The Garden Report
This is the biggest pumpkin out in the front yard and I swear every time I look at it, it's measurably bigger. There's another good sized one in the backyard but the critters have already nibbled on it. This is why I don't worry about having too many pumpkins because something (squirrels? raccoons? opossum?) wreck most of them. The animals usually eat them as soon as they're as big as a grape.

My sunflowers are thriving. I didn't pull any so my entire garden is a forest of sunflowers. The tomato plants are big and dripping with tons of green tomatoes. Nothing even looks close to getting ripe. We're having a rainy streak which was nice at first but is moving into the category of dismaying. Outside my office window it looks like November right now. eek. I've got a few lettuce-y type plants and beets that don't seem to grow. That covers it.

We have an endless abundance of lawn weeds in the form of little yellow flowers. I spent hours weeding on Sunday and you can barely tell. In a related story I decided to devote a couple of hours to filing at the office yesterday. I decided that weeding and filing are the same: lots of work with little progress and there's always more on the way.

This is a rambling post meandering to different topics if you're not getting that yet. I don't know if I've written exactly about this as much as hinted about it but I submitted a short story last week for the first time in eons.

A shortish version of my writing career is I wrote various stuff for a long time and then wrote a novel which took years (Linking to exact pages is too depressing but if you're interested the newsletters tell the tale starting in the early 90's.) In 2001 I did a workshop and did my last major push for publication which yielded a tiny bit of interest and that's it. Then I took a screenwriting class and did that for a few years and for a long time it was fun until it became no longer fun and I got to a point where I no longer enjoyed even the thought of writing and quit.

I took a Photoshop class and learned how to work a sewing machine and tried new cooking things. But I never felt very good about not writing and it's taken awhile but I'm enjoying it again and finally completed and submitted something and it's a whole new world out there.

When I was on vacation I think my domain hosting tweaked their spam filtering because I had 150 spam for one week and normally I get about 3 a day. The spam filtering gives you the option of sending the spam to a folder or sending out into the ethers and I realize the drawbacks of this decision but I picked the ethers. Going to the spam folder to look for misfiled email was like a part time job and I very rarely found any real email and even then it was someone I bought something from who wanted me to buy more things. I noted the sudden spike in my spam with a "hm?" and never thought of it again.

I recently noticed I haven't been getting any comments from here. In case anyone reading doesn't know how it works, in addition to being posted on the page, blog comments are sent via email to the blogger. I figured my loyal commenter was disappointed that the posts have been so boring lately. But later I noticed that there were new comments. Even from new people. I guess the comments are flying off into the ethers with the spam and I should probably investigate further but for now the comments have been redirected to a gmail account so comment away secure in the knowledge that I'm appreciative and actually seeing all the comments.

One last thing before I go Bob and I have been loving the HBO show Flight of the Conchords. It's hilarious.