January 2009: Briefly cold, but mostly cool.

Just to set the wintry mood, here's a night by the fireplace. Despite all the fondness Jenny expresses for the fireplace, the fact that we live in Austin didn't fit into the calculations when we "bought the house for the fireplace". This picture here was from one of the times we used it (out of only two or three times that it was cold enough for a fire). So, in Austin at least, it turns out that "buying the house for the fireplace" is about as sensible as "buying the house for the attic ladder".

Can you spot the random visage/silhouette on the back of our fireplace? I thought this was pretty much great as soon as I spotted him. I took no small pleasure in referring to him as our neighborhood Zulu prince for the remainder of the night.I spent much of the pleasantly mild/cool weather digging out one of the garden plots. (I first buried an irrigation pipe from the rain barrel on the corner of the house ,where the most roof-water is channeled). I thought this would be a better way to make sure the maximum water was getting to the garden in the hot, dry summer months. And we also had a spare irrigation pipe that was cluttering things up.

Then here's some of the digging, about half-way through:

The pipe before I buried it:

A close-up of the excavation:

And then a couple wider angles:

The yard waste pile was still intact, but by this point, my plans were to dismantle it as soon as possible (move it to beds, make space for some privacy bushes over there beside the fence, and start a new pile somewhere else.)

I decided to use some of the surplus dirt from all this digging to build up what would soon be the herb bed of my dreams.

As was evident in one of the wider angle shots above, there were still some plants that survived the winter. In fact, it was a good thing they did b/c they weren't making fast enough progress in the fall, so the only way I got anything out of them was b/c their life was prolonged unexpectedly due to the mild weather. Here are a couple rutabagas: