green thumb in training

i planted my little herb planter garden last night!  i planted from plants this year - maybe next year i'll brave seeds, depending on how this year's expedition goes.  we now have cilantro, sage, sweet basil, onion chives, and rosemary growing in a lovely green planter.  it's a little more crowded than i thought it would be, so i may have to separate them at some point.  again, we'll see.  i'm so excited for a summer full of tasty cooking, though!  especially the basil and rosemary - yum.  i saw an article a few months ago suggesting that you cut long sections of rosemary, strip the herby leaves, and use the wood as skewers for kabobs.  i'm not sure my rosemary will get big enough for that this year (it's a perennial, so hopefully i won't kill it this season), but how lovely does that sound??

when our friends jordan and miranda moved to minnesota, they gave us their railing-mount plastic planter.  i dumped out the soil last night, cleaned it up, and am spray painting it the same cappucino color as our shutters, with plans to mount it on the iron railing in front of our front door with some pretty flowers in it!  i have a notoriously brown thumb, so i'm not sure how my forays into gardening will go, but i'm mildly optimistic.  i also have plans to start a mini garden in a bare patch in our lawn next to the back patio - cherry tomatoes and zucchini are currently what i'm planning, but i may branch out.

oh, after pictures of the roof project are finally posted on facebook!  (as well as an early look at my gardening attempts.)

overview

ooh la la, a non-bargain-hunting post!  as i find the boundaries provided by numbering things comforting, i'll do list form (also to keep my verbose narrative in check):

1. we officially have our camping reservation for yellowstone in august!  plus, i spent the morning reading my frommer's yellowstone guide, and i'm getting steadily more excited.  there's just so much to see and do, i'm starting to wish we'd planned more than three to three and a half days there.  our campground is near the grand canyon of the yellowstone, and near the upper and lower falls, which are two of the things that i'd most hoped to see.  it's going to be challenging to balance getting out and hiking and experiencing the nature of the park with driving and wanting to see everything because it's all so cool and beautiful.
2. whoops, went onto facebook to find a link and got totally distracted!  our friends zach and casey, who were our first friends in denver, are moving to africa to work with friends at the recreation project.  their website explains it better, but basically uganda has tons of kids (and adults) really emotionally scarred from the history of war in their country and from being forced into fighting, so they're building a ropes course and sports rec leagues as a sort of recreational therapy, to help the kids channel their aggression and competition and passion into constructive things, and help build leadership.  we went to a fundraising bowling night last night to see them before they leave.  (we haven't seen them as a couple in ages, and casey and i haven't hung out since we both left our first apartment complex, but scott and zach still play poker, watch football, and do the occasional sports team together.)
3. in celebration of being alone in the office today, i had a diet coke with lunch (which i just finished drinking now, four hours later - i'm a slow drinker), and i've totally got the post-caffeine jitters.  i hate that feeling.
4. scott and i pulled our first weeds of the season yesterday.  we do have some more to do, but thankfully it's way less bad than last year - i'm hoping that if we start early, we can keep it under control and not have a thistle forest in our sideyard by mid-june.  we're also planning to call our tree trimmer who also does general landscaping work to get a bid on taking out some dead aspens and pulling out one of our dead-bush-and-dirty-river-rock areas so that we can start making our yard look pretty.  (it desparately needs new weed barrier and bushes, and we're debating whether to clean up the river rock or switch it out with mulch - either the traditional wood stuff or the rubber stuff.)  we're undecided how much to do ourselves vs hiring someone else to do ... it's just so much easier to write a check to someone else, but also obviously more costly.  also, we're excited to start re-planting trees this year!
5. tonight is my last night of tutoring gerardo.  (actually, not tutoring - it's the end of year celebration/dinner.)  he's ending 5th grade, which means that next year he starts middle school.  whiz kids is thinking of opening up a middle school tutoring site in the area since there are so many 5th graders moving up, but i'm not sure if he'll continue with it next year.  we shall see - it could be my last night with him ever, or i could get three more years!  (when i asked him about it last week, he said that he wants to not do it so that i can stay with the elementary school kids and tutor his little brother, who'll be in first grade next year.  how sweet is that??)

heart amazon

i love amazon!  i just ordered an svga cable to hook my computer up to the tv to do things like watch hulu.com on tv for $6.99 including shipping, an audio cable also for computer to tv usage for $6 with free shipping, a wirless rain sensor for $45 with free shipping that will be eligible for full rebate from our water company, and two filters for our vacuum for $8.15 each with free shipping.

for comparison, bestbuy.com listed a comprable length svga cable for $45, had a shorter audio cable for $9, and the reason that i haven't changed my vacuum filter in close to two years is that the filters at target/walmart cost $15-20 each which made me cranky.  that's a savings of approximately $55 total!

now, off to watch lost.  we decided that we're doing nothing but laundry and lounging today.  so far, we're on target!  (slept in til 10am - love it.)

slightly less cheap phone service

our magic jack is back in working order, by the way.  we started using it at the beginning of january, i think, and at the end of march i noticed that the little blue power light in the magic jack that was flickering.  hmm.  i found that if i wiggled it down it would power off, or wiggled up the power would stay on.  i tried using electrical tape to hold in the "on" position, but finally it just refused to power on any more.  right, i wasn't thrilled.  scott contacted customer service and ordered us a new one ($20 since the old one had a physical defect), and we're back in business.  we had kept the old magic jack plugged straight into my computer, but it's like 2.5 inches long x 1.5 inches wide, and i think it got bumped around on my laptop often enough that the usb connection broke.  so, learning from our mistake, we got a 10 foot usb extension cord and now have the magic jack safely extensioned away and taped into place on top of the little power cord box for my laptop.  so far so good, and if you ever decide to give magic jack a whirl and use a laptop as your primary home computer, i highly recommend the usb extension cord route.

2012

scott and i really like watching movies.  as such, redbox is approximately the greatest thing since sliced bread to us, and we rejoiced when one came to the grocery store across the street from us.  anyway, on easter weekend scott came home with the movie 2012, and it was awesome - wonderfully cheesy action, so much unintentional comedy, and somehow predictable yet suspenseful at the same time.  if you're not familiar, the premise of the movie is that the earth's core heats up which makes the plates of the earth shift, which in turn leads to crazy huge earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and megatsunamis, wiping out everyone on earth except a few hundred thousand world leaders and super-wealthy people who can afford tickets on huge arks.  oh, john cusack and his family survive, though, because they manage to get their car/rv/plane out at precisely the right moment - specifically about two inches ahead of the giant chasm opening up in the earth, wheels spinning wildly on the crumbling pavement, but then speeding away ahead of the death crack in the nick of time.  their plane runs out of gas in china rather than the pacific because of the earth's crazy land shifting, and then mere moments later they happen upon a tibetan monk with a pickup truck who happens to have a brother who can sneak them onto one of the arks - something that apparently no other ark workers considered!

when it all comes down, the movie is totally absurd and laughably wonderful - BUT, because we watched it in the midst of this year of heightened awareness of earthquakes, i just can't stop thinking about it!  everytime another major earthquake is reported on the news (and i think there have been six in the week and a half since then), i find myself wondering if this amount of earthquake activity is normal.  when i heard the news of iceland's volcanic eruption and that the subsequent ash cloud is prevent air travel across the uk and europe, i a) wonder how many active volcanoes there are and if they're related to the earthquakes at all, and b) laugh because in the movie they fly their plane through tons of volcanic ash with no problems.  i saw an article this morning about earthquake swarms in yellowstone and found myself pondering the state of the yellowstone caldera, and specifically wondering what the odds are that it would erupt when we're up there this summer.  silly, i know, but still things my brain hangs on to.  no, i am actually concerned about any of it, just something i find myself pondering occasionally.  besides, as the book of matthew says, no one can know the time or day of the end times.
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vaguely related, we're planning a trip to yellowstone for august, and i'm excited!  i have a copy of the 2010 frommer's yellowstone/tetons guide on hold at the library for poring over this weekend.  we're doing the trip with mike, maura, and kinley, but i'm hopeful that it will work out with both of our schedules and with camping availability to do the first week of august to coincide with our 5 year wedding anniversary.  (5 years!)  if so, we were talking about maybe stopping in jackson, wyoming (an hour or so south of yellowstone, through grand teton national park) to enjoy the view of the teton mountain range, explore and stay the night at an inn somewhere in the valley.  fun, right?