Update on our Garden

It’s been fun to watch our garden grow over the last couple of weeks. I can definitely tell that they have grown, although Celeste could give you a day-by-day of how many new flowers and how many new vegetables have sprouted. She really enjoys spending time in the garden, especially now that her office has moved to our apartment and the garden is right outside. We made a bet on what vegetable would be ready first -- we both guessed cucumber. But the first vegetable was actually a green pepper. It was very tasty. That was about two weeks ago, and a week ago, the first cucumber was picked. I wasn’t there for the honors since I had a short trip to Dallas (by short, I flew in at 12:30 am and left the same day at 8:00 pm). So I enjoyed the cucumber through Celeste’s description. She said that it was very good. We've since picked a few more cucumbers and green peppers, and they have all been wonderful.

There are some fun things we’ve learned from our garden. First of all, squirrels apparently like strawberries, since strawberries keep disappearing before fully ripe. Celeste keeps thinking that it is me. It isn’t, though. We have a family of squirrels living in the tree on our patio. We haven’t caught them in the act, yet, but we think it’s them.

Herbs straight from the garden are wonderful! Fresh parsley is wonderful! Fresh basil is wonderful! Fresh cilantro is wonderful! You might be interested to see what cilantro looks like when you let it grow past its edible stage (you know, the fresh cilantro bunches you buy in the store). Once cilantro gets to a certain point, it grows flowers and seeds and loses the “cilantro” flavor. It actually looks like a giant weed. That isn’t a weed, though. We’ve been keeping our garden weed-free. We’ll probably plant it in a separate container next time, but for now, it towers over the green onions. One other interesting thing is that the seeds that grow on the cilantro plant are called coriander. Who knew? I guess the bigger question, though – who knows what coriander is? I didn’t even know it existed until Celeste told me.

The last fun thing about our garden is our new drip irrigation system. When we went to Monterey for the three-day Memorial Day weekend, we weren’t sure who to get to water our garden. So, we installed a drip irrigation system and a timer. Now, we don’t have to worry at all about watering, because it self waters everyday at the same specified timed. It’s great. Low maintenance gardening.

An example of the hose that connects all our plants.


The water timer for auto-watering convenience.
For more pictures, go to our Picture Album.

My Geocaching Quest

Since my travels have been taking me all over the U.S., I decided to try to find a geocache in every state. (If you don’t know what geocaching is, read about it at geocaching.com). When I get to a new state, I try to have the coordinates for a geocache close to my hotel. Sometimes, it’s really close to the hotel (such as a geocache I found on Time’s Square in New York City -- see picture below). Other times, I have to take quite the hike (such as in Dallas walking 3.5 miles in muggy heat).


The thing I like most about geocaching is that it usually leads to fun parks and interesting landmarks that only locals usually know about. For example, I found this running trail in New Jersey. As I was jogging back to the car, I literally almost ran into a deer on the trail. I’m not sure who was spooked more, me or the deer.

It’s been fun adding a geocache or two to each of my trips. It gives me a bit of exercise, too. I’ve been making decent progress on hitting the list of states. I’m tracking it on a map in my geocaching.com profile (I copied the most recent map below). It’s a pretty long process to get all 50 states, but it’s been taking me to fun little places. This month, I added Massachusetts and Texas to my list of states. That brings me up to 15 states.

Our First Garden in California

Since we moved a few weeks ago, we now have our own private patio. It's a pretty big area, too, and we realized that it gets enough direct sunlight that it would be perfect for a garden. So what did we do? We planted a garden last week. We've got peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, strawberries, cilantro, basil, green onions, and parsley. Over the last week, we had quite the heat wave. Temperatures exceeded 100 degrees. It wasn't exactly the best weather to be outside, or inside if you didn't have A/C. But the plants sure loved it. When we planted the tomatoes last week, only one of the plants was (barely) above the first horizontal wire in the tomato cage. Now, all of them are almost up to the second wire. I guess the heat was good for them. We love our garden! And what is especially nice is that we have our own hose. That sure makes watering a lot easier (we used to use a watering can -- took a lot longer).

Our Garden - One Week Ago
Click on the pictures to see the difference a week will make

Our Garden - Today

Snowboarding At Tahoe

Celeste and I tried out snowboarding for the first time last weekend. My company paid for us to go to North Star at Lake Tahoe. We met at 4am at my office so that we could get to the resort by 8am. We took lessons in the morning and went up the mountain after lunch. It was a ton of fun! We decided that snowboarding is more fun than skiing, mostly because you can do more in snowboarding. Of course, we did fall a lot and ended up with sore knees and bums. But it was worth it. And at the end of the day, we were still smiling (And I had a nice sunburn across my forehead since I had my hat on while applying sunscreen -- it made for a funny tan line). :) Can't wait 'til the company trip next year!

Salsa Routine

Celeste and I had fun choreographing a salsa routine for a church activity. Hope you enjoy it!