Garden Update

The garden is coming along nicely! There are some very beautiful flowers on the eggplant.


The tomatoes are beginning to form, also!

We Ate the Rye!

We cooked the rye we foraged and used it as a salad topping. It was really good!

Gardening on the Fifth Floor

We live in a place with a great view and a balcony that is ten inches wide, so planting some food crops has been challenging. Despite the obvious difficulty, we planted some vegetables in containers. A real garden would have been better, but this has provided a chance to work on skills related to growing food, which is an excellent doom-related activity. Even in an ordinary doom like the Great Depression, knowing how to garden is essential.

This is a box (called the "salad bar") with lettuce and beets; we also have a box of herbs, a bag of tomatoes, and another bag of eggplants and bell peppers. I don't know how well this is going to work or how much it will yield, given the cramped quarters.

This is the box of herbs. In order from closest to farthest from the camera, the herbs are oregano, tarragon, chives, lavender, Thai basil, sweet basil, and dill.

Yum, tomatoes! I have planted Early Girl and Sweet 100s. Next year, if this turns out to work, I want to put in some heirloom tomatoes. I'm thinking that Black Seaman tomatoes would be fun, both because the name makes me giggle and because they look like tomatoes from Mars.

That's the bag of eggplants and peppers.

Because the balcony is so incredibly narrow, it was difficult to find pots deep enough for tomatoes and narrow enough for the balcony, so we used some big plastic bags instead.

Urban Foraging

"Survivalists" isn't the right word; it carries all kinds of spooky connotations of cabins in Montana and stockpiles of weaponry. We're more like "doom hobbyists." That is, we like to imagine what we would do if some major disaster happened and we had to provide for ourselves using basic survival skills.

One of the doom-related projects has been foraging for edible wild plants. This is a great hobby, because it is cheap (sometimes free!) and results in food as well as useful skills. A few weeks ago I discovered a vacant lot a couple blocks away from home. This lot has been the source of some tasty herbs, apparently leftovers from a previous resident's garden, and I've watched over the summer as patches of rye matured. Finally the rye was ripe enough for harvest.

After we harvested the rye, Joseph and I had to figure out how to thresh and winnow it...in the top-floor condo. This could be a challenge, as grain processing is usually done outside. Joseph had the excellent idea of using a bag to contain the mess and just beating the bagged-up grain against the table to separate the seeds from the husks.

The first bag he tried was a paper lunch bag, which gave some good results. Then he had the idea of putting the rye inside a net bag (to catch the husks) and the net bag inside a cloth jelly bag. That turned out to work better, though the net bag was not as good at catching the chaff as we'd hoped.

Threshing tools: jelly bag, net bag (from fruit we bought at the supermarket). The grain and chaff mixture that comes out of the bag is also visible in this picture.

Once the grain was threshed, it had to be winnowed. Traditionally this is done by putting it in a large bowl or basket and tossing it into the air on a breezy day, so the chaff blows away and the seeds stay in the bowl.

A wok and the fan made a good improvised solution.

Here you can see the wok, the fan, and the grains.

Here is the rye after processing! It looks like a tiny amount, but we only took a few stalks of the rye, leaving the vast majority of it for the birds and other wildlife.

Doesn't this photo make it look like I'm in the middle of a field in some pastoral setting? In reality, this is still the middle of Seattle.

Typewriting is odd ?

I spent a lovely evening at the Oddfellows' Lodge. OK, it wasn't *really* the Oddfellows Lodge, but a restaurant established in the former Oddfellows Hall. My companion mentioned that there was something odd (heh) about the menus. I hadn't noticed, but on further inspection, the menus revealed themselves to be *typewritten*. This was, to my mind, not at all odd. What I did notice was that the glasses for cocktails were the right size and shape for the drinks being served in them, and that they were very tasty... perhaps too tasty. In any case, should you be on Capitol Hill in Seattle, seek out the Oddfellows Hall, or the Tin Table, in the same building. There is also a dance hall in the same building where people with the usual number of left feet might actually swing dance, should they be so inclined.

What do we want? BRAAAAINS! When do we want it? BRAAAAINS!

On July 3, we were looking online for something fun to do, and found that there was a Zombie Walk scheduled for that day.

What luck! The night before, we'd been talking about going out wearing postapocalyptic costumes to a bar or nightclub, and here there was already a nice doomy event scheduled.

The only catch? We had two hours to get ready! Joseph is the costume and props maven, and he immediately set to work making clothes look like they had been buried for years. The key ingredient was a spray bottle filled with a mixture of tea, coffee, and other stuff, which gave the clothing that grave-mouldered look. He also got a pot of blood ready.


The base garments of the zombie costumes were some older clothes that we had.

After making the clothing look old and adding some grave-dirt (made of coffee grounds with flour and spices), we put holes in 'em. Most zombies just cut slashes in their outfits, but that looks fake because actual worn-out clothes don't tear in neat slashes; they wear through. So we used a Dremel tool with a grinding head to make realistic-looking rips. After that, Joseph burned the edges of the rips, giving a spooky cremation-gone-awry look to our costumes.

Once the costumes were dry, it was makeup time. Artful application of flat, dead-looking makeup with lowlights of moldy grey sucked the life out of us. The finishing touch was the fake blood, which Joseph has learned to cook in a way that makes it dry to look scabby and clotted like real blood. We used method acting techniques to bloody ourselves up: pretending to eat brains and letting the blood fall and drip, wiping out faces and hands on our clothes, and carrying out other ordinary undead actions so the blood patterns would look natural. I picked my nose with a bloody finger.

On the drive to the event, we listened to zombie-themed music with the car stereo volume up and the windows down. You would be surprised just how many strange looks a couple of bloody zombies driving through the neighborhood get. Er...maybe you wouldn't.

At the walk, we registered for Guinness, socialized with other zombies, and toured the neighborhood on a couple of waves of the zombie walk. After the walk we stopped at a bar for some beer and food (pizza, not brains). Several other zombies came in, including a green-faced zombie who told us about some of his hobbies, including skydiving, and said he wants to adventure with us.