#8 Plant a garden...check

The plants are in the ground. And they only look half dead. Last weekend while I was in Moab I left the plants on the balcony to get the sun and showers. Most of the plants were looking a little worn when I got home Sunday evening. They are very happy to be the soil.
My friend Analiesa, who is a super smart botanist, came over to help me plant Wednesday. She is so nice to me. I am pretty sure she thought I was a plant killer when she saw how desperate my plants looked. She helped me determine where each should be planted based on sunlight, water drainage from our roof (I noticed some pretty intense waterfalls from our rain gutters during the last few storms) and how each plant grows. She taught me how to harvest each plant. She even taught me which plants are good bug repellent (who know jalapenos were a good repellent). I planted most from starts I purchase at J&L Nursery and two from seed.

Hopefully, this won't be a common occurrence this summer, but there was already one plant casualty.  One of my lettuce plants tore right off the root when I went to pull it out of the container to plant. Luckily, I had lots of backup.
So let's take an inventory of my garden. After weeding, re-terracing (check out my handy-work), more weeding, adding "good" soil, planting and watering I have a garden. Hopefully, throughout the summer and fall I will be harvesting:

• Carrots
• Beans
• Zucchini
• Cucumbers
• Cabbage
• Lettuce
• Jalapenos
• Tomatoes (3 varieties)
• Bell peppers (Red, green and orange)
• Cilantro
• Chives

Finally

I got an A. And it is only took me a few weeks after the semester to post my final project.
As a kid I loved the "what in the world" section of National Geographic Kids magazine. They took regular household items or objects most people would recognize and photographed little details in a super close-up, macro setting. I wanted to recreate the game. So here it is my final project and your "What in the world" game. (Most aren't difficult, but there are a couple that hang people up.)

Answers:

ɥsnɹq dn-ǝʞɐɯ ˙0⇂ ɥsnɹqɥʇooʇ ˙6 ɹǝʇɐɹƃ ǝsǝǝɥɔ ˙8 sʍollɐɯɥsɹɐɯ ˙ㄥ ɐuɐuɐq ˙9 sƃuıɹʇs ɹɐʇınƃ ˙ގ sʎǝʞ ɹǝʇndɯoɔ ˙ㄣ sdıʇ-b ˙ᄐ ɥsnɹq ɹıɐɥ ˙ᄅ ʎɹɹǝqʍɐɹʇs ˙⇂

Let's play in the dark...room

By far my favorite part of my photography class was the darkroom. It was a little nerve racking at the end of the semester not knowing if the darkroom would be completed in time, but we were lucky enough to get 2 weeks to play in the darkroom. And I was going to take full advantage of it.
First we did photograms. These are...well let's just quote Wikipedia
"A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image varying in tone, depending on the transparency of the objects used. Areas of the paper that have received no light appear white; those exposed through transparent or semi-transparent objects appear grey.^[1] "

I really loved my first photogram (one on the left).

After that I developed a few photos.

I really like the image on the right. I used some of the negative on the right to help frame the image.
You are seeing everything of the image, no cropping.

Moab Rain Clouds

Cody acting tough setting up the slackline

But really he is tough, standing up from a seated position

Rachelle is my new fav slackline buddy

My favorite move

Magic

I need a bumper sticker that says "Moab is my happy place." I went to Moab for the first time in college (if my memory serves me right which it usually doesn't, I don't think I went as a child). Now I go several times a year. I have even gone in the winter. Now that was interesting. What til you see the Colorado river frozen. About 5 years ago I took my first trip to Moab for climbing and now it has become an annual trip.
This year sadly, our trip was to be haunted by rain clouds, but that didn't stop us from having a ball (a great way of saying we had a lot of fun). We woke up Saturday morning planning to climb Castleton Towers. Instead we woke up to rain and soggy sleeping bags. Our climbing blues were soon soothed by the Love Muffin breakfast and a shopping trip to Pagan. We then set out to repel off Corona Arch. I'll fully admit, I am a pansy at heart. I really want to be tough, but I'm not. After scrambling up a steep sand stone slab I was on top of the arch knowing that my only way down was the 140 ft repel (going down the slab would have been more dangerous because of the exposure). Luckily, I have great friends who didn't mind if a four letter word slipped from my lips as I prepared to drop over the edge. I made it pass the edge then I was hanging freely in the air for my repel. As soon as I was off the arch I felt stupid of being scared.

Moab view on our way to Corona Arch

This might be where a few choice words slipped out

And I'm off

Mom! Look no hands

Can't get enough of the red rocks

But what would a climbing trip be without actual climbing. The storm held off long enough for us to do a couple climbs on Potash Rd. Too bad the darkness came too soon. With night came our awesome sleeping arrangements. My friend Sterling lives in Moab and so we crashed at his house, sort of. We actually crashed on the trampoline outside. Cody and I played guitars (me giving up really quickly) and everyone sang. You really grow together when you sleep on a tramp, mostly because you are eventually laying on top of each other. But that didn't last long, because bright and early Sunday morning the rains came again and we moved to picnic benches under a pavilion. Every plan we had for the day was instantly crush and we headed home shortly after breakfast vowing to come back in a few weeks to climb again.
This post couldn't come at a better time. I am heading to Moab this weekend hoping to finally tackle Castleton.

That's a big boy

Climbers pack it right

Adam rocking it

Wall Street (Potash Rd)

Cody - Redhead's do it better!

Oh we might have killed the battery rocking out to some tunes

Put your back into it!

Is it too much to ask for no spiders?

I can handle a lot of crawling things, worms, babies, potato bugs, ants, but not spiders. I hate spiders. Is it really too much to ask that there be no spiders in my garden?
Today, when I got home from work I decided to spend the beautiful sun-shinny day pulling weeds. Let's call it weed relocation. I relocated the weeds from my flower boxes (soon to be garden specular) to first the stairs, then to the compost trash bin. And while doing this I encountered what I deem too many spiders (at least 5 creepy critters). They just scamper across the dirt and rocks so quickly I freak out every time. I left most of them alone, but there was one really big one that I just couldn't let live in my garden. Thank goodness for gardening gloves.

Here is the transplanting/relocation action.

Transplanted my weeds from here

To here

Til finally it looks like this

Now to re-terrace, add good soil, build drip watering system (all those years at Orbit Irrigation are going to come in handy) and plant. This is a great start for my list.

Ssh, I'm hunting photos

Because my teacher doesn't think we have enough to do, she threw in a useless assignment to keep us busy until our darkroom opened up. We had to shoot at one location, using film and capture images from a scavenger hunt list.

The List

1. Architecture 
2. Eyes
3. Leaves
4. Movement
5. Night shot
6. Reflection
7. Small creatures
8. Something amusing
9. Something red
10. Windows

Here is what I got (in order)

Note: The images are grainy because the studio who processed the film scanned the images onto a CD at really low resolutions. Don't fight me on this one, this is just what our teacher told us to do.

Hard to see, but there is the blur of car headlights

Can you see me?

This one was a stretch, but there are "small" birds on the top of the building

I thought it was funny