Writings

Yesterday, Susan and I went to the Poughkeepsie Farm Project's annual plant sale. The Poughkeepsie Farm Project started in 1999, leasing a stretch of Vassar College land to create a Community Supported Agriculture program. There are a fixed number of shares to the CSA sold each year, which include a required number of volunteer hours on the farm, and then share holders show up once a week and pick up their bag of fresh vegetables off the farm. This lets the farmer share the risks and rewards of the farm, and allows the farm to run totally organically. If something hits the beans this year, and there aren't many, that was the risk. If there is a bumper crop of tomatos, those are split equally between all the members. In addition to the CSA, the PFP helps run the farmer's market in Poughkeepsie, runs programs for bringing Poughkeepsie Youth onto the farm for internships, and gives away 20% of the yield of the farm to local food banks. I first heard about the PFP through one of my classmates in my leadership class last year. She and her husband had been part of the CSA for a few years, and it seemed like a great idea to join up.

At the plant sale the CSA sells starter plants for you garden, each member is mailed a coupon that gets them 2 for free. Given that we had a bit of an aphid explosion on some of our tomatos and peppers, this provided a chance to back fill a few of the plants we lost. After we purchased our plants, we hopped in on a tour of the farm, which spans over 7 acres of fields. They have a 5 year crop rotation model on the farm, which helps replenish the soil, as well as confuse the insects. As soon as some bug figures out a good place to lay eggs for next year, their crop is changed out from under them, so they never establish. At one point we wandered through the asparagus beds, where we were encouraged to reach down and snap of a bit to taste. My god, I don't think I've ever tasted asparagus that fresh, and that delicious, ever. Susan's eyes lit up incredibly after that. While we'd both been generally into the idea of the CSA, the prospect of the kind of food that we'll be flush with starting in 2 weeks, and running until November, washed over both of us, and we realized how great of an idea this was.

As we wandered around the farm, we also got the sense of being part of something larger there. The whole PFP mission, with bringing quality food back to the community, is very touching. It will provide a great many opportunities to volunteer beyond just working on the farm, which I'm looking forward to. In an era of styrofoam tasting vegetables delivered via your mega mart from who knows where, the idea that this summer we're going to get a majority of our vegetables from 5 miles away, grown without chemicals, is very appealing. The promise of huge flats of organic strawberries in a month is something I just can't wait for. :)

Pidgin 2.0 just released, which has given me a chance to start looking at IM plugins (which I wasn't going to do during Gaim's 2 year beta cycle where that interface was always changing). Pidgin 2.0 has some nice changes to it, including final unification of buddy accounts, which I was so used to from Everybuddy years ago. I've already found a couple of bugs in pidgin, but I'm also starting to get familiar enough with the source base that I'm starting to figure out fixes at the same time (at least for the less subtle ones). The last couple of days I spent some time forward porting a private set of plugins from 2.0b2 -> pidgin 2.0 without using the gaim-compat layer. I've still got one subtle segfault (looks like a race in buddy status update), but it was a great learning experience on the source base and the API. Hopefully I'll manage to have enough time to hack up some other plugins over the next many moons.

We finished the deck last night, by doing the last 16 ballisters for the stair way. It's an odd sense of both accomplishment and loss at the same time. Since sometime in February I've been focussed on the deck as a project. I had to come up with a plan, and make sure that plan was executed smoothly, especially as I had family come in from out of town to help out on it, and didn't want to waste their time. Part of my brain has been devoted to the deck for the last 3 months, always making sure the next part of it was lined up to go. Now, it's done, and I need to call the inspector today to come out and clear it.

But at the same time, building something like that from nothing has been very satifying, and I think I'll miss not building every weekend. Most of the time I'm building virtual widgets, so producing a physical widget from time to time is quite a nice change of pace. I've got a set of corner shelves, and a potting bench for Susan that I need to build this summer, both of which will be fun, but not quite on the same scale.

Anyway, for now, I can have a lot of fun relaxing on the deck, before the bugs show up (a couple more weeks). I can also feel very accomplished for having a big summer project done before the summer even officially starts. :)

I realize that I've been rather silent about the deck since before concrete pouring weekend. The deck is nearly done, with only 16 ballisters left on the stairs to go. That will hopefully be completed on Tuesday night, so I can get our inspection scheduled RSN. I've got a bunch of pictures from various stages of building, though I'm going to wait until after our memorial day party to put them up, as I'd rather let people see it in person for the first time, instead of by pictures.

I will have to say the deck project has gotten me to buy a couple of really awesome new tools. The first of which is a hammer drill, with which I can put a 3/4 inch hole, 6 inches deep in our cinder blocks in about 10 seconds. Just awesome. :) I also now have a proper cutting table for my mitre saw, which gives me 3 1/2 foot extenders on either side with rollers and guides.

Apparently madwifi has been nice to me of late. I just realized that my locale change which is going to require a reboot hadn't taken affect yet. So I checked my uptime.

dargo:~> uptime
07:49:58 up 70 days,  8:26,  1 user,  load average: 0.93, 0.58, 0.39

Nifty!

More pictures of the ongoing deck project.

The Building Inspector came yesterday, and signed off on the holes we dug. He was quick to notice that we hit rock, so the depth of the holes isn't an issue... yay!

While we probably didn't have to go quite so crazy in digging through as much rock as we did, I'm sort of glad we did. Now I know this deck is never going to move, as it will be build on concrete pillars, that are surrounded by rock.

The inspection happening this week keeps us on schedule for the rest of the project (actually a little ahead of schedule, but we won't be accelerating anything). In 8 days we pour concrete (with my Dad coming down to help), and 2 weeks after that Big Construction Weekend, where we'll go from footings to deck in a weekend. Lots of family coming in to town for that one. :)

For the third time I attempted to get a paper in for OSCON, however, unlike the last 2 attempts, this one was accepted. :)

The paper is entitled "Easy as Pie: Making Graphical Desktop Applications with Perl and Glade", based on my personal experience learning enough Glade to do the ExifTagger project, though the reality is that the way Gtk2 maps up to other high level languages, such as Python and Ruby, the talk should be pretty broadly applicable to any high level language developers.

The Deck Project marches on. Last weekend I managed to round up a few trusty friends (Jay, Mike, Pyg), and dig the 4 holes required to pour concrete footings for the deck.

Town of LaGrange code calls for 42" holes, to prevent footings from shifting under frost heaves. Now, as we found out later, digging 42" down through dirt is about a 2 hr task for 2 guys to do, swapping off. However, my house is built on a hill. And that hill is there because of giant rocks. Not just boulders, but giant, span across your property, rock. One of the houses on the way up to ours is actually built into the rock. They have no dirt in their yard at all, just an acre of rock.

We're a little better off. There is just enough dirt on our rock so that trees can grow, and you can plant shallow gardens. Depending on where you dig in our yard, sometimes you get a couple feet of dirt, sometimes just a few inches.

Of course, all of this was learned in gory detail this weekend. The first hole we dug, we managed to hit rock 6 inches down, but decided we could get through it with my 6 foot bar. 7 hours later, with 3 people working on it, we had gotten to 35" and the hole was no longer moving downwards at all. The second hole was started about 1/2 way through that process, which we got about 24" before there was no movement. Just before we were going to give up for the day, Pyg showed up, and we got to try out the auger on holes 3 and 4, which had a chance for having dirt in them. Hole 3 got 8", then stalled the auger. Hole 4 got 24" before it stalled it out. We then declared it a Saturday, and let our bones rest over night.

On Sunday after noon we managed to get through Hole 4 pretty quickly, and actually get it to 42". Hole 3 dug to about 34" before we declared it dead.

Pictures included for posterity. Saturday morning, all idealistic. Hey, this will be fine. Hmmm... this is mostly rock. Look what came out of the hole. Not sure hole 2 is moving any more. I can get it, I know I can. Peppy in the hole. It's actually easier to scrape out the holes than dig them out. That should have been our first sign to stop. Hole 4. I guess this thing actually works if you have dirt. 42" == 2/3 of a Jay Look at all that rock. Good enough! Hope the inspector thinks so as well.

This Saturday I fully committed to building my new deck, by taking down the old one. Fortunately, the demolition went pretty quickly due to help from Jay and . Taking down the deck also required moving the outside firewood down to the firepit, done in the most awesome, if not the most effective, way. Enjoy the pictures (no longer online).