In the wake of March's school shooting in Winnenden, Germany, the government is considering outlawing paintball and laser tag on the principle that participants become desensitized to shooting people. Perhaps the hypothesis has some merit, but from my point of view over here in the good ol' U. S. of A., it seems ridiculous. Can you imagine trying to pass this legislation here? You'd be laughed out of Congress.

Compared to recent years, this one was pretty dull. We're still living in West Virginia, in a bungalow rented from the college where I work. I'm still teaching physics to premeds, education majors and engineering technology students. Josh is still working from home, contributing to Hardball Times on a weekly basis, as well as their annual. He's also been picking up hours working for Trackman, a Danish company specializing in golf analysis machines. The company is trying to port their product to baseball, but being Danish, they know very little about baseball, so they've brought Josh on board.

Our kittens have grown. Olive is a hefty 11 1/2 pounds and Celie--who we call "little one" and "baby-girl" because of her small size--is actually a hefty 9 pounds. No matter how big she gets, though, Celie will undoubtedly always be the little sister. She behaves just like a little sister, following Olive around and irritating her. She eats when Olive eats, and out of the same bowl (even though there are two), when Olive sleeps Celie will often bat at her trying to get her to play, and whatever toy Olive has is unfailingly the one that is most interesting to Celie.

Olive likes the outside. In the summer, we'd leave the porch door cracked most of the day, and she'd divide her time between exploring outside and sleeping on our bed. (When I say "our" bed, I mean it belongs to all four of us--Celie and Olive clearly think that they have as much right to it as Josh and I do.) Being confined for the winter isn't making Olive happy at all.

Celie, much like a human 15-month-old, has begun to learn to speak. For her first year she was pretty much mute. Even when she opened her mouth and looked like she was trying to make noise, she didn't. Since a post-natal upper respiratory infection is the suspected culprit of her scarred left eye, we wondered if her vocal chords were damaged. Then she just seemed to figure it out. All of a sudden, when she opens her mouth, sound tends to come out. It's only soft, high-pitched mews like a newborn kitten, but it's cute.

With Josh working in baseball, summer is his busy time, and of course the school year is my busy time, so we don't find a lot of time to get away. We spent a weekend in Cleveland at the expense of the Indians, who were interviewing Josh for a job. I had been to Cleveland before, visiting my sister who was doing an REU at Case Western University, and I liked it just as much (if not more) this time around. I think Cleveland would be a great place to live, but unfortunately, the Indians decided "to go in a different direction."

We spent a couple days at my aunt and uncle's in Pennsylvania. My parents were staying with them, so we made the (relatively) short trip to make it a family gathering. It was also the first time I met my cousin's son. I was really impressed with how responsible a parent my cousin seems to be.

We also made a "working" trip to Washington D.C. and stayed with my sister Christine. The "working" part of the trip was meeting up with some of Josh's internet baseball buddies at the Nationals game. We saw a lot of baseball this summer. As fun as it was, Josh was always kind of in "work" mode, which seems to have paid off with some notoriety.

I was able to traipse after Josh because I wasn't teaching over the summer. I spent a lot of time at the computer--a little bit at work, a lot at play--and in the garden. Gardening here has been a real challenge. With permission from our landlord, we began digging, and found a mixture of rock, clay and broken glass. Buckets of broken glass. Also a yo-yo, the stiletto heel off a woman's shoe, and a hydraulic screen door closer, among other things. Somebody clearly kept a trash heap out there.

After digging out as much trash and clay as we could, we began to replace it with organic matter. Kilos and kilos of organic matter. And unlike our garden at Fermilab, where the piles of horse manure were replenished for free, this was a lot of purchasing bags and hauling them from the home store. When we finally got a mix resembling soil, we planted. Watering, though, was a problem, as it all tended to just run down the hill, taking our expensive soil with it. We did have some successes, though, particularly with the flowers. I repeat the gardener's mantra, "it will be better next year." And with professional grow lights my husband got me for my birthday, I'm sure it will be.

Like I said, nothing too exciting for us this year. Just daily life. But daily life has been good, and we're happy. We hope that this holiday season and new year find you happy and healthy as well.

In 1985, the intrepid young (15-18 years old!) geeks at "Pacific Tech" built a megawatt chemical laser that "could vaporize a human target from space" in the cult classic Real Genius. If you've never seen the film, you're truly missing out. It was back when Val Kilmer could actually act.

Well, it seems that 22 years later, reality has finally caught up with fantasy. The US Air Force is currently testing the "Airborne Laser", a megawatt chemical laser mounted in a Boeing 747, the ostensible purpose of which is to intercept and destroy ICBMs. Even though the system isn't designed to eliminate military dictators and foreign oil barons as they take their morning coffee on the veranda (or so we're told), the similarities are striking.

If you've been following along this summer, you may have been surprised that I haven't talked more about my garden. I do have a garden--of sorts. I was given permission to plant "as long as it doesn't interfere with the guys coming to do landscaping". I was going to make a snide remark about the frequency and quality of the "landscapers'" visits, but figured it wouldn't help matters.

First, I defined and expanded the flower beds next to the side porch. I planted dahlia tubers and dwarf sunflowers, calendula, and nasturtium from seed. Later on I added some gerbera daisies I bought at Lowes, but even though they're now beginning a post-transplant bloom, I don't really feel like I've "grown" them, since they came to me fairly mature.

Most of the dahlias have grown up quite nicely, and one of the "neon splendor" plants is opening its first bloom. The nasturtium have thrown a couple of blooms, and the sunflowers and calendula are bushy and green, even though they're short and bloomless.

I've also carved out a nice flower bed in the corner of the yard.The centerpiece is another dahlia, "nick's pick". The bushy plants in front are escholzia--california poppy. Behind that are more calendula. The coneflowers are another pick-up from Lowe's, but these I feel a little more attached to because I bought them from the "reduced for quick sale" bin, and though they were cheap, they weren't particularly healthy. On the left there are some lavender plants, also purchased. The purple stuff on the right is russian sage. I was at Lowe's and they had this display where they had different rows of plants and it was really clear which plants the bees liked. I'm not a huge fan of the plants (though I think they'd look cool blooming en masse) but the bees are, so I picked up a few. We want to do everything we can to encourage the reproduction of bees. (In case you haven't heard, the bee population in the US--and increasingly in the rest of the world--is collapsing.) The rug over the fence is the neighbor lady's. For some reason she leaves it there all summer and then brings it in for the winter. I talked to her about it, and she doesn't mind if it gets wet when I water (which makes sense since she leaves it out in all kinds of rain).

Since we have the chain-link fence along the sunny sides of the property, I decided to plant some climbers. I planted peas and pole beans, cucumbers and squash. The peas are doing great. They've reached the top of the fence and we've been eating them for about a week. I was actually a little surprised about how well they were doing, as I started them kind of late, and everybody knows they're a cool-weather crop. But they seem to not mind that they're on the sunny north slope. Which is why it was (is) all the more perplexing that the pole beans, planted right next to the peas, did so poorly. Beans love sun, don't they? The beans started out gangbusters, green and vigorous, but by the time they got their second set of leaves, they were showing signs of sun stress, and many died. A second planting exhibited the same progression. When the cucumbers and squash started to exhibit the same symptoms, I panicked. Not knowing what to do, I began intensive watering--even though the clay-laden soil seemed quite moist--and things seemed to stabilize. I still lost my entire first planting of squash, and about 40% of the cucumbers, but I'm hoping that vigilant watering will be the answer. I'm optimistic; enough so that I've completed a third planting of beans.

In addition to the climbers, I've planted tomatoes and peppers. The Seed Savers' Exchange out of Iowa has such a variety of heirloom tomatoes and peppers that I like to start them from seed. Since my husband doesn't like tomatoes, I decided to stick to two varieties, one for eating and one for canning. I also ordered some pepper seeds. I started them all indoors, with very poor results. I think a 20% success rate might be an over-estimate. So I supplemented my planting with some immature plants from the nursery. As the picture shows, I haven't had much success keeping them alive either. This roma plant is about a quarter the size it was when I bought it!

Overall, I've had mixed results. Most of the flowers (that is, the ones that grew--the celosia, amaranth, strawflower, and false sunflower were total busts, either never emerging or dying off before setting true leaves) seem to be doing well, and most of the vegetables are struggling. Maybe the flowers can feel my love. Whatever it is, I'm more than a little worried about leaving everything to itself for a week. So, I'm going to leave the soaker hose on at a trickle and hope for the best.

We live in a house rented from the college. While it's a spacious little bungalow, it's been around for a while and needs more than it's fair share of repairs. For example, in the picture I posted in the fall, you can see where chunks of concrete have fallen out of the front steps. The winter did us no favors, and in the spring I asked maintenance to come patch up some holes. They decided it was unpatchable (which was really the right decision, since we were losing concrete in chunks the size of basketballs) and decided to replace it. Since the house is owned by the state, that meant putting out for bids, etc.

When the bid came back at half the value of the house, they went to plan B and built us a deck. They did a generally good job. My biggest complaint is that they put the railing spindles on upside down (with the points up, rising over the railing) such that it seems like we're living in a piked fortress. Also, it's quite big--the main part is about 15' x 20'--but as you can see from the pictures below, when you're coming up the drive, all you can see is deck, which also means that when someone comes up the drive, we can't see them from the window. The best part about the deck is that they wrapped it around the side of the house and connected it to our side porch. We use that side porch a lot, since it's covered and cool, and it's nice that they're all connected.

It took them about two weeks to do it--from coming in with the bulldozer to putting on the finishing touches--and it was all done without a single building permit.

In the last month, we've had one day without rain. You'd think that as a gardener, I would be happy to get so much water. Really it's a problem, and not just because the rain keeps me inside and breeds bugs. As you can hopefully see from the crappy video (it was taken with our camera, so it's better than I might have expected) water just washes away, taking the dirt with it. Those brown streaks are muddy currents in the river that is our street. I still have to water constantly, and when I say constantly, I mean about eight out of every 24 hours. We're going away this week and are planning on simply leaving the water on. We've got a soaker hose, and so all of that water goes directly into the ground, but after a while it comes running out the side of the mountain and our plants wilt. It's been tough being a gardener here, but hopefully when we get back from our trip this week, the dahlia will have begun to bloom. Then I'll be happier.

After a week of speculation, Chris Mortensen has reported that Brett Favre has asked the Packers to release him. While the announcement has seemed to have put a damper on the yammering of pundits, the fact that he's asked to be released--not simply moved back to the active roster--has started a whole new kind of speculation in our house: if he's not going to be a Packer, what might he be?

So, for shits and giggles and because I couldn't find one already on the web, I photoshopped a Vikings uniform onto Brett. It doesn't really look like him anymore, does it?