even need these at this point!

...But, what the hell? I got 'em anyway!

So, coming into mid-November the compost looked like this...

...But, by the first week of March, things had sunk—and shrunk—quite a bit...

Meanwhile, the garlic was chugging along all winter. This was our garlic crop just a week into November...

Most people plant their garlic around Columbus Day; but, I'm not so great at remembering exactly when we "celebrate" a rapist-conquistador who happened to procure himself a few ships. So, I prefer to go by my sister and brother-in-law's anniversary instead: As far as I can tell, they've never raped anyone and don't own even a single ship. And, their anniversary happens to fall within a week of Colum-bum Day.

Honestly, the garlic has never seemed to notice the difference. <shrug>

...And so, here we were by early March...

And, here's the garlic now, nearly a week into April...

I forget exactly when I put cardboard down last year; but, shortly before winter proper rolled in, I decided to do an experiment and see whether a few layers of cardboard might provide enough shade to coax the worms into coming all the way up to eat the surface detritus throughout the off season (instead of leaving a few inches of mulch untouched, as they would otherwise).

So, here was the garden as of 04 March...

As for worms, my composting worms are doing great: I treat them like royalty, so they spent the winter nice and warm in my parents' basement—turning garbage into black gold...

When I checked on them today, I found that they had basically finished processing one of the bins—and were far enough along in the other that I could just dump everything into the garden...

But first, I had to take off the cardboard...

It looks like the garden worms did come all the way to the surface to start munching on the mulch I'd put down back in the fall, just like I had hoped they would. (Also, I apparently got visited by some moles or something over the winter, judging by all those paths carved in the soil.)

I dumped what was left of the cardboard in the compost pile (where I'm sure it'll be gone in a month or two, tops), and then I transferred the worms from the basement into the garden so they can go forth and multiply :)

GFCI

Back at the apartment, Athennia informed me that our maintenance guy finally showed up just before noon (responding to our call from around 6:00 A.M.).

It turns out that, when Riley's recorder concert drove the center outlet to take his own life, the other two outlets went with him because they're all connected via a ground fault circuit interrupter (meant to cut the power for safety reasons in case of electrical problems).

So, after zapping himself and sending a fireball across the kitchen (according to Athennia), the maintenance guy replaced two of our outlets and had us back up and running within an hour or so.

So, I packed everything back into the coolers, lugged it all back to the apartment, and we restocked the fridge...

...and then we put a No Concerts Aloud ordinance into effect for Riley, effective immediately!

#outlet-lives-matter