June 2006

There were 17 posts published in June 2006 (this is page 2 of 2).

Spring Harvest

Late spring in the Willamette Valley — you know what that means: fresh strawberries. Some people tromp off to large farms to pick them. Kris and I harvest our own.

I’m particularly fond of our plants. The ones running wild in the rose bed come from the Gingeriches. They’re threatening to crowd out the flowers. The strawberry plants in among the raspberries came from Mac and Pam (who, in turn, originally got them from us — essentially, these are descendants of the plants I bought when we first moved into the house in Canby).

Our first strawberries of the season weren’t so good. We gave a batch of them to the neighbors, and it made me feel guilty. They were more “waterberries” than strawberries — they were flavorless from too much rain. Over the past week, though, their flavor has improved.

Last Friday, Kris picked five pounds from in and and among her roses. On Sunday, we put Will and Tiffany to work harvesting the fruit. There’s still more to come, too. Meanwhile, we’ve been snatching raspberries here and there. The berries aren’t very big, but they’re flavorful. (These raspberries are from Mac and Pam, too.) Our three highbush blueberries (transplanted from the neighbors) aren’t going to bear this year (they had a lot of fruit last year, even though they’d just been transplanted), but our two lowbush varieties are straining under the weight. Just a couple more weeks and I’ll be eating blueberries at every meal.

I’ve been eating fresh peas ever since the strawberries came on. Crunchy and delicious. They’re actually better after sitting in the fridge overnight, sealed inside a plastic bag with a bit of water.

There’s still lots more to come. We’re just getting started with the garden produce. Kris’ tomato plants are ENORMOUS! (I plan to climb one up to the clouds, where I’ll steal a harp and a goose and various other goodies from the giants who live there.)

Addendum by Kris: I am trying a new fertilizer this year, which may account for some of the tomatoes’ enormity. Also, we have six pears and countless apples, though they’re all quite small yet.

Meanwhile, other things are sprouting at the Cronk residence…

Swallowtail

I’m sitting on the back porch on a pleasant Saturday afternoon. I’m sipping a gin fizz. Toto is perched on the railing, surveying the yard. Kris is at work in the garden.

In the back hedge, a swallowtail butterfly alights upon the pale purple rhododendron, the rhododendron that towers nearly twenty feet above the ground. The scene is gorgeous — butterfly and blossom make perfect complements, framed by a forest of green. The swallowtail flutters from flower to flower. I’d like to take a picture, but it is only there for ten or twenty seconds before it breezes away.

In Dreams

Dreams are so strange sometimes. I’ve had some odd ones the past couple nights.

Earlier this week, I dreamed of my childhood friend John Kern. Or more precisely, I dreamed that he had a sister named Starla. Starla Kern had won $1,000,000 doing something unusual (the details of which are now sketchy — winning a reality show? defeating Godzilla?), and that she was all over Portland-area news stations. They referred to her as “Starla Kern, formerly of Wilsonville”, and parenthetically mentioned that her brother, John, had ghost-written Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. (In non-dream life, John has served aboard submarines.) After the big to-do, I bumped into Starla at an ice cream parlor, and we reminisced about old times.

But that’s nothing compared to what I dreamed last night.

I dreamed that we were with Jeremy and Jennifer, staying in a yurt at the coast. From the campground, we could hear the ocean. Kris and Jenn had wandered off to look at some foxglove while Jeremy and I tended the kids. He and I were seated around a campfire, drinking Jack and Coke. The kids were running up a bluff to a cliff that overlooked the sea.

“Be careful,” Jeremy said as he poured himself another drink. Hank and Scout laughed as they raced up and down the slope. Then, without warning, brother and sister joined hands and leapt from the cliff to the beach below. Emma landed first, and she rolled out on the sand, giggling. Harrison landed with a sickening crunch as his legs snapped beneath him. He began to scream. Emma began to scream.

“Damn kids,” said Jeremy, taking another sip of his drink. The screaming bothered me, though, so I went over to see if there was anything I could do. As I neared them, a giant crocodile sprang from the surf and charged the children. Emma moved aside, but Harrison’s legs were rubber. The crocodile gobbled him down.

“Jeremy,” I shouted, “a crocodile just ate your son.”

“Damn it,” he said. He got up and strolled over, drink in hand. The crocodile idled at the base of the cliff, a big grin on its face. I could hear Harrison inside, screaming. Emma was clinging to my pants and crying.

When Jeremy reached us, he handed me his Jack and Coke and marched up to the crocodile. He wrestled with its jaws, but the animal only got a quizzical look on its face, and then gobbled him down, too. Or mostly down.

One arm still protruded from the beast’s mouth. In a valiant feat of strength, Jeremy forced open the iron jaws. “My drink,” he gasped. “Give me my drink!” I walked over and gave him his Jack and Coke. He drank the entire thing before the jaws snapped close again. The crocodile winked at Emma (who was still crying) and then sank beneath the surf.

I wonder what I will dream tonight…

Download This Song

MC Lars publicly denounces the record companies:

I’m telling you, this whole thing — me sitting on my laptop posting this bootleg video from YouTube about music piracy (and outmoded business models) to my blog — is so 2006 that it hurts.

But this is the future, folks.

This is now.

[via the ever-prescient Andy Baio, who says this is old, but new to him — it’s new to me, too, and probably to most of you, as well — mas aqui]

I *heart* Rick Springfield

Tiffany is the best sister-in-law ever.

When she met us for dinner last night, she slipped a CD across the table to me. “What’s this?” I asked. The label read 80s Hits Stripped.

“I think you’ll like it,” she said. “It’s eighties songs done acoustic by the original artists.”

I do like it. Or most of it. We listened to it in the car on the way home. The first two songs didn’t impress me, but Men at Work (“Down Under”) and Asia (“Heat of the Moment”) were pretty good. And when Rick Springfield started strumming “Jessie’s Girl”, I squealed like a little girl.

I kid you not.

I took my hands off the steering wheel, squeezed them into fists, closed my eyes, and jiggled, squealing the whole time. I loved Rick Springfield (a.k.a. Richard Lewis Springthorpe) as a teenager. I am completely in earnest when I declare that he’s the most under-rated recording artist of the 1980s. His concert was the best I’ve ever seen.

Here, for your edification, until I am forced to remove it (please do not link directly to this file from your own web page), is a clip of Springfield’s acoustic “Jessie’s Girl”:

Rick Springfield – Jessie’s Girl (acoustic)

My favorite Springfield album was always Tao (five stars at Amazon, and containing songs like “Celebrate Youth”, “State of the Heart”, “Written in Rock”, and “My Father’s Chair”), but you might be more interested in his hits Working class Dog (with “Jessie’s Girl”, “I’ve Done Everything For You”, and “Love is Alright Tonight”), Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me yet (with “Don’t Talk to Strangers”, “I Get Excited”, and “What Kind of Fool Am I”), or Living in Oz (which gets five stars at Amazon and includes “Human Touch”, “Affair of the Heart”, and “Souls”).

Of course, there are always greatest hits collections:

While researching this entry, I discovered the Springfield is still making music. The Day After Yesterday, released in 2005, is an album of covers. Rick Springfield says, “[These] have been favorites of mine for a long time. They are songs I wish I’d written.” Tracks include I’m Not In Love (10cc), Under The Milky Way (The Church), Life In A Northern Town (Dream Academy), Broken Wings (Mister Mister), Human (Human League), Holding On To Yesterday (Ambrosia), Baker Street (Gerry Rafferty), Waiting For A Girl Like You (Foreigner), Let’s Go Out Tonight (Blue Nile), For No One (Beatles), Miss You Nights (Westlife), Blue Rose (Lizz Wright), Cry (Rick Springfield) and Imagine (John Lennon).

Rick Springfield covering The Blue Nile? I’m so there!

For more about my never-ending nostalgia for eighties music, check out:

Tune in next time when I’ll rave about Styx.

The Write Stuff

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. And if a person is defined but what it is they do most often, what it is they love, I have, at last, become a writer.

I spend several hours each day writing. I write for this weblog. I write for Get Rich Slowly (which, for good or ill, is now my main blog). I used to write for Four Color Comics (which is not dead, I promise). I write even more for my own edification. In fact, I’d guess that only about half of what I write is ever seen by anyone but me.

If you had told me a decade ago that I would be a writer, but not for traditional media, I would have said you were crazy. But that’s what has happened. Custom Box is still my day job — no question — but writing is who I am, what I do. (I’m even beginning to make a little money at it!)

I haven’t had much time to write during the past ten days. We’ve been busy with friends and yard work. Yesterday I had finally had enough. “I’m spending all day Sunday writing,” I told Kris. “I’m finishing my chores tonight, and then I’m going to sit at the kitchen table all day. Writing.”

And here I am. And here I’ll be twelve hours from now.

I am writing.

I am a writer.

A Little Digg

One of my sites just got dugg, but not in a good way.

Many of you are probably familiar with the social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and digg and furl. These sites allow users to share links to interesting sites with other people. Each site employs its own method of ranking the popularity of links.

Well, yesterday I thought a link that sennoma posted was funny and might make a good change of pace for my personal finance blog. It was a guide to winning things from a claw machine, one of those attractions you see in a supermarket. I posted a summary of the original article and went on my merry way.

This morning, when I came in from mowing the lawn, I checked my site stats to find an extra-ordinary number of visitors over the past hour. “What the hell?” I thought. Get Rich Slowly had received 4,000 hits from digg. “Maybe they linked to my article on choosing organic produce,” I thought. No such luck.

Somebody had ‘dugg’ the claw machine article, which had made it to the site’s front page (that’s apparently a big deal, as my traffic numbers reveal). And many digg users weren’t happy about it. Here’s a typical comment:

This guy sucks. He stole content from other peoples website and didn’t even credit them. Then linked his crappy blog to digg to get ad revenue. This is how this c*cksucker is getting rich slowly.

sigh

I registered for a digg account and posted a comment trying to clarify things, but it didn’t really matter. People had already made up their minds: I was a spammer, had posted my own link, was trying to get rich by google ads. They responded to my comment by telling me I was full of crap:

Beat it, spammer.

Oh brother. It’s not like a two-minute session with google wouldn’t verify I was telling the truth — I have a very public presence on the web. No, it’s easier to just make unfounded accusations and move on. The thing is, I shouldn’t even have dignified these bozos with a response. I forgot one of the cardinal rules of the internet, something I learned back on Usenet in the early nineties: Don’t get involved in flame wars.

I’m proud of Get Rich Slowly. I’m trying to make it a useful site for people who are working toward financial independence. I spend hours each day searching for useful information. It sucks for it to get some negative publicity, but I need to remind myself that this is a very, very small thing, especially considering the other feedback I’ve received has been uniformly positive.

And how much did I make in Google ad revenue from those 4,000 digg visitors? Less than two dollars. Here’s a question for you, diggsters: would I really sacrifice my own reputation and the reputation of my site for a couple of bucks? Maybe you would, but to me that sounds like suicide. I want this site to be strong in the long-term, to grow into something useful for many people. Why would I kill it in its infancy?

(Ha! I just checked the profile of the digg user who posted this. He’s the #28 user on the site, and has posted hundreds of stories, many of which made it to the front page. That makes this situation even more ludicrous. Regular digg users should recognize his name.)

Why do I let myself get worked up over little things like this?