A “GrowBox“—the bottom half provides water in a reservoir, which is wicked up by the soil. You only have to water about once a week! Clockwise from upper left: tomato, cucumber, kale, zucchini, rosemary, parsley. The consistent watering helps, as does the included organic fertilizer. The burlap-looking thing keeps weeds down, reduces moisture loss from the soil, and apparently provides some nutrients as well, though we’re a little skeptical on that part. Let’s see what we’ve got in August!
I can’t believe how much I’ve changed since I started writing this site. When I began jotting down my thoughts in 1999, I hadn’t been to high school, undergrad, or dental school. I didn’t have student loan debt. No car. No home. No bills. I paid no insurance. No paycheck. My biggest concerns were how fast the summer seemed to pass by and how much homework I found myself working on the other part of the year. My writing showed few reflections on what drove me to try so hard in school, or where I wanted to go in life. And anyway, the style of writing online at the time was simply to recount what you’d done that day, a literal journal of events, and I always talk about trying that again here but never quite seem to gather the courage to simply go back to that: “Here’s what happened today.” I always seem to be pursuing giant revelations, trite truisms articulated thoughtfully, advice to myself, or all three in an exhausting, overwrought, unholy blend. No matter how many times I edit those hackneyed paragraphs, it gets published as tangled prose, heavy writing. Let’s try the old way this week, ok?
Today marks two months since moving day to our new place here in Woodbury; looking back, we have been working non-stop. We painted some 15 foot ceilings and installed a room and a half of engineered hardwood floor before move-in, but it turns out the home improvement sprint evolved into a marathon. You can imagine what it’s like to run the first 800 meters of a race flat-out before realizing that you’ve signed up for 26.2 miles.
Mykala and I have little to nothing left in our tanks — it’s been one week since we closed on our first place, and we have been working almost literally every free moment to freshen it up in preparation for this Saturday’s move. We’re talking 14, 16, 18 hour days here.
We closed on our townhouse this past Thursday the 13th. Since then, we’ve been doing 14 hour days getting the place ready to move in. We’re in the middle of painting rooms right now, and we’ll be laying floor hopefully later this week, too. I almost don’t have the energy to keep my head up, so I’ll stop typing before it crashes into the keyboard. Looking forward to posting pictures of the new place after we move on the 22nd!
Today we found out that you are our baby. We love you already. Your mama went to the doctor’s office and they took your first picture. You are very small right now, just the length of a grain of rice — a “basmati grain of rice,” your mom said. I hope that someday you might read what I am writing and it might give you some insight into that mysterious time when your parents were young and not even five years into their marriage. We love one another so so much, and we want you to be in our family.
