Perhaps the wind is still howling round your house, but . . . hallelujah, seed catalogs are also stuffing the mailbox. So, let's talk lettuce. If this is your first season gardening, or your twenty-millionth, lettuce is one of those plants you should definitely try. Whether it's going to be in a container on your patio or deck, or in-ground, lettuce is super easy to sow. It's also music to a tired gardener's soul. Along with radishes, I don't think there is anything easier. As you know, it gets really hot here quickly, so if you want, you can start your lettuce indoors. I usually just sow mine outside and thin it after it comes up when it's about the stage in this picture. Lettuce, sown this way, must be thinned, or this is all you'll get. Lettuce seeds are tiny, and there are tools you can use to make...

I was working on an article, and I found these lovely photos while I was on a search for something which worked with my piece. Since we are getting ready to have the Mother of all cold fronts, gaze upon these beauties. First, is the gorgeous agave Helen Weis and I saw when we visited the Dallas Arboretum. It was faboo, and Helen recently reminded me that I had to work very hard to get this photograph going around behind the bed to get the right angle. The second photo is of the bulbs I forced this fall. They are now large and beginning to bloom, but I liked them best at this stage when they were full of expectation and opportunity. Some of them worked, and others were an epic fail. Still, they've given us months of enjoyment. You can't beat that. I wrote about forcing bulbs and other...

I really debated about whether to embed this on my blog because it's truly personal. On my mom's birthday last weekend, she showed up with a DVD of some footage recorded when I was four years old. It's the only Super 8 film they had although my dad won a camera. I asked Bear, my director and ultimate video technician, if we could import it into my Mac. She said to search Google. So, we did. We found a nifty open-source program called Handbrake which made it possible to rip the information off of the DVD and onto our computer. Bear did some editing--she wants to be a director one day--and suddenly, the 8 mm film was sharper and in better condition than before.  I downloaded a clip of projector sound just like you would have heard back then from Freesound.org, and with a bit of tinkering, we have a...

My sister has this noise she makes sometimes called her "Powerless Noise." It's a bit of a raspberry mixed with a sigh. That's precisely what I think of July and August, the two longest months of 2011. Do I really want to travel back there again? Will you venture with me? You're a brave soul. Well, then . . . onward! The hard times were just beginnin' on July 5th. In my most recent post, I stated we received good rain on Easter Sunday and then none after. Well, then it rained 1.24 inches in June, and it was over 100F for much of that month. The above one hundred temps continued through July. The caption of the photo below: "A touch of blue makes it cooler." Not much cooler I can tell you. Still, we weren't worried. We should have been. By July 9th, I complained I'd lost my...