totimundi.com Blog

In the warm weather I often sit in the back yard for an hour or so to read a book.  The Eastern chipmunk who lives in the back yard often sits on top of a wood pile and watches me.  Today he (I don’t know whether it is male or female, but I’m guessing it is male since I have never seen it with any offspring) was doing a lot of chattering.  At one point I thought he was chattering to get my attention.  So I gave him a little bit of Audubon Society “critter food,” a combination of cracked corn and various seeds.  Then later he was doing more chattering.  I don’t know whether he was trying to communicate with another chipmunk at a distance or whether he just enjoyed hearing the sound of his own chattering.  Some birds were singing and I had the radio on playing a Brandenburg concerto.  Maybe he was just adding to the music.

The turnip seeds that I planted have germinated, but there is no sign of any activity from the carrot or parsnip seeds.

I’d like to go to London for a three-day two-night trip in October.  I was hoping to find an air fare under $700, but the lowest fare I find at priceline.com is $902.  But then when I look at flight & hotel combos, I can get one at $829, with the hotel being an apparently good hotel at a convenient address.  That doesn’t seem to make sense to me, and I’m wondering if there is some disadvantage that isn’t occurring to me.  Even if one did not want a hotel, it would be cheaper to make the trip with the flight & hotel combo.

Last time I went to London I booked the flight and the hotel separately.  The flight was about $650 and the hotel (two nights) was about $320.

A T-shirt depicting three wolves and the moon has become the number-one apparel item at amazon.com because of prank reviews.

Today in a small area where I have grown vegetables in the past, I added two bags of top soil and three bags of gardening soil in order to improve the quality of the soil, and I planted some carrots, parsnips, and turnips.  I’m trying root vegetables this year, even though cucumbers are what I have had the most success with in the past.  This year I’m trying some cucumbers in containers at a different spot, along with some tomatoes.   There have been fewer caterpillars bothering the tomato and cucumber plants the past couple of days.

I don’t know what this bush is called, but it has a lot of blossoms at the moment.

The rhododendron looks as if it is going to have a number of blossoms, but only one has begun to open.

And one of the tomato plants is beginning to develop blossoms.

Today I saw only two caterpillars.  Maybe the rain earlier today has restricted their movement.

The National Weather Service has announced a frost advisory for my area tonight.  I’ll move the plant pots into the cellar.  Good thing I didn’t plant the seedlings in the ground.

I bought three small tomato plants and three small cucumber plants yesterday at Home Depot.  I planted them in plant pots that I plan to leave on the southern side of the house where there may be enough sun for them.  I did not try to plant them in the ground because the soil is like clay and contains many tree roots.  I think the pots will be big enough.

When I looked at them a few hours later, there were little green caterpillars crawling up the outside of the plant pots.  A few had made it so far as to be able to begin nibbling at plant leaves.  I removed them by hand.  And then again this morning there were more of them.  I did some research on the internet and learned that something called bacillus thuringiensis is supposed to kill the caterpillars but not make the crops unfit for human consumption.  So I got some at Home Depot.  One has to mix a small quantity with water and then spray it on the leaves.  So I made up twelve ounces of the stuff in a plastic spray bottle.  About four ounces of the spray seemed enough when I actually sprayed it on the plants.

I plan to use the rest of the stuff in the spray bottle in the next few days.  The instructions that came with the product say that one is not supposed to let the mixture sit for more than a few hours.  But it doesn’t say what happens if one does that.  If the house explodes tonight, that will be the reason.

I’m not sure that the stuff is going to do much good anyhow.  It says that the caterpillars will die in two or three days after ingesting some.  There are lots of them and they can probably do a lot of damage in two or three days.

Google has changed the background colors for the headings on its news page so that now there are several different colors, many of them a sort of sickish candy color, shades of pink, purple, orange etc.  If they are going to use disturbing colors, they should give people the option of choosing their own colors.

Maybe they think people don’t want to read anything.  They just want to see different colors.  “Oh look, different colors!”

amazon.co.uk, Release date: 15 June 2009

amazon.com, Release date: 16 June 2009

amazon.de, Release date: 19 June 2009

“Gramophone has learned of a deal between the BBC and EMI Classics to record and release Thomas Adès’s [sic] opera The Tempest. . . .

The BBC are to record the ROH revival for broadcast and EMI will issue it, probably later this year. When the BBC televised the original run, tenor Ian Bostridge (who plays Caliban) was indisposed and an understudy sang his role. It will be Bostridge, though, alongside fellow original cast members Simon Keenlyside (Prospero) and Cynthia Sieden (Ariel) and newcomer Kate Royal (Miranda), who will feature on the EMI set.” . . .

James Inverne, Gramophone, 20 March 2007

The names of two of my great-grandaunts, Isabella and Emily, who were born in county Leitrim in the 1860’s are names numbered two and three in popularity for girls born in the United States in 2008.  When I was a child I would not have thought that those names would ever be popular again.  And their father’s name, Daniel, is number five for boys born in the U.S. in 2008, but Daniel has always had a certain popularity.

Article at news.yahoo.com