Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Yay, then...not yay... ha ha

Yay-  my laptop survived!
Not sure how it lived, but so far it is back to normal and no sticky keys (i don't sweeten my coffee) even.
Hubby thinks i may have saved it by flipping it over to drain and yanking the battery as  soon as i could. I also put the blow dryer on cool and set it up against it for a few minutes.  WHile that was working, i got out mini box fan and set the laptop up so the air blew into the keyboard so i could put away the blow dryer.  Another thing that helped is thta keyboards have this  failsafe sort of thing, kind of like GFCI....  if there is a sudden voltage change it shuts down automatically.  So when the spill happened, the computer got itself shutting down and i just had to clean it up and wait for it to dry.

So there ends the drama of the day for Tuesday.

One thing i did do to change my laptop's settings to hopefully protect it was to go into the energy settings and tell it to do nothing when the cover of the laptop is closed.  This way when i leave the room for a few seconds, i can close the cover and this will protect the keys and screen from tiny, nosy,  little fingers---and spills.
I keep my laptop on all day and i check something on it a number of times a day. Shutting it down after each lookup  is not going to happen, so this might be the next best thing.

But i am grateful that i don't need to get a new one at this point.  I have been very good at archiving things into my external hard drive, so i would only have lost my huge bookmarks list and a few inconsequential things.

So, all is well that ends well... hubby said just to watch for overheating.

Last night large regions got snow. Our mountains up here got as much as 2 feet. Some spots a few miles East of us got some freezing rain, but i don't think we got any of it.  I think our night time low temperature got down to 38 degrees. I have not been out to see the mini greenhouses yet this morning. I haven't even been over to the window that has the indoor/outdoor remote thermometer in it.  I have the wire of the outdoor thermometer inside one of the greenhouses and then i have the 'indoor' part on the shelf of the gas grill where i can see it through the window (and it won't get rained on).

So there isn't much to report on sprouty things or gardeny things since it just raining out and its not a weekend, so nothing is being done.  Hopefully there won't be too much rain and my dad will be willing to get the compost over here for us.
I hope to have it get tilled in so i can put  clear plastic over the soil to wake up the weeds then run the Mantis over it a week later, then black plastic to warm the soil faster. 
According to the Johnny's blog and according to the book by Eliot Coleman (that i am reading now) i should be able to plant out the hardies within a week or two- and possibly as much as a couple weeks ago-  under the hoops of course.

The little citrus trees seem to be doing fine so far. The venous orange still has those rolled leaves, but there isn't any real info on this plant online. Some posts about them that result from searching, seem to imply that 'venous' is a made-up name by Gurney's/Henry Fields.  There was one suggestion that it might be Madame Vinous orange...which is a known type.  But its hart to tell because people are in general so dismissive to HF and their products, that nobody will say much even if they did know.

I don't know myself right yet,  i just want to get some nice smelling flowers. It doesn't even have to set fruit, but if it does i would love to see some fruit with at least an orange blush.
 I do want a variegated pink Eureka lemon soon.  I saw it first at Springhill's website... but i don't remember their reputation so i'd check in on that before i would consider them .  Territorial also sells it and they have the Kaffir lime that i want to replace the one i accidentally murdered.  They also have the Kumquat plant i want.
They also have one of the better reputations, so i might go there for "all my citrus needs"...  since hubby was kind of freaked out by my idea of turning the front garden into a Milkweed festival, i may have to console myself with a collection of a different sort.

The Goji seedlings are taking off like crazy, and i did manage to find the charger for my camera after an hour of searching the other day.

I also think that  my Hoya shephardi is setting a penduncle.  This is pretty exciting since this can take years to happen... of course it can still take years to bud and then bloom from this point i guess. But the fact that it seems to be starting something after less than 2 years from being a rooted cutting...  its pretty cool.  One out of 6 of my Hoyas might bloom within the next three years.  Yay!

 I forgot two of my Passiflora outside, i'm going to leave them out until it warms up cause i think if i bring them back in they might go into shock if they aren't there already. But i did repot the P. lavender Lady the other day, it looks happier in a bigger pot.

Well, i guess that is all.

2 comments:

Faith said...

So glad! Yeah, the shutting down immediately is a VERY good thing.

I got tired of losing all my bookmarks, so I finally got a Delicious account. It's really cool. It was super easy to import all my saved bookmarks from the pc, and then so easy to use them no matter where I am on the web, I think I have over 3600 bookmarks, all neatly categorized with tags, so finding stuff is really nice! That's how I got you the two floor planning links.

I also upload ALL my photos to Flickr so if I crash I have copies. Whew!

I have some dear friends who moved here from NY. They lost their garden twice already this year, with late frosts, so they are waiting. Their plot is in a frost pocket.

I would love to have all year long color here, so my window shopping in that catalog I mentioned to you resulted in a list of successive bloomers throughout the season.

~Faith

icebear said...

I plan to call and get a catalog from Vernon & Sons... i happen to be a phonephobe so it may take me some time to nerve up for it. lol

I like that Delicious thing, never actually knew what it was for, i saw it, but never remembered to ask anyone or look up its purpose. I think i will set myself up with it sometime today.
I used to have thousands of bookmarks, but i have only rebuilt up to a few hundred again at most since the last crash.

How awful for your friends, that must be terribly frustrating! Maybe they might consider looking into low tunnels/hoop houses since they are in a pocket. It might make just enough difference on frosty mornings.