Brian and I spent a large part of early spring building a new garden.  Last year, we just tilled part of the back yard and threw some starters in the ground and called it good.  The soil isn’t great though, so my garden didn’t do its best and I didn’t even get to hoard enough tomatoes to make sauce.  I knew building beds would be expensive because of all of the dirt, so when we got a settlement check from Toyota (what the settlement was for, I don’t remember) for $125, we agreed to put it towards the garden.  If you’ve built raised beds, you know that $125 doesn’t cover two cedar beds and a cinder block bed and all of the dirt.  So much dirt.  We just used basic soil and a little mushroom compost, plus my own compost and I think we spent nearly $100 just on dirt.  We bought 24 cinder blocks at a little over $1 each, and I can’t remember how much the wood was but cedar is pricey.  The only thing that made it a little better was that Menards was having a rebate promotion for a percentage back, so we were able to mail in a couple of receipts and get ~$20 back in store credit.

The rebate promo was in March, so we bought the wood and blocks then, and Brian built one bed one weekend and the other the next.  We were in no hurry since I knew that planting weather was still a ways off.  The hardest part was getting the blocks and dirt to the yard, we don’t have an alley or anything and my garden is on the opposite corner away from the gate.  So I had to load the blocks onto a moving dollie and pull them.  Dollies make moving heavy objects a lot easier, but that ease was kind of negated by the fact that I had to pull the dollie through grass instead of just over pavement.  I wanted cinder blocks so I could plant my herbs in the holes on the outside, and if I want to expand it next year I can pretty easily.  We went with two layers of bricks so I could plant greens in it from seed and not worry about Harley hopping on top of them to nap.  If you want a raised bed but don’t want to mess with cutting wood I would totally recommend cinder blocks, just keep in mind that they are HEAVY, we had to take ours home in two trips, and leveling the ground can be a pain in the ass and then you won’t do it properly and you’ll end up with some crooked bricks that you’ll have to push inward while trying to shovel dirt underneath with your hand, and that dirt will eventually settle and then the blocks will be crooked again.  Hypothetically, I mean.  That totally did not happen to me.

The greens as of yesterday.  As you can see, they’re doing great!  I have kale starters, then kale from seed, collards, and two kinds of lettuce that I can’t remember what they are and the seed packet is out of reach.  The front and back have basil, basil, more basil, sage, lavender, thyme, rosemary, and oregano.  I stuffed the bottom layer of the blocks with old leaves and dirt we dug up to level the ground to help keep the empty ones stable.  If you look on Pinterest, there are some really cool looking cinder block beds, you can even make a simple planter out of a couple, paint them, whatever.  And you can dismantle them at any time and re-arrange!

And here are the cedar beds, things are starting to flower and i’ve been eating really small strawberries this week but nothing too exciting so far.  The far bed is all tomatoes because i’m insane, the closer one is strawberries in the front (I planted four last year just to get them started and transplanted about a dozen into the bed from the babies they made), then peppers and eggplant, then four zucchini plants (I know, why, i’m stupid) watermelon because I thought i’d give that a whirl, and cucumbers in the back.  I tend to grow the same basics every year and try one new plant just to see if it’s easy to grow because i’m the laziest gardener ever.  Everything is doing great so far, we’ve had a decent amount of rain since I planted a month ago.  I hope to have a small jungle by this time next month!

Last weekend was the last chance to order from Cosmo’s before they closed their doors. When Leigh and Ken announced they were closing, I immediately placed an order to help them clear out their stock (and I ordered enough to get free shipping so it wasn’t any more than I would spend at the health food store). But when they put up a code for 40% off of everything, I couldn’t resist even though I am not exactly rolling in the money.

One of the items I ordered got oversold, so Leigh emailed me and asked me what I wanted as a replacement. My reply was, “Chocolate, other jerky’s, chocolate, any non-perishable food item, chocolate, whatevs.” I got extra chocolate wrapped up like a present and a jar of Biscoff cookie spread, way more than the value of what they were replacing. This isn’t the only time that my Cosmo’s order has included a little something extra. Ken and Leigh are good people and I wish them luck in the next part of their life.

And now why i’m putting my url on my photos from now on: Pinterest and tumblr.

Actually, since this is long and not everyone will care to read that much about the subject, let me say that it is NOT because I think I take amazing pictures. I have nothing to sell, I don’t have ads on my site that I want more people to see. Since I only update about once a month i’m not even really concerned with how many people read/look at my blog. I used to think it was kind of ridiculous for non-professionals/non-artists to watermark their photos. If you still do, feel free to think i’m an asshole.

I have a Pinterest account and I think it’s great. I love having visual bookmarks of recipes, makeup ideas, gardening ideas, etc. There are some things about it that aren’t so great, like the fact that they save a hi-res copy of the pinned image. And that so many people DO NOT ATTRIBUTE/LINK BACK TO THE CORRECT SOURCE. I’m saying this as a user and not as someone who has found my images on there, I hate it when I see a pin I like and want to click through to the blog/site, and…it goes to a tumblr, or the person saved it and uploaded it themselves. Don’t do that, guys! I know when you’re re-pinning stuff you probably don’t always go and look at where the image came from, but if you are pinning something, make sure it’s from the site of the person who it belongs to, so at least people who want to follow the trail, can.

My friend Sunny has made a bunch of posts about this in the past month, if you want to read more about it.

What really gets me is tumblr. I kind of hate tumblr, but I know a lot of people who use it. My husband bought a tumblr t-shirt just to give me grief. Sometimes when I check my flickr stats, I get links from tumblr, and mostly I just make that Marge Simpson sound and move on. It bothers me that someone can post nothing of their own and get a couple dozen likes/reblogs for it, but the person who actually created the content gets jack. I’ve never turned off sharing of my photos on flickr though, until I found a referral on one of my food photos for a pro-anorexia tumblr. I absolutely do not want anyone using anything of mine to support hurting themselves, if I can help it. Can I?

But even if you have sharing disabled and your photo protection as high as it can be, someone can still use the bookmarklet function on either of these sites. The only other thing you can do is opt out of the flickr API search. But someone can still stumble across your photo and use the bookmarklet.

Now, a lot of people straight-up do not care about this stuff. That’s fine. If you don’t care, none of this matters. If you do care, you are basically screwed. There is nothing you can do except get off of the internet, because this is the way things are now. So that’s why I decided to just start putting my url in the bottom corner of my photos. Sure, someone can save my photo from one of these sites and crop it out, but considering how easy it is to repost things these days, less people are going to go through that effort. And if they do, there’s nothing I can do about that!

Hey, remember when my dog slid down the stairs and dislocated his hip?  And we spent around a grand total to have it put back?  And then it came right back out and he had to have surgery?

Okay, it didn’t come RIGHT back out.  During a visit to get his bandage re-wrapped, someone finally thought to tell me that his hip might come back out.  I believe my exact internal monologue was, “You have got to be fucking shitting me.”  If I had known that right off the bat, I would’ve just opted for surgery, which cost more but there wasn’t any question on if it would work, and the recovery time would’ve been shorter than the bandage wearing time.  Anyway, when they took the bandage off they told me to continue carrying him around and keeping him isolated when he’s alone for two weeks, and if it doesn’t come out in that time frame, it’s probably fine.

We made it one week, five days.  Now i’m sure you’re like, “You irresponsible ho, what did you let him do?”  Chester jumped back onto his hind legs, tried to turn, and that’s all it took.  And this is after he took it upon himself to leap onto a few couches the second our backs were turned.  So the answer is yes, I am a horrible mother.

Thanks to Care Credit we were able to afford the surgery, but his doctor ended up doing an emergency c-section and a few other emergencies that day, which was a Friday, so we had to take him home for the weekend and try to keep him doped up.  Chester lost about six pounds during this whole thing, and it was mostly because every time he had to go to the vet, he would be pissed off and refuse to eat/he was in too much pain to care.  He wouldn’t eat at all that night and I had to literally pry his jaw open just to get him to take his regular meds and his pain pills.  Chester would swallow the kitchen sink if I let him, so him not wanting to eat made me really sad (that and the fact that he would yelp in extreme pain whenever he had to be moved).

After his surgery, he was only out of it for a day or two before he started to perk back up, eating normally, and all that jazz.  We had to do physical therapy on him, playing with his joints to keep them moving since he had barely started to put his foot down before he hurt himself again, so he had been walking on three legs for over a month at this point.  We also had to try and put a heating pad on him.  All of that was very fun and just as well received as you might think.

During the surgery, the doctor found that the tendon that connects the leg bone into the hip socket was completely snapped, and he had a bunch of turn butt muscles.  That means that it had no chance of staying in, and he was in way more pain than we thought and that he let on.  Chester is a trooper and despite the jaw prying and grumping about the therapies, he was so good through all of this.  I love my dog.

Chester a few days after surgery:

Grudgingly (look at that face) accepting the heating pad:

And this is how I knew he was better.  He won’t jump on the bed (and he also won’t sleep with us at night anymore, boo), but after a week he started wanting to nap on it so I pick him up and put him on it sometimes (he can get down fine).  Chester’s favorite toy is the bed.  He likes to burrow under the covers and thrash around, and we ask where Chester is and when he pops back out he’s like “Dude, here I am!”  One day he seemed to realize that his hip was okay and he could once again roll over on his back and kick back and forth like an overturned turtle or something:

And now he is mostly back to normal. He sometimes runs on three legs still because it’s easier, and he has a wicked 18 o’clock shadow where his fur is growing back. But he doesn’t have to sleep in a pen anymore and since he’s not doped up and asleep all the time his personality, of which he has a lot, is back in full effect.