I’ve been doing the photoblog, one-post-a-day thing for so long that it is kind of hard to get back in the true weblog, post-anytime-you-want sort of deal.  Plus, this new project is just too much fun.

Schlepped the kids to the doctor yesterday for a checkup. Boychild is huge…something we already knew just from standing next to him…he’s 5′1″ tall at age 11.  The doctor says if he keeps growing at this rate (which he thinks unlikely), he’ll be 6′3″ by the time he’s done.  He’s been complaining of pain in his knee lately, right under the patella, which Doctor man believes is Osgood-Schlatter’s disease.  It occurs in (mainly) boys of this age and disappears in their late teens.

I ask you…if it up and spontaneously disappears, should it really be called a DISEASE???   Or just a Syndrome.  Maybe an Inconvenience.  I officially object to the use of the word Disease in this instance.  Dammit.

The Girlchild is also huge, 4′5″ tall, which was evident in the way she towered over the classmate that escorted her to the office for checkout yesterday.  This soccer season should be interesting.

Turns out both kiddos needed a booster shot yesterday, the Chicken Pops vaccine (I can’t be the only one who calls it that…), which came as a surprise to the Girlchild.  An unpleasant surprise.  As tough as the little bird is, she is the biggest needle fraidycat on earth, she just does not dig pain of any stripe.  Unhelpful in the extreme was the bitch whore cow of a nurse administering the injection.  She demanded that I physically restrain Boychild (who could give a crap someone’s sticking a needle in his arm) so he wouldn’t, I don’t know, turn into the frickin’ Hulk and eat her up yum?  Then when Girlchild started her tear-ridden floor show, Nurse Wussypants acted like the child had suddenly grown spikes and an insatiable bloodlust for forebrain-stunted immigrants, and scurried over to the door to shriek for help.

Here is where I Lost My Cool.

She does not need to be physically restrained, much less by a complete stranger, I snapped.  Nurse Wussypants blinked at me.  Get over here and give her this injection or I will do it for you, I snapped again.  I Do. Not. Have. patience for horseshit of this variety, particularly where my children are concerned, and I sincerely do not give a damn if that cow locked herself in the supply closet for the rest of the day, ala Elliot.  If she doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to deal with her chosen profession then she needs to get her ass into the nearest call center and start answering Verizon helpdesk requests in a way guaranteed to make the caller wish for a meteorite strike on their own residence, just to End The Agony.

Is it really too much to expect that you’ll deal with intelligent people at any given time, or has the population density become so, er, dense, that it’s statistically impossible?  Whatever the case, I’m not backing down.  Especially when this is the very same doctor’s office (albeit different doctor) that was responsible for this nightmare.

Here, have a picture of our cat collection, and their favorite catnip pusher supplier.

The actual children (as opposed to the furry children down at the bottom there) started school this week, despite the attentions of not-a-hurricane Fay. Girlchild is in 3rd grade this year, which I expect she will ace just as thoroughly as she did 2nd grade…straight A’s all year, and she was doing third grade math independently of the rest of the class a few months after school started. She’s also reading at an off-the-charts level, last tested around 7th grade reading level. She’s going to be like me, I think, who (to hear my parents tell it) missed all of Europe, most of the Mediterranean and Africa, because I had my nose in a book.

Yeah, but I now have the vocabulary of a GOD, thank you very much.

The Boychild started 6th grade, which is so far different from elementary school as to be actual college. He has EIGHT classes in his 8 hour school day, but check out this schedule:

1. Chorus (apparently the punk has quite the nice singing voice)
2. Advanced World Geography
3. Advanced PE (I really couldn’t tell you what makes it “advanced”)
4. Earth and Space Science (I’m so bloody excited about this class that I offered to attend it for him)
5. Language Arts
6. Advanced Reading
7. Advanced Math (!!!!)
8. Art/Art Appreciation

I am LOVING this schedule. Last year was a math nightmare for the kid, mainly due to personality conflicts, I think…but not to be discounted, a crappy teacher can completely ruin a kid. My ninth grade math teacher, Mrs. Blackburn (may she burn in hell), completely destroyed my interest in mathematics for decades, and is why I am not a robotics engineer right now. The boy apparently tests very well, though, since placement in 6th grade is determined by the (ridiculous) FCAT test.

Middle school is quite different than elementary, not just in the different classes, but the almost exponential increase in responsibility for the kids. They’re expected to get to each class on their own (after the first week of orienteering), they’re expected to get themselves to lunch, etc. etc. etc. It’s perceived as more freedom, too, I suppose, in not constantly having someone telling you where to go/what to do…which is very important to the newly-pubescent, particularly the offpsring of two very Alpha parents. Most importantly, though, the Boychild seems to have undergone an attitude shift, maybe listened to us one of the thousand times we exhorted him to not let someone else determine his destiny, and is determined to do well this year. I think our visit to Uncle NASA’s workplace this summer was a nice prod for him, too. He got to see the real world, and see how seriously cool it can be. So, cross your fingers for him, once the homework starts piling on things might go straight to hell. *bangs head on desk*

As for the other “kids,” both orange babies are growing like weeds. Hermes has gone from pretty kitten to gorgeous adolescent:

A better view of his target:

Oliver is not so lion-faced anymore, but still a lovely boy:

This white spot on his chest just appeared this week:

De-Everything Day is in about two weeks, which, after receiving claws in the bottom of my foot whilst trying to sleep, as well as regularly prying a horny Oliver off a screeching Hermes’ back, I await with almost gleeful anticipation.

HAH! I had to stop in the middle of writing this post to take clean shorts and shoes over to the Boychild’s school. He apparently tried to stop a basketball with his face, which resulted in the routine nosebleed. And that reminds me that I’ve started a new project site called This + That, in which we snark on news, current events, and our child taking a basketball to the schnozz. We’re looking for more contributors, so if you’re interested in joining, drop me a a line.

Fay finally managed to rain on us a bit last night, a whole 1/4″ according to the trusty and official FBY rain gauge out back. Oh well, at least it’s not ninety-million degrees to go along with this 2000% humidity.

We’re really having a bumper pepper crop this year. Along with the billyuns of poblanos and red bells, we have a burgeoning Marconi bullnose:

Some Red Rockets:

And the picturesque Thai Hot:

With more and more (and more) to come:

The pots of onions and carrots are sprouting away:

The red rice beans are as prolific as one could hope for:

And have seriously lovely blooms:

Best of all…the fig tree is fruiting!

Which only a little bit makes up for the cursed whiteflies utterly destroying my ground cherry bush. It’s not that they outright laugh at applications of Sevin, it’s that they’re so bloody prolific, new eggs hatching every few days. So after scouring the ‘net, we’re going to try Nylar, a prime ingredient in some flea preventatives. Destruction of fleas = a happy bonus!

Well, Fay couldn’t get enough energy out of the 90 or so miles of water between Cuba and the Keys, so is now doing an impression of an aging film star in a nursing home…

Yes, lots of bluster, and liquids flung everywhere.

So we’re looking at high-ish winds and between 2 and 5 inches of rain. WhatEVAR. That’s a regular Saturday around here.

So, about the new look… As I cried said before, I was using a photoblog plugin to adapt wordpress into a photobloggy sort of application, and all that went very, very bad during the upgrades to 2.6. So, rather than troubleshoot someone else’s crappy code, I’m going back to a more bloggy sort of layout, which surely pleases me in the archive department. Thumbnail images as archives are great for a pure photoblog, but not so helpful when you also write words to go along with.

But I’m also still a very prolific shooter, with a whole lotta flowers, flutterbys and general scenery lying about, so the image up top will randomly rotate as you visit/navigate/generally reload pages. Yes, it’s a huge honking image, sorry, but in that I still wish to remain photobloggy. At least the body images will be about 200 pixels smaller in this layout, to make room for the spiff-tastic sidebar over there to the right.

Yes, I said spiff-tastic.

I have to go glare at the remnants of Fay now, who since I started this post has dwindled somewhat in her trek across lower Florida, and rather resembles a semi-incontinent ex-paint huffer…

Yes, wandering around in circles and occasionally piddling in corners.

Ah, my five loyal readers…words cannot describe the incandescent fury which is mine these past 72 hours.

Those of you using Wordpress note how it shrieks at you to upgrade whenever a new release comes about. Generally, this is a good idea, as fallow versions tend to become script kiddie targets, and next thing you know, your server is spewing Vi@gr@ spam and your sysadmins are giving you the fuck-eye.

Despite the immense number of plugins I was using, as well as the squirrelly (unnecessarily-) PHP-coded theme, I upgraded.

We’ll just gloss right over the next three days, shall we? Suffice it to say, I have done a fresh install of WP 2.6 and exported my entries from the old install into this new one. There will be days and days of tweaking ahead as A) this theme, er, is not up to my standards, and B) we’re scheduled for a hurricane enema from Fay tomorrow.

Coriander and Nancy, I’m sorry, but in the process of recovering my old blog I had to do a restore from backup, and your last comments were blitzed into oblivion. Please don’t take it personally, I love you, I rly ryl do.

See you all on the flip side.

Ok, here we go… *cracks knuckles* Gird your loins, people, this is going to be a long one. Well worth it though.

When Husband and I met, we were both working in the Huntsville, Alabama area. 8 or so months later we were planning a wedding. I will tell you right now it was nothing resembling a church wedding, nor had anything to do with the usual church wedding things, so we wanted an outdoor venue, but something that guests in their finery could navigate sans muddy shoes and clothing tears. The Huntsville Botanical Garden was not such an obvious choice…even though it had been open for over a decade, we’d never previously visited.

It only took one visit to settle that, though. The aquatic garden was newly open, didn’t have very many mature plantings around it, but it was completely gorgeous, and we were married there on May 1, 1996.

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As I’ve probably whinged before, this year has been a Learning Year as far as the garden goes. We’re seeing what we should avoid planting until fall, what’s best started in January so as to produce before the summer rains, and that it’s utterly futile to try and grow watermelons. *snort*

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I know, I know, I still haven’t put up the HSV Botanical Gardens pictures (well, HERE anyway, most of them are uploaded to Flickr already if you want to nose around there), but between the enforced idleness due to the knee (which is much better, thanks fer askin’!), catching up at work (both regular and design), and just the day to day dealing with two kids, one dog and SIX cats, isn’t leaving time for much else. And there’s almost 200 of those pictures, which takes time to upload, tag, categorize, etc., you know, everything that makes a rewarding internet-y experience.

There, was that enough excuses for today? Good. Onward…

Imagine my DELIGHT in coming back from vacation to a collection of cannas that looked like this:

Open up the tattered sticky leaves and you’ll find this little bastard:

Yes, it’s the delightful canna leafroller, who, post-destruction and metamorphosis, is a sort of nondescript butterfly called the Brazilian skipper. Now I’m a notorious photographer of the butterflies, even specifically plant things to attract them, but let’s see…do I want the six foot tall gorgeous-foliaged plants with beautiful blooms or small nondescript sort-of butterflies? No contest. Bacillus thuringiensis to the rescue!

Spray once a week for best results. The cannas are already making new leaves, huzzah!

I WILL result to chemical control in my garden, people, but I will do my very, very best to avoid killing the beneficials, which means spraying in the morning to avoid the evening pollinators, and in every case possible using something that specifically targets a certain pest, like the Bt, which only lunches caterpillars. Yes, certain butterfly species will take a hit but last I checked they were nowhere near endangered.

Just save your sympathy for those bastard milkweed beetles who utterly killed my specifically-planted-for-monarchs milkweed. ‘Cos those bastards are next.

Yes, I do have pictures for you, I promise…I’m supposed to be taking it easy this week, though, which means sitting on the couch with an ice pack on my knee, and using Photoshop on the laptop is significantly less, er, fun, than doing it on the desktop.

So, let’s talk about reality shows instead!

But only the ones that require skills other than A) having a big mouth, B) having a big cup size, or C) making an ass of one’s self in public.

SYTYCD: I’ve mentioned this is my first year watching this show, as dance and I are not best pals, but I have seriously enjoyed this program. The kids are so NICE, and wicked talented. And the emphasis is on performance, dammit, not drama, manufactured or otherwise. I find myself really hoping that those who are eliminated really benefit from the exposure of being on the show and get nice high paying jobs…because they’re all so NICE!

It is also enjoyable to have judges who are not prone to fits of PMS (I’m looking at you, Cowell), and can actually give constructive criticism without temper tantrums. Though I swear if I could poke a spoon down Mary Murphy’s throat and dig out that damned scream, I surely would.

Who do I like to win? Hell, I don’t even know how the finale is structured. They’ve got two couples dancing? Or is it everyone for themselves? Joshua is more talented than Twitch (who is still seriously good), and Katee is more…evocative, I suppose, than Courtney. But Courtney is still damned good. It’s a matter of degrees between the two girls, I think. So who do YOU think is going to win? And someone tell me how the finale works, pls kthx.

Project Runway: Oh, how I love this show. I wanted to be a fashion designer one summer in my early teens. I had sketches of modular outfits littering my bedroom floor, architectural garments containing women whose cheekbones would cut glass. I wonder if my mother still has any of that stuff, it’d be (no doubt) hilarious to go through now. And my nom de sew…oh, I spent DAYS picking that out. I was going to change the face of fashion as….wait for it….ECHO VALENTINE.

Yeah, I was 13 once, shutup.

Anyway, this season’s crop of designers is possibly the best I’ve seen so far in the series. I confess I do not understand The Suede winning challenge #2 with that orful woven madness, and completely blame Natalie Portman. (For a midget she is apparently quite powerful.) Yeah, it was a cute silhouette, but the neckline was scary bad, and the bodice completely ate the model’s chest. Well, what there was of it.

You just have to feel sorry for the straight guys that wind up on the show, like Joe. They really seem to have no idea how to deal with the queen-y bitchfests, their eyes kind of glaze over, and I think they probably sleep on the couch in the apartment just out of sheer reflex.

Is it too much to ask for someone to take a piece of spare pipe and beat the living shite out of Stella? She’s not even amusing to watch, just endlessly, excessively grating. I predict every single thing she sends down the runway is going to have A) huge grommets, B) lacing, and C) leather in some form. It’s only Ep 3 and I am already quite tired of her and everything she’s doing.

I predict right now that Kelli is in the final three. She really stands out, and has from the beginning, with the all important “point of view” the judges love so much.

Oh, if anyone else was wondering about Nina Garcia’s apparent change in status (ie. FIRING) with Elle, Gawker has some interesting tidbits on that:

According to a tipster, Elle publisher Carol Smith signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Anne Klein to have Garcia—then an Elle staffer—do in-store appearance and promotions on behalf of the fashion brand. But Garcia refused to wear Anne Klein clothes at the appearances, because she believed it would be a “conflict of interest.” This put the huge endorsement deal in jeopardy, we hear, and everyone from Elle’s editor-in-chief to former Hachette boss Jack Kliger was putting pressure on Garcia to give in and wear the damn clothes to keep the customer happy.

But Garcia was stubborn! By the time her final mandatory appearance for Anne Klein rolled around, says the source, the publisher actually drove to Garcia’s home and waited for her to make sure she wore an appropriately Klein-ish outfit. The entire ordeal was so outlandish that the whole staff was gossiping about it. Shortly after the endorsement deal wrapped up, Nina Garcia was fired—after Elle had made its money. Or so we hear.

IN-teresting.

OH! The mother of all reality shows, The Gong Show, premiered last night on Comedy Central. Naturally we forgot all about it, but I’m sure they’re going to re-run the crap out of it. Husband is convinced they’re going to screw it up, I remain cautiously optimistic.

Well, the stinking knee hurts again, as I apparently slept on it wrong last night. If I can re-bork it just sleeping on it, then what is the point of immobility during the day, I ask you. I have things to do, people.

So, vacation was good. We stayed at my parents’ new 28 acre farm in north Alabama, despite its near-complete lack of furnishings (they won’t be living in it full time for a while yet)…the seven nights sleeping on an air mattress are what started this whole knee thing, btw, well, more specifically, the getting UP from the air mattress each morning. It was nice to have this as your backyard, coffee-having, waking-up view every morning though:

The kids had a blast on the obligatory country-backyard trampoline:

We fished at a neighbor’s catfish-stocked pond on Sunday, and were honestly too busy reeling in the fish to take any pictures. Cooking followed, of course, and visiting with more family.

Monday saw us (joined by Husband’s brother) visiting the Huntsville Botanical Garden, a favorite haunt of ours long before we were ever married there (12 years ago!). It was a pleasure to watch it grow over the years we lived in Huntsville, and an even bigger pleasure to see how it has grown in the 7 years since we left. If you’re ever in the area, it is more than worth a visit. Just maybe not in the 100 degree temperatures of mid-July… Spring, spring is nice. All the dogwoods will be in bloom, and the tulips…and you won’t lose five pounds just walking around.

Monday evening we caught up with our oldest friends at a local Thai place, then had the pleasure of visiting their house, dogs and wonderful backyard garden (pics forthcoming, of course). On the drive over to their abode, we showed the children the houses we lived in when each were born. Their interest was tepid at best, but it was nice to see where we’d been.

Tuesday was spent chasing fish around the Tennessee river. It’s called “FISHING” people, not “CATCHING.”

Wednesday saw a visit to the US Space and Rocket Center, also in Huntspatch, and also a regular haunt for us when we lived there. The new Davidson Center with the full size Saturn V rocket is a very nice addition to an already excellent museum. Afterwards, we journeyed out to Redstone Arsenal for a visit to Husband’s brother’s workplace, and the old Saturn test stands. More on all that when I get the pictures up.

Wednesday evening saw dinner again with friends at the iconic Big Ed’s Pizza. My father picked up a Big Ed’s pie every Friday after work during the years Big Ed actually owned it, and I am pleased to report it is every bit as good today in the care of his son Steve. Caitlin, please keep an eye on it for us and don’t let it close!

Thursday was a day of lollygagging, as the parents were having a tractor delivered and had to hang around to take instruction on the driving of same, so we took the kids around the Sand Mountain area and let them blow the rest of their souvenir money. A nice lazy day.

Friday we drove down to Lower Alabama for an all-too brief visit with Grandma, then moseyed on to Pensacola, where we deposited the children with Nana and took a hotel room for the night. Glorious, GLORIOUS bed!! It was too late for the knees, of course, but so very much better than an air mattress anyway.

Saturday we made the ten hour trek home and officially swore we were driving exactly no further than 30 miles from our house for the next six months.

We took a metric buttload of pictures at both the Garden and Space Center, which will trickle up here as I get them edited. It was a truly a simple and satisfying vacation, filled with family, friends and revisiting some fine old memories.