Scourge

So far the weeds are the only thing thriving in our garden, and this particular variety seems to be the most tenacious. Not only does it grow back seemingly overnight, and seem to wedge itself into impossibly tight places between strawberry plant stems, but it also has a long root that is really hard to pull out. Most of the time I end up just getting the green part, which rips away fairly easily (by design?) and leave the root intact.



Now that you've had a minute to lust after my pale leg and sexy boot, we can continue.

We managed to get home from work around 3 this afternoon, so Chieko and I headed out into the yard for a few hours of maintenance.

This whole gardening experience is great fun and gives me a good reason to go outside and play in the dirt. Whoever lived in this house before us planted stuff all over the place though, with little regard for how big it would eventually get or apparent consideration of how much friggin mint one person needs. Incidentally, the mint was growing up among the strawberries. On the other side of the yard, there was a lemongrass bush, and a small grove of oregano, and a rosemary plant that was about 3 feet tall and flailing all over the place. The mint and rosemary are gone, the lemongrass and oregano have been halved. Now we just need to figure out how to use it.

I felt sort of bad about wasting some perfectly good herb plants, but we were never going to use either of them, and our yard is too small to have overgrown crops that we don't need. We'll plant something else that we'll actually consume in their place.

Another unfortunate incident occurred as I was laying into the lemongrass hedge and ripping roots out of the ground, all under the watchful eyes of my do 70+ year old neighbors who do nothing but garden, and had happened to come inspect whatever it was that I was destroying.

Eyeing a clump of roots on the ground one of them asked me, 'Is that asparagus.' I had no idea what it was, but he was right. It was a perfectly mature asparagus root that I had ripped out of the ground to its death. And that really is a shame, because I love asparagus. Fortunately the happy gardeners who lived here before planted asparagus all over the damn place, so there are a few random sprigs growing beneath the hedge in the back of the house. So all hope is not lost.

Aside from all the gardening fun, Chieko had her most recent checkup last Saturday. The doctor hooked her up the ultrasound and we could see the baby really moving its legs and jiggling around. He also showed us the fancy 3-D imaging they do now, which I think is much cooler than that standard black and white ultrasound.

She's at about 13 weeks now, and everything is good. We have a genki baby so far. Chieko, on the other hand, has had a horrible cough for about 2 weeks now and sounds like crap. She finally went back to the doctor a few days ago and got some low dose antibiotics that don't really seem to be working. What really sucks is that her morning sickness has more or less cleared up, only to usher in this latest malady. Hopefully she'll be on the mend soon.

OK, bedtime for me. Another great day for Boston sports, by the way.