In the last eight years, my online writing output has ebbed and flowed, changed tone, changed subject matter, and basically followed my life.  What started as a diary to allow me to vent a little about my little life turned into a social platform for connecting with my friends, then a place to share my changing religious beliefs, then a place to collect my tweets.  Basically it’s been whatever I have felt like making it.

I realize that this is a far cry from “blogging”.  It’s much more personal journaling.  Bloggers tend to have a particular subject or particular tone that they specialize in that gains them readership, fame and glory.  My blog is just a reflection of where I’m at in my life.  In all candor, that place isn’t all that writing-centric these days.  I’m far more interested in doing than saying.  However, this morning I realized that I really want to record this time in my life as well.  I don’t want to only write when I have a religion to complain about or I stared a little too hard into the glaring beauty of my navel and caught some intriguing glimpse of my soul.  No, I should go ahead and record the more mundane facts of my life as well since I am likely to wish I had later on.

So, what’s new?  Plenty.  And by that I mean: gardening, hiking, geocaching, biking and building.  Here’s what’s been going on…

Last month I did something that is kinda silly.  I was at the Home Depot getting some hardware for something when I spotted these little Burpee Seed Starter kits and I just decided I had to try that.  Never mind that I know less about gardening than my buddy who figured out how to grow a marijuana plant in his living room (I’ve never grown anything before), I really want to do this so I decided to just jump in.  I brought my little trays of dried peat pellets and packets of seeds home, read the directions, poured warm water over the pellets and started planting the seeds that came in the packets.  Doo dee doo, tomatoes!  Dum dee dum, cucumbers!  Doop doo…  peppers, beans, zucchini, carrots…  let’s just see what happens, shall we?  I had so much fun planting that I went back to the store and bought stuff for a little herb garden for the kitchen.  Cilantro?  Chives?  Parsley?  Oregano?  Sounds great to me!

In all honesty, I pretty much expected that nothing would happen.  I had never really seen seeds planted and growing in to plants before.  This was all very much an experiment.  Apparently, however, this whole “growing plants” thing is pretty easy though.  I put them all in their little mini greenhouses, set those in front of the big south-facing glass patio door, and watched.  Whoa.  Maybe I should have thought it through a little better.

Here I am, maybe a month later, and boy howdy have I ever got plants.  The beans already outgrew their starter pots and had to be transferred into some larger containers.  They are doing great over there, just growing lots of bushy parts and probably getting ready to make beans within the month before it would even be time to move them outside.  The tomatoes are looking awesome.  It’s going to be  a shame to cull them down to the actual number of tomato plants I want but I don’t need nearly as many as I’ve planted so far.  The same with the cukes and zucchini.  This weekend I plan to transplant my three strongest tomato plants.  One is going in an upside-down tomato hanger thing, and two are going into pots (one for eventual transplant outdoors, the other to stay in the container).  I have no idea what to do with the cukes or zucchini, but the peppers can stay put.  They’re still so little.  I didn’t realize they were such slow growers. 

This weekend I will be starting a bunch more seeds (hot peppers!), building a “salad box” for lettuces and greens, transplanting some plants and (if the weather allows) maybe even tilling up the spot where I’m going to put the raised beds.  It’s going to be great fun and (hopefully) I’ll even wind up with some food out of the deal…  I’m especially pumped about the salad box.  I think I could get into this.

Another thing I am probably going to do this weekend is go for a hike.  The last three weeks I’ve hiked at least once a week.  I hiked Alimagnet and did a little geocaching, I hiked Lebanon Hills west, and hiked part of Lebanon Hills east.  We’re planning a trip to the Superior Hiking Trail pretty soon here and I want to be ready.  So far my longest hike has been 6 miles.  I’m ready to try a 10-15 mile hike.

In the last few weeks, in addition to the hiking, I revamped my shed and garage, both of which were pretty big projects.  I pulled everything out of the shed, threw a bunch of old junk away, and repacked it to make better use of the space.  Then, I did the same thing to the north half of the garage (the south half is on the docket for this weekend, I hope).  There is now sufficient room in the garage to do a little building (the salad box, some book shelves, raised bed garden frames, a mudroom storage bench and a compost tumbler are on my list of things I plan to build).  Also todo: get the boat out and ready for the fishing season, put the snow blower in storage, apply the first lawn treatment of the year, replace the garage windows, and lose the remaining 25 pounds that I want to lose.  OK, that last one will take a little more time.  In fact, I’m hoping that this new lifestyle direction will help make that one just sort of happen on it’s own.  I’ll be too busy to eat.

So far I’ve managed to lose 10 pounds by eating whatever I want but keeping track of the calories and trying to average 1500-1800 calories a day.  I use an iPhone app called LoseIt! to keep track of my exercise and food and it’s pretty painless and fun.  I’m also trying to keep track of other things.  For instance, I was reading today about keeping a nature journal.  I love that idea.  In just the last couple of weeks I’ve encountered a silver fox, seen a wild turkey in my yard climbing over my brush pile, and spotted some relatively rare orange-crowned warblers in the woods.  About the warblers…  I don’t really know anything about birds.  When I saw these little fellas, I had no idea what they were, just that they were kinda brownish/greenish and had orange spots on their heads.  I didn’t know what a warbler was.  I used an iPhone app called iBird Explorer to punch in some info about the birds I was seeing and it helped me figure it out, complete with photos and audio of their call.  I told my grandma what I had seen and she said that I was pretty lucky since those guys are hard to spot and they don’t live around here, they just pass through while migrating.  Anyhow, there are three nature sightings that I found interesting.  I think I’d like to start taking more note of things like that. 

Anyhow, I have been feeling pretty crappy all day today.  I’ve got a sore throat and I just feel blech.  But at least I finally wrote something here on the old bloggie.  Hope it wasn’t too boring to read.  :-)

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RyanSutter has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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