The Jasmine Project: A Change of Vine

As many of you may have astutely guessed from my rant about the phone company, I am moving. Or, more accurately, have moved. This is the first morning in the new house. Which means that the jasmine project has come to a close, because the jasmine stayed at the old house, and at the new house, my view is of some trees and a pasture, so I don’t have a pressing need to create an evergreen barrier.

I went outside early this morning to take some pictures; the light is not the best because the sun was just barely up, but you can get a sense of things, at least. (And I couldn’t wait around because I have a pile of work to do; all those little things you remember you have to acquire to get fully settled need to be acquired. Like, you know. Groceries.)

Pasture: Early morning, the sun just cresting a line of fir trees, with a pasture in the foreground.

Because it’s coming on winter, gardening nerdery is pretty much not going to happen for a few months, except for planting some bulbs for spring. I’m going to get the lay of the land and when the weather starts to warm up, will start plotting more serious gardening activity. As I recently discussed, I’m going to be using native plants, and I have some ideas which will probably firm up as I get a sense of how the light works and all that good stuff. I am also scheming to put in vegetables, although I need to set up some deer security first, because deer do not make the best neighbours. And, of course, ornamental wise, no plant is deer-proof, or even ‘deer resistant,’ really, the little blighters will eat anything and everything that strikes their fancy, and nothing can stop them.

Buck: A two point buck nibbling some shrubbery, back to the camera.

Taken through a window, since I was afraid I would spook him if I opened the door; this buck has been around a couple of times as I’ve been moving in, and I suspect I will be seeing more of him. Look at that insouciant tail. That tail says ‘I’ma gonna eat your lettuce, puny human!’

There are some established plants, notably by the front porch:

Front Garden: Some plants in a flowerbed with wood chips. Heather can be seen in the rear of the bed, and the foreground has some plants with big oblong leaves and little pink flowers.

I’m excited, both about the new house itself and the plethora of gardening opportunities. There’s much more space here to sprawl out with a garden and much more room for imagination.

Through the Window: A photograph of a leafless tree.

This picture was taken through a window in the living room; the blurs and smudges are caused by the glass, which dates to the 1940s and is subsequently a little wavy.

The phone company effectively left me without service for a week, which I did not appreciate in the slightest. I note that the gas company was extremely efficient and very helpful; locally-based Kemgas is very on it in terms of customer service and I have nothing but praise for them (for example, we ended up  having to replace the tank, and they had a new tank out within 24 hours, before I’d even moved in!). Oddly enough, my PG&E transfer went very smoothly as well, so it’s really just the phone company I have reserved my ire for, in terms of utilities.

Someday, ATT. Someday, I’ll have my revenge.

1 November, 2010 – 10:28 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in photography | Tagged , |

Trilling Crullers

Matt Smith at SF Weekly: The city needs to call 911 on emergency dispatchers

“Jane Doe” is the pseudonym of a 911 dispatch employee who claims she was punished for acting as a whistle-blower, purportedly seeking to expose alleged time-card fraud, workplace bullying, cyber-snooping, goldbricking, and other misconduct where timely emergency response might have been compromised.

s.e. smith at Global Comment: Legalize It? A look at California’s Proposition 19

I live in the heart of the Emerald Triangle, where the air turns skunky in the fall and everyone seems to be paying with sticky hundreds at the grocery store, even, perhaps especially, the people in ratty, tattered clothes, who totter out to the parking lot with their organic cheese doodles to remotely unlock their $60,000 German cars.

E. R. Bills at Fort Worth Weekly: Johnny Got His Pills

Instead of reducing combat tours to reasonable timeframes, limiting the number of tours a soldier has to endure, or simply removing unstable soldiers from these ill-conceived wars indefinitely, the U.S. military is apparently using our men and women in uniform as guinea pigs for a soldier’s-little-helper pill that will supposedly desensitize them to the insanity around them.

Corey Hutchins at Free Times: Army of Darkness

In a state already blood-Republican red, its civil-war GOP summer primaries felt more like a scene out of Army of Darkness than any rational political contest. Something strange and weird and almost violent had seemed to descend on the electorate.

Caitlin Donohue at San Francisco Bay Guardian: Dia de los San Franciscanos

“The whole point of Day of the Dead is that we’re honoring death but mocking it,” says Martha Rodriguez, a Mexico City musician who curates the Dia de los Muertos San Francisco Symphony family concert that celebrates this year’s centennial of the Mexican Revolution.

Robert Moyes at Monday Magazine: Up From the Streets

Outside of elite art circles, Jean-Michel Basquiat is in some ways little more than a Jeopardy! question: what New York street artist shot to international fame in the 1980s, only to be dead of a heroin overdose at age 27?

1 November, 2010 – 10:04 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |