Ayse: August 2005 Archives

I was ordering an item on Amazon, and in doing so it occurred to me that I could probably easily afford to buy everything on my cough extensive cough wish list that was selling used for under $2. So I just did. And the total order was under $200, $50 of which was the stuff I had to buy, anyway. It was 25 books, altogether, and some of them ones I've been wanting to read for a while.

It kind of sucks that Amazon has dropped the bottom out of the used book market, because I have a huge stack of books I want to sell and seem unable to do for any reasonable amount, but at the same time, this is definitely a boon on the purchase side of things.

In order to distract ourselves from the overwhelming anxiety of the quagmire, Noel and I have been obsessively redesigning rooms in the house. Most especially the future bathroom under the stairs, and the upstairs bathroom (which was disconnected during the foundation work).

So after work today I made a brief stop at Expo, to check out some faucets and shower controls I'd been looking at in online catalogs. What I found was deeply disturbing.

A recent development in the saga of the baby grapes: Downy Mildew! Yes, this fluffy stuff is all over some of the leaves. Looking online, I see that causes are generally being in a damp place (which the laundry room certainly is) with poor air circulation (which the laundry room generally has). The cure is spraying with a fungicide, so after an appointment this afternoon I will be purchasing some of the stuff (mmmm...toxins!) and seeing how well it works.

I re-enabled comments. Glad to see that made so many of you happy. However, I've got comments set to be pre-screened, and unless you give me a VALID e-mail address, and yes, by valid I mean one where I can send you an e-mail and you will respond to me, I'm just not going to put your comment up. Don't give me that BS about spam -- I don't post e-mail addresses, and I don't spam or sell addresses to spammers. They are for my own assurance that you are who you say you are, and because it's a policy I'm enforcing it uniformly, no matter how benign the comment might be. I don't think it's too much to ask that commenters identify themselves at least to me on my own website.

So thanks for all the comments. Consider sending me e-mail telling me who you are so I can actually post them here.

I upgraded Movable Type, the software that I use to handle the data on this site. This is part of my grand effort to fix my broken comments, and I am almost there, except that my preview template is broken. But you can now post comments, as long as you're OK with not being able to preview them.

Because of the massive amounts of spam, all comments are screened before posting. And I need a valid e-mail address, which will not be posted online. I don't think that's an unreasonable requirement, but just FYI, those e-mail addresses will never be rented or sold or whatever people do with data these days. They're basically there to give me a way to contact you.

It was inevitable, as the grapes began growing more vigorously, that this title would appear. It's been a hearty week in the laundry room, with baby grapes entering the terrible twos and cuttings taking root.