dpritchard.net ¦ blog

So the ’09 / ’10 vegetable growing period is upon us. Gretchen and I have spent five of the last seven days (more-or-less) down in the bottom of the garden, working on revamping the vege patch. The new retaining wall is mostly my doing. Unless it falls down, then someone else can take the credit! It was all made possible by vouchers from family from Christmas and Birthday, so thanks to you all! Never-the-less, we sunk (I’d like to say “invested”) just on $300 in this year’s planting effort. Still, we ought to get nearly that much back out. Hopefully. Anyway, here are some photos from the wall building and the post-planting phases.

In addition to previously mentioned happenings, my cat went missing about 16 days ago. Sad news. Hopefully he will show up. However the longest I have heard of a cat disappearing and coming home safely has been three weeks, so I’m not holding out much hope.

So, things do happen while I’m not posting to this blog. Strange, I know, but seriously: Who has the time to post to a blog these days?

In no particular order, these things have or are happened:

• Charlotte is getting married. I’m going to the wedding. Hoorah.
• Quite independently, I’m going to Auckland in the last weekend of August. Gretchen is coming. Ostensibly I’m going to visit Dad, because I won’t see him at Christmas time, however there is a Conference on at the same time and now The Lab Boys are coming up too. We are going to stay on the boat and hopefully take a trip up to Great Barrier Island. Super.
• Mum moved into the Barn. Looks flash. Can’t wait to visit the new pad in a few weeks.
• The Botany Wiki lives! Well, kind-of. I’m taking a slowly, slowly approach with it this time.
• The bag of hurt that is our IT support is still around and continues to make me grumpy.
• Battlestar Galactica aired it’s final episode here in NZ. Cool. Especially cool is the remake of All Along The Watchtower which had been quietly sneaking in to the soundtrack all season, but played in full for the first time during the final episode. This new remake, as well as the original and all of it’s various covers are getting some serious airtime in the lab at the moment on the back of an awesome BSG finale.
• Pete came down to visit. We chatted, drank beer and played Settlers. A good weekend all up.
• Pseudorpeplication is a hot-topic in The Lab these days. Controversial.
• Gretchen is well. Writing her thesis. Tough going. Not looking forward to my battle with the written word.
• Tina has been to Germany and returned safe and well. She brought us chocolate and it was fantastic (based on my sample of N=1 (psudoreplicate that) before it all mysteriously disappeared).
• Gretchen’s little sister (well, technicaly little, little sister) came to visit with her boyfriend. We went to the Catlins, which was atypically sunny and so therefore even more amazing than normal. What a fantastic part of the country.
• I’ve been geeking up a storm in The Lab recently. Nitrate Reductase Assays are the new Black.
• It was my birthday. I got lots of great gifts. It seems like the “give vouchers and cash” message is getting through. I didn’t log my vouchers / cash gifts on this site because I’m lazy and I’ve been busy. Insert any other form of excuse you like, but I didn’t do it. I have a record of who gave what and I do intend to retroactivly post to this site, when I get a chance.
• PISL is officially alive and active. I slapped together a site for the company. Like all my sites, it is seriously lacking in content, but it does have a rather snazzy (although terribly hacky) PHP-based portfolio page

And that is that. For now.

I haven’t posted in a while.

Not since Christmas really.

One of the main reasons is that what really interests me is posting photos and I haven’t been taking many recently.

I guess the other main reason it that I have actually been writing my thesis. Scary as it sounds, I actually feel guilty when I’m writing anything that isn’t my thesis these days. So posting random things to my website has taken a bit of a back seat.

Anyway, I might try and get some pictures up soon. Updates around the house and what-not. Just don’t expect too much.