When I planted my peas this spring, I kept in mind the rhyme: True to form, we lost about 75% of the crop to critters. What I failed to properly calculate is that even if each plant produces 10 pods, that's only 100 or so peas--a couple of tablespoons. So far, our entire crop has been less than a cup of shelled peas. Which reminds me of another garden quotation, this one attributed to Thomas Cooper, former editor of Horticulture magazine: A garden is never as good as it will be next year.

After a week of almost no TV, yesterday we spent some time catching up (thanks, TiVo). In the morning, we caught a Colbert Report. They were doing a bit on Stephen Hawking, and said that he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, "a position once held by Isaac Newton." Later on, we were watching a Nova on Isaac Newton and it said he became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, "a position now held by Stephen Hawking." So, each physicist's provenance is that he holds a chair held by the other. Personally, I'd say that it does a lot more for Stephen Hawking's reputation than it does Isaac Newton's, but that's just me.

I've never looked at it this way before, because my sister Christine is a post-doc, and I'm a post-doc, but both of us intend to become professors if we can. Our sister Brenda is already a teacher. Not only that, but our two working-age brothers (the third is still in high school) both work construction. The girls are teachers; the boys are builders. Talk about fulfilling gender stereotypes. I thought I had avoided the pitfall of being limited by my gender when I became a physicist. It may just be that I chose a profession where I could both convince myself I had broken the stereotype while I was fulfilling it.

The furries are back in my garden, and boy, do they seem to be selective about their dinner. This year I planted out about 24 pepper plants in 4 varieties, King of the North, Buran, Ace, and Yankee Bell. I didn't group plants of the same variety together--they were all mixed up. Yet somehow, the furries were able to select out the Yankee Bell plants. They ate every one to the ground, while leaving all the other varieties pretty much untouched (a couple of leaves were chomped off two of the Buran plants, but that was it). I wonder if I, too, would have found Yankee Bell particularly tasty.

Last night I was watching an old episode of Charmed in which a ghost seeks out the sisters for help. Nobody can see him but the sisters, and to the sisters he looks normal--until a bicycle runs through him, or he walks through a door. In typical fashion, this ghost tries to do normal things--turn on the TV for instance--but can't because he's a ghost. Yet he never sinks through the floor, he can sit and ride in a car, and climbs down stairs. Why is it that TV ghosts always have feet and asses that can interact with floors and chairs, but when that same ghost wants to kick a can or walk through a wall there's no resistance? Would it be so hard for these programs, who are already paying the special-effects guys to make coffee mugs thrown at the ghost to go right through him, to give us some good, old-fashioned floaty-ghost action?

Those who were in on the early days of my old blog know that I've suffered delusions of having a relationship to the Brewers' Ricky Weeks and Prince Fielder. Well, I was at it again today. Josh and I went to Miller Park to see the Brewers take on the Cardinals, and, first Brewer to the plate, Ricky hits a dinger. My eyes welled with tears of pride. Then, in the #5 slot, Prince hits one. Proud again. Not quite as proud as with Ricky, but we'll get to that in a minute. Now, I'm rational. I know that Prince Fielder could trip over me and not know that we've actually spent a lot of time together--well at least "together" in the same ballpark. (Don't laugh! Some of them, like Pohlman Field in Beloit, were quite small.) The point is, it's a one-way relationship. I have a sense of it, and he certainly doesn't. So far, I've been able to avoid stalker-type behavior, but it has given me a glimpse of understanding of how people might find that path. I mean, I'm standing in a stadium with tens of thousands of other people who all believe they have a right to a piece of these players, and I'm the worst of them. I want to kick these Joes for thinking they have the right to have their piece of "my" boys. They're Johnny-come-latelies jumping on my bandwagon. Those boys are the best thing in baseball, they're mine, and I'll shoot anyone who says different (Oops! I said I wasn't going down that road, didn't I?) So what if I'm proud of them? As long as I don't start making plans to off Prince's wife or kidnap his baby, what's the big deal? None. So I learned something about myself. I'm not immune to the draw of celebrity sickness. More importantly, I think I may have "discovered" that I believe that, like altruism, pure pride in someone else does not exist. The reason I was more proud of Ricky than I was of Prince? Because I was more proud of myself for backing the less obvious horse. Josh is always talking about Prince. Prince this and Prince that. I'm always reminding him of Ricky. So when Ricky does something great, it reflects well on me. Because that's what it's all about, right?

Since this incarnation of my blog is new, and since it's now being indexed by Blogger such that people who don't know me might actually read it, I'm going to preface this story with the explaination that my husband and I have a large plot in the community garden at Fermilab. This is our third year on the plot, and up until now we've had minimal problems with stuff munching the plants. We never even put up a fence, and the most we've lost is some tulips (our munchers will weave their way between daffodils to eat the tulips) and peas. Then, this year, all hell broke loose. The first sign of problems was two days after I had put out 5 tomato plants that I had raised from tiny heirloom seeds into 18"-tall plants, when only one was left standing. The others had completely disappeared, except for a couple of leaves on the ground. I have this clear picture in my head of a magician saying "abracadabra," a puff of smoke, and two leaves fluttering to the ground, because it was as if these plants magically disappeared. And they were tomato plants. I've never heard of anything liking tomato plants. I took a closer look around and found evidence that everything was being munched: sunflowers, beans, peas, poppies. So we started putting up fence. More precisely, we filled in the gaps in the sections of fence that were already there as parts of other gardeners' defense systems. Well, yesterday after work we went out to water, and there were 2 (2!) bunnies in our garden. When they saw us, they ran for what had been a gap in the fence, but that we had plugged on Saturday. The fact that they couldn't get out what was clearly their "usual route" was a good sign. The fact that they were on the WRONG SIDE OF THE FENCE was not. In their terror, they tried to climb up the new fence, but couldn't (also a good sign). Eventually, they regrouped and found a hole in an older section of fence to squeeze through. We've patched the hole, but I'm sure they'll just find another. I know they've camped out in the long grasses in the untended plots on either side of ours. I'm so mad at the club about this. Last year, nobody tended the north plot. I complained, and nothing happened, even though there is a rule that if you fail to tend your plot you can be "blacklisted." So this year, I begged the president of the club to give the plot to the north to someone else--there were so many people wanting plots this year, they plowed up a whole bunch more land to make 25 new plots--but he refused. So whoever didn't tend the north plot last year must have come up with the $5 to renew his ownership. Why would he do that? Why pay for a plot you have no intention of using? Granted, the fee is chump change, but why bother? I kept complaining to the president about the fact that none of the plots surrounding ours had been tended (this year, the east and south plots have been abandoned too). He told me I had to wait until June, and then complain to the vice-president. I was upset to have to wait so long: the higher the weeds got, the tougher it was going to be mow them (which I was going to have to do) and, the plot to the south was entirely populated with thistles (waist-high thistles). I was sure that if nobody had done anything by mid-May, nobody intended to. However, two weeks ago, somebody finally cleans out and mows the east plot, and figure I was wrong about people starting their gardening before mid-May. June comes, and I email the vice-president. As of yesterday, I had heard nothing back. Then last night Josh was making a trip to the trash bin over by the president's plot and seizes the opportunity to complain to him about all the untended plots and how they're harboring furry fugitives. The president tells Josh to tell the vice-president, who happens to be standing nearby, about the problem, as its his responsibility to deal with delinquent gardeners. The vice-president says that he'll email the people who have leased the plots, but he doesn't have a copy of the plot map. So Josh walks back over to the president (who's standing about 25 meters away) and gets the map and brings it to the vice-president. The vice-president tells Josh that he will contact the plot owners, and if he gets no response, mow the plots. I'm surprised at his vow to mow, because I was sure I was going to have to mow the plots. It's then that I realize that nobody is going to garden in the east plot, but that somebody else has complained about it not being tended, and the vice-president has cut it down--two weeks earlier than I was allowed to, even though I've been trying to get it done since March!!!

I've finally given in and given up on my blog code. It was just too much work, and didn't work well enough. So, now I'm using Blogger, like the rest of the world. One of the reasons I didn't do that straight off was because I wanted to use my website to host. Now I can do that (or probably more accurately, "now I've figured out how to do that"). Another reason was that I wanted to use my own website "template," and I think I've figured out how to do that too. So there was really nothing stopping me from using Google's software. Except, of course, my reluctance to give up on many, many hours of code. So, let's see how it works.