Anyone remember the Baywatch episode with the ladybugs?

Last weekend we took a trip to Sandbridge and got attacked by ladybugs. At one point I had three all sitting on my at once. The water was cold, and the sand kept on blasting us, but we had some killer seafood for lunch and I found a cool shell (a fairly intact Conch).
I thought you'd all like to marvel at me doing a Baywatch impression (minus the yellow floaty thing).

Costco

Yesterday we made our first purchases at the Mecca of excess known as Costco. My place of work offers cheap membership each May. Although we got the cards a few weeks ago, and had gone in to take a look around, it has taken us this long to summon the courage to actually buy anything. I think I found the deal of the century in a set of Floor Mats for by truck that came in at $13. We don't have to buy ground beef, yogurts or Snickers bars for a while!

SFG Update

I can't really tell one plant from another, so I had Kristal tell me exactly what we had and I wrote it all down. The box on the left was planted from seed, and the right box was planted with starters.
For the purposes of web accessibility I should have created a table using html table tags. But I was lazy and did probably the worst thing I could've done. I turned an Excel file into a JPEG and posted the information as an image. Al Gore (the de facto creator of the internet) would be horrified. I added some poorly drawn grass to try to convince myself that an image really was the most appropriate format in this context, but I know in my heart that I guilty and not even providing alternate text can atone for my sloth.

Updating my blog

I hope you all like the new more personal blog banner. I created this guy when the Simpsons movie came out. It was a pretty good representation of my facial hair situation at the time. Anyway, I found him in my picture folder and though he would do a good job of welcoming readers to my blog.

I have high aspiration of updating my blog template. I need to upgrade to Blogger's new templates, but that would involve resetting the various colour and font changes I have made. At the moment I am still unclear as to the advantages of the new templates. Since I barely find to time to write posts, I dread the prospect of spending hours working on my template just to have it look identical to the current incarnation. I'm so out of practice with HTML that editing is a process of trial and error. I was trying to remove the padding about the banner image today, but can't for the life of me find the appropriate line of code to change. It isn't helped that the Blogger templates are written with some form of style-sheet that is unfamiliar to me.

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I took the plunge and the new template editor is much easier to work with. It took about 10 minutes to make some colour and font changes, reinstate my banner and enact a few other minor edits. My only disappointment is that clicking on a colour swatch to select a text colour is much less satisfiying than locating to appropriate line of code and editing the hexadecimal number.

George

George, originally uploaded by evens.john.

Kristal and I visited Crump Memorial Park this evening as I'd seen some young lambs there last weekend. We also walked around to see the pigs. A couple of volunteers arrived to tend to the garden, so we got a formal introduction to George and Martha (the pigs!).

The park garden grows the usual vegetables and of course tobacco, which is cured in the only surviving tobacco curing shed in Henrico county, also located on the property.

Square foot gardens

garden 026, originally uploaded by evens.john.

Due to our limited yard space, patchy knowledge of gardening principles and abundance of creativity we are attempting to grow our vegetables in square foot gardens. We picked up a ton of dirt on a recent trip to Mathews, and threw it in a 4x4 box. Apparently the grid is also very important to the method of the SFG. Today we picked up some starter plants for Home Depot. We have a second box which we will try to start plants from seed! Watch this space and I'll let you know if we manage to grow anything!