Okay, now that was a good day...

[elfs]

Omaha gets hacked. The day started off on a sour note. I'd woken up, made coffee, and decided to sit down and hack on a small personal project. I'd gotten an email from the boss about making sure our branding was consistent across outlets going forward, and after nodding my head and making a mark in my to-do I put it aside. I was about to get head-first into my project when Omaha started to notice very odd things about her numbers at iGameRadio.

We discovered she'd been hacked. After much research I was able to find the keyword that revealed the hack location: in the wp-config.php file the hacker had inserted a nasty little chunk of code wrapped in an eval(base64_decode()). The wrapper makes it hard to grep for; fortunately, "base64_decode" is itself pretty rare inside wordpress code and easy to grep for.

Bloody vandals

Library run. It was about 9:30 when we'd finished, and the girls and I all had library books that had to go back, so I took the two of them up into town. When we arrived we discovered that the library didn't open until 10. They tried to visit the pet store, but it was also closed, so we ended up in a coffee shop. Kouryou-chan learned that she wasn't fond of caramel macchiatos.

I was annoyed to discover that someone has already vandalized the library. It's a hell of a brazen act, as this has to be one of the busiest rooms in the city, the entrance hallway that leads to the library-cum-city hall, with elevator access only to the city administration centers on the third floor. Lots of people walk through here constantly.

Meeting over coffee.After we got home, I had to run Omaha up to a meeting at yet another coffeeshop. It was a pretty busy day for coffeeshops, but at least none of them were Starbucks [NSFW!]. It was supposed to be a short meeting, so I spent most of my time with a sketchbook writing out some quick proposed Javascript experimental sites that I might get to in my copious spare time. Some of them are adaptations of the current IndieFlix site-- better film details, better filmmaker management, that kind of thing.

Me and Yamaraashi-chan/span>

Off to get plants. The third run of the day was out to the big local plant nursery for our annual garden run. We picked up eight tomato plants, because we love fresh tomatoes. (Tomatoes are rightly called "the gateway drug" of gardening; once you've had tomatoes out of a garden you never quite enjoy store-bought, nitrogen-gassed tomatoes again.) We also picked out some experiments: watermelon, sugar pumpkins, butternut squash. The girls really wanted some blueberry bushes, but they were quite pricey and not very hardy, according to the leaflets.

On our return, we had lunch. I've been eating a lot of salmon lately; today was a simple salmon sandwich with mayo, sliced red onion, and sweet relish. Kouryou-chan sliced her own apples today, although I can think of a better way than how she's doing it. I'll have to show her.

Spiders!

Lots of yard work. I applied some moisturizer with SPF 15, because I knew I was going to spend the next six hours outdoors. And sure enough, I did. I tilled the raised beds on the west side of the property, weeded them, then planted the tomatoes in staggered rows about fifteen inches apart, mixing our poor soil with some really good compost. While I was doing that, Yamaraashi-chan noticed a horde of baby spiders climbing up the ruined shed I mentioned in a dream a few days ago. I had to take pictures.

About this time, the neighborhood kids came out. We've got a new one, a young lady a year younger than Kouryou-chan who identifies herself as "Pinoy" (Filipino). She's sassy and smart-mouthed, but she seems to fit in okay. All the kids were out, including both boys, so there was a lot of tussling and arguing. I got hit in the head with a frisbee.

My second big task of the day was to clean up the damn compost bins. One of them was a waste of space, one had fallen over, and the other hadn't been touched since October. I righted and dug out the fallen one, only to discover it had composted well anyway, and got about 20 gallons of compost out of it. That's a messy job, running the mass over a chickenwire grate to separate the compost from the digest, and then tossing the digest back into the newly-repaired bin.

I took on all three. The neighbor's kids had a pitchfork, which helped. (I gotta get me one of those.) I'd been worried that we were running out of compost-- by the end of the day, I had 60 gallons of the stuff and a fresh starter for another 60 gallons.

Tomatoes!

Omaha, meanwhile, weeded out the front flower beds and trimmed back the bushes that line the side of the driveway. It feels like we did a ton of work, and there's still a ton left to do. At least the moss and weeds seem to be losing the battle.

Omaha and I took a shower together. That's always nice.

Manshopping. Only, not. After we were clean, we went out to a local chowderhouse for dinner. Yamaraashi-chan, to my amazement, ordered a salad with diced chicken. She didn't care for the blue cheese dressing.

Then we went shopping. For me. I shop rarely, and often in large doses. This time it was underthings-- t-shirts, socks, shorts-- and jeans. 501's, only. That's no place for a zipper. Omaha made me try on every pair, and I appreciated it; despite all of them claiming to fit, one pair most certainly did not. They all need to be re-hemmed; I know there's a local seamstress, but I don't know what she charges.

Then, finally, home for the last time. I'm exhausted. I dug and buried and pitched and cleaned and hacked and chauffeured, and now I'm ready for sleep.

Comments

Reduce shovelling by mulching instead of composting

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

Unless you need high temperatures to kill weed seeds, you can try mulching your vegetable waste instead of composting. If you want, you can first run the hard-to-break-down items (peanut shells, stalks of celery, banana peels) through a blender, but it's not essential. Then just spread the material around the base of your plants. The material blocks the growth of weeds, and worms quickly convert it into castings.