Lately I've been spending my free time at my other blog or out in the garden or knitting for newborns for the Women's Auxiliary project.

I just joined a listserve about local gardening and got a heads up about this event at Denver Botanical Garden: 'IN YOUR FACE: Ethics and Urban Ecology'. It costs $18 for DBG members, $21 for non members; April 1 at 7:00PM. Call 720-865-3580 to register. I'm not familiar with this guy, but just felt like giving a plug for the DBG.

Join the Hunt for Bees! The Great Sunflower Project is working to 'track and value the goods and services provided by natural ecosystems' so they are looking for volunteers to help them track bees in urban settings. Sounds like fun, eh? Go to their website to sign up and get a free pack of wild sunflower seeds to get started.
photo from: http://www.greatsunflower.org

Ok, for two weeks I've had this song "Hello" sung by American Idol contestant David Cook,(originally by Lionel Richie) playing in my head. Since he's able to do that, he's my fav. 

Look what I found when we were walking the dogs.  Isn't it sweet?  I heard a story today about a dolphin helping some stranded whales find their way back to the open water after hearing the whales' distress calls.  Spring is here, and the radishes and carrots have broken ground and the turnips are showing their true leaves.  The lone crocus in the garden is already spent and little green tips of grass are showing through the old mat from last year.  Very sweet time of year.

The Doglady at Scottish Terrier and Dog News posted the question, "Why do Scottie girls look like old men?" Here are a couple of my Scottie friends. Isn't it obvious who is a girl and who is the real old man?

Sweetie, who is a milk and honey afficiondo, says that this locally produced milk is better than all the rest. You can practically smell the hay when you drink it. The website says Thornton, but the bottle says Fort Collins. Wholesome Milk Products.

This is some of the bizarre public art that welcomes folks to Denver at the airport. The blue horse is new. The eyes are lit with red lights. Inside, this fella with the skull and weapons is part of a mural, the message of which I can't decipher. And lastly, the gargoyle watches over the baggage area.
I don't fly so don't ask me why. I've never seen this kind of art in train stations. Sorry about the photo line up - they're all supposed to be on the left.
photos from citynoise.org and flydenver.com

My laptop is 'vintage', meaning that even the Apple store doesn't have the replacement parts. It stopped responding to my efforts to turn it on after a few months of occasionally being coaxed into starting up.
I took it to the Mac Shack where I bought it used. They charged $45 (!) to diagnose the problem as being the logic board.
Today I took it to the Apple store where they didn't charge me a thing but told me they couldn't get the parts anyway. The Apple genius said that it could be the logic board or something else and which is cheaper to fix, but "you could take it to the Mac Shack and they would charge you 1/2 hour of labor to actually open it up and tell you the exact problem." Good to know.

picture from homepage.mac.com

A pickup truck pulled up to park beside me and this caught my eye. Where he goes, the dogs go, too!
(click to embiggen & see the beautiful faces)

I'm almost finished effusing over Costco but I have to mention these chips: Rice Work Salsa Fresca. It's not so much about the price, it's just that I haven't seen them for sale anywhere else. They are so good. Two bags good.

I don't get to Denver that often but I do enjoy the ubiquitous web cams.




I realized that rather than make this into a garden blog, I should just start one. The link is upper and left.

I stopped by a Wal-Mart in Englewood today to pick up some cheap army toys for a little friend (special request). After I swiped by credit card, the console asked for my zip code and I just didn't feel like cooperating with their marketing program so I entered a false one. My card was rejected! No way that it was for lack of funds, it's one that I hardly ever use and it worked at the gas station just minutes before. I paid cash and left.

More often than not, I don't provide extra information about myself during retail transactions. Cuts Deluxe doesn't need to know my phone number. Uh-uh. I don't mind them not knowing when my last haircut was. I didn't mind giving the information to my membership retailer, since I trade that for lower costs and higher interest rates and rebates. Maybe Wal-Mart was looking out for my safety by asking for my zip code but I would rather take my chances and not have them know where I live.

More Costco-love.  Isn't this like a modern-day cathedral?  High ceilings, vast spaces, with no piped in music like the smaller stores.  Nothing to distract a person from all the amazing deals like the glasses that Honey got.  The difference in what we would have paid elsewhere covered our membership cost.  I really like the white ceiling bouncing around all the sky light.

The vote is in:
Enough with the cold and snow and grey skies! At least this one feels like a spring snow.

Bravo, Uno! A beagle wins a fancy dog show!

More Costco love, this time for Columbus Italian Dry Salame. Not even sure the cost, but by the time we get to that department, we've saved so much money that it doesn't matter!

I have this perfectly good cold frame that we added onto the south side of the house when we built it but I haven't used it much over the years.

This is the year. I have the seeds and I've signed up for a class with Boulder Going Local, more for the encouragement than anything else, and I'm going to do it!

First I have to confront those prickly thistle remains that thrive in the dry heat and neglect.

Oh, to cold-frame-garden in the mode of Helen and Scott Nearing! I see lots of greens and early carrots in our future.

Why I love Costco:

I had to be convinced to join Costco by my younger who had just moved out to his own apartment. He did a good job of selling me a membership but the card mostly languished in my wallet for several months. Somehow, though, I was infected by Costcolove.

This Gerties's Artichoke Tapenade is something I would never have tried for the price ($11+ for a jar) but Costco offered it to me for around $8 and I took it! We plowed through most of the jar in 1.5 days.

There's more, including their 2# tubs of Krinos Kalamata Olives (pitted, no less!) for around $6. I can't find them for less than $9/lb any where else. So yes, I'm in love. I visit monthly and would go more if it wasn't over the hill in another town.

Gardening this time of year for me is basically

1. making sure the kitchen scraps get to the compost
2. stirring the leaves around
3. getting dear hubby to clean up around his shed
4. picking up stuff in the yard that was deposited by chinooks
5. thinking about how to keep the deer out of my food garden
6. reminding myself that I should use the cold frame this year
7. dreaming up projects for dear hubby to do

Good workout, eh?

Still here. Good thing that asteroid missed us.

I have 5+ years of stickers on my neighborhood Eco-pass and decided to use it today to return home from Denver early.  I've always enjoyed the RTD between Boulder and Denver going back to the days when I was getting to know my husband (before we married).   Something about that metal and diesel smell and being high up off the pavement and knowing that nothing will get in the way.  Sailing up the High Occupancy Vehicle Lane like nobody's business.  And it's only on busses that I overhear conversations like, "I hope you don't have to go to jail....that would be sad."

There's a headline today about disappearing dirt.

"Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth."

Yes that is true and has been for decades and something you can do about that is compost!. Just dedicate an area of your garden for a pile of yard and kitchen wastes (no meats or oils) and add to it throughout the year. Keep it moist. You can turn it in order to convert it to soil faster or let it slowly be changed over the years (my preferred method). A quicker alternative during the growing season is to bury the matter right into the soil. The life underground will have it transformed into rich, black soil in a matter of weeks. Or you can buy a fancy plastic bin. (Can't help you there.)


image from www.mytinyplot.co.uk

It's snowing again, those tiny little dry flakes that hardly look like they're there. Kudos to the new back walk that only wants to be swept, not shoveled.
My phalaenopsis, the one that the friend was going to throw out, is blooming again. This year it's a little later in the year. What's up with that? The other outstanding indoor bloom is the white geranium, the kind that old Italian ladies have on their balconies. And my sweet african violets.

When I started spending so much time in LA, I found various community blogs, including blogging.la. It's been a good source for 'local finds' and other miscellanea.

A sister site, denver.metblogs has been around for a while, in a somewhat somnambulant form. The site is supposed to be about life in the various metropolitan areas that the blogs represent. Life in Denver must be a slow, sleepy existence since I responded to the call for more writers 16 days ago. No other new writers have been posted to the authors list. Maybe the flood of applicants was just too much to handle?

I'm really not crazy about stark, brown winter beauty. Yesterday, though, I had to go to east Boulder county and was pulled right into the agricultural version of the season. East on Arapahoe, through the wide open fields - it's like looking out over a dry ocean bed - just earth and sky for miles and miles. The trip back west is just road and stunning views of the Front Range. Thanks to all the Open Space taxing, we'll have fields and old trees to look at for some time to come. Money well spent.

Why, oh why did I schedule myself to start work at 4:30??

I'm doing my own little version of "Nickel and Dimed" to make some extra money for a project I want to do. My first assignment has been pretty fun except for the big yellow tee-shirt and standing all day. This job is limited to the returning student rush so co-workers won't have time to take on the proportions of family and close friends as Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book. That's the point - go in, get some extra money, leave and travel.

But starting at 4:30 in the middle of winter is working against my phototropic ways.

It's out with the old at what was the Bank of Boulder but lots of Christmas decorations are still up, including my wreaths and the Flagstaff star. That doesn't stop the major greeting card beast from barrelling toward Valentine's Day.

Yes, the red continues, but did you know that Christmas red is different from Valentine's Day red in the greeting card industry? Christmas is deeper, richer, full of meaning while Valentine's is brighter with the promise of the lighter pastels to come with Easter.

One way to get color in the house in the winter - use prisms. Most of mine catch the morning sun. The sun is too low to be broken up in the west window.
I've been reading gardening blogs this winter that list what's blooming in the garden. I can attest that nothing is in bloom in my yard and now that the snow is melting, it's all various shades of brown for a while. Indoors, a few colorful violets and a jewel orchid are blooming with a phalaenopsis on deck. I've been importing bouquets of color from my florist (Costco). The good news is dusk is lasting till 5:30ish.

This is why I'll never have a lush garden. They are totally oblivious to my yappie Scottie.