the fastidious princess

Hey, guys… hope the week’s been good to you so far. We’re about halfway through I figure, so that’s something… I figure.

You think it’s easy to write this much every day and still be so awesome? Well, it is. Sometimes I look back on the tons and tons of words on this webpage and kinda freak out: “Good Lord, when do I have time to do ‘real’ stuff with all that writing?” Eh, I seem to find plenty of time. Surprisingly, even to me, it’s not as time-consuming as it looks – I guess.

Oh, before we get started, I updated Keaton’s picture gallery late today with some images from her 2nd birthday party here at home (at the kids gym with all her buds), and a few from Easter. Go ahead and go check that out now, this thing’ll be here when you get back – take your time even. (Yeah, I know, I said I might have some video… but man… that’s a lot of work!)

Anyway back to the writing/blogging thing if I may, I’m happy to say that overall daily readership here at sounds familiar has experienced a measurable uptick for 2008. That makes me happy, and I’m always excited to find out about new readers and get new comments – keep ‘em coming. Also on the rise are the spam comments the site gets, although thanks to the near-perfect filtering of Akismet very few end up getting through. Seems like just yesterday (it wasn’t, it was back in September of 2006) when I was exclaiming about my Akismet spam-blocked count breaking the 100,000 barrier, and here we are this week hovering just under 200,000. Amazing.

And, last on the blogging run of topics: You guys and your poll-gaming. I should’ve never said how easy it was to fool the poll by deleting cookies. Early Tuesday morning someone up-voted the “pants off” voting option by about ten votes. Turns out, however, that with this new polling plugin, I can actually see who games the system – and by how many votes. So, if I wanted to, I could completely discount “artificial” voting. Don’t think I will, though, as it seems to me that if someone wants to go to the trouble, they must really want to read something. Anyway, the poll for this Friday is still open, and right now the triple-X topic is out in the lead. If you’d rather see things turn out differently, make sure you flex your muscle of democracy and make it happen. I’ll post the poll again Thursday, but for now if you haven’t voted just cruise down the page and do it.

Yesterday after work I decided to get into the garden and prep it for the Spring planting. First job was to pull all the wheat from my failed “know the cost of a loaf of bread” project. Turns out wheat, I guess like any grass really, has a pretty extensive root network – guess that’s why they plant the stuff as erosion control on hillsides, eh? – anyway, pulling it took some time, after which I backfilled with more fresh compost/peat/etc. Since Keaton got some super-awesome toddler-sized garden implements as gifts for her birthday last month, I brought her outside with me to help. At first, she wasn’t having it. Being the fastidious princess she is, when I hoisted her up into the garden box she just stood there, rooted in her spot, looking down at her shoes with the most concerned look on her face. “Don’t like it, Daddy!,” she’d whine. “You don’t like what, baby?,” Dad asked. “Don’t like the sand in my shoes! My shoes are dirty, Daddy…” I tried to explain to her that getting dirty is part of gardening, but she wasn’t having it.

After ten minutes or so spent standing statue-still fretting over the dirt in her shoes, I tried to accelerate things by piling soil around her feet, completely covering them like we were at the beach. At first she whined some more, but soon enough she pulled her feet out and asked me to take off her shoes. Once she was barefoot, she seemed a little better and started walking around. Soon enough she was throwing dirt at me, it was quite a rapid progression. At some point, we found a worm while turning up soil, and I had her hold out her hand so it could crawl on her. She called it a “silly worman,” which is apparently what they are called on The Backyardigans (so sayeth Sharaun), and seemed to enjoy herself as it wriggled up her arm. We found a cocoon too, the kind where the pointy butt-end is still sort of alive and spins around to corkscrew the thing into the Earth. She held that in her hand and watched it move, and even knew, after I told her what it was, that it was going to turn into a butterfly.

We had a good time, and the garden is now ready for some new stuff. We were planning on planting tonight, but I got home a little late from work and the wind was up so it was a bit chilly (it’s looking like the amazing weather we’ve been having the past week is about to take a turn for the worse with the forecast showing rain and wind the next couple days). Maybe tomorrow if the weather holds and it’s warm enough as the sun goes down, otherwise we’ll have to wait till the weekend or something.

Well folks, that’s enough for me tonight… sorry it’s all over the place. Goodnight.

Also written on this day...

• mixed - 2019
• dwarves & princesses & castles - 2010
• green thumb - 2007
• humping invisible sticks - 2004