...despite our best efforts to slow it down. We haven't had much unstructured time in the past month. We've either been at work, working on graduate school stuff at work, or working on graduate school stuff at home. It was kind of a relentless month and I'm not exactly sad to see it go. Still, we had some (structured and scheduled) fun in between the long periods of relentless productivity.
Our greatest achievement (and subsequent disappointment) was our little garden on the porch. Eight or so tomatoes, about nine peppers, a couple of cucumbers, and some gourdy climbers whose identity we're still working on. Just a couple of weeks ago, the porch was a riot of green leaves, yellow blossoms and the smell of tomato.
Unfortunately, our tomatoes got blight and our viney plants seem to be suffering from nutrient deficiency, lack of root space or both. Our peppers, however, are performing valiantly, and we've harvested a couple of cucumbers. There are a few ripening tomatoes on the vine, but the tomato plants are, generally, big wait-and-see. Kate did some re-potting last night and we've begun a fertilizer-bombing regimen in a last-ditch hail mary attempt to salvage our plants and our dignities.
In the meantime, I've been working to fight back the swarming hoards of spiders and little bugs that find their way through our screen windows. The spiders in our neck of the woods here in Yeoju are phenomenally huge and phenomenally numerous. I saw one about a block from our house whose body must have been two inches long, not including legs. They're not so monstrously huge at our house, but they're everywhere--mostly nesting in the cracks between our vinyl siding and under our roof overhang. Our livable spaces outside on the porch are mostly spider-free (it takes some maintenance) but the narrow balcony around back of the house is pretty solidly an arachnid habitat preserve. Every night and every morning I dispatch one or a handful of spiders with a wad of paper towel and a pounce, and I've also been known to go on holocaust-scale buggie killing sprees with a rag swatter. These only really happen when someone accidentally leaves a window open at night when the fluorescent lights are on, but they are a sight to behold when they do (I'm sure that Kate could provide a hyperbolic and humiliating account). While Kate worked to salvage our garden last night I used clear packing tape to seal the open seams between the screens and the windows and window frames. Now we're comfortable with leaving the windows open at night, which means more breeze and less AC, which isn't very effective anyway. We are slowly but surely bringing back the order of civilization to our home.
Otherwise, we've been spending a lot of our time on the porch, especially in the evenings. It's quite nice. The monsoon season just settled in (it's raining pretty hard at the moment) which means that sunny days may be few and far between for the next four to six weeks, and the humidity is pretty bad. All of the Wisconsinites complain about the humidity and the heat, but it's frankly not much worse than the Chesapeake. It's the damned bugs that drive me nuts.
A few more photos of life at home, with a handful more on the photo blog:
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