TO A TOP SCIENTIST
This is great. In 1957, an Australian schoolboy named Denis Cox sent a letter “to a top scientist” at Woomera’s Rocket Range with his design for an Australian rocket. My favorite part is “You put in other details.” Ha! This blogger tracked him down earlier this year. Judging by the comments, it looks like Denis may finally get his reply.

A little stressed
I’ve got three weeks til we go on holiday, and so so much to do.

• Finish a mammoth spec at work so the guys have things to work on in my absence.
• Prepare a presentation on Roald Dahl to give to 120 third-graders next week. (My nephew Kurt told his teacher about my website, so they invited me to speak.)
• Get everything ready for knitting camp, including the syllabus for the sock class I’m teaching, the Internet presentation I’m giving, and the trivia quiz our group is providing.
• Prepare and send out this year’s Halloween Party invitation.
• Get everything ready for Eileen’s arrival. I cleaned my office (i.e. the guest room) yesterday and it was like tidying the psychic blockage in my own head. (I’ve also got to finish knitting the gift I’m making for her.)
• Meet up with Erin the house/cat-sitter and make sure everything’s in order for her.
• Get everything ready for the October guild meeting, including finding us a secondhand filing cabinet and organising for the Food for the Future Fair.

Oh crap. When I write it out like that, there’s even more than I realised.

When I was a kid, every Sears catalog in my Grandma Veva’s house had the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine circled as a desirable Christmas gift. I never got one. And now, NOW, somebody is selling them? I can buy one for my very own? My inner 8-year-old is cheering. (Link courtesy of Gael, who rightly describes it as “the toy we all wanted, but never got.”)

Garden Update: I hope you guys don’t mind that I’ve been a little garden-obsessed lately. It’s just something about the increasing sunlight and warm weather, not to mention that my usual obsessions – knitting and running – have been off the boil for a while. Anyway, on Tuesday morning I put down mulch on all four beds. On two of them I used lucerne, and on the other two I tried out something new: dried coffee parchment. This is the papery membrane that surrounds the coffee cherries, and Michael was given bags of it from one of the local coffee roasters. So we’re trying it out. Thursday we noticed tiny green specks in the square where we scattered rocket seed. Our first sprouting! Friday I spotted some slug trails on top of the mulch, so I put down Blitzem pellets. This morning I was gratified to find three slugs in their death throes (which I promptly squished on the pavement). Our cauliflower seeds have also sprouted! It’s all happening. I took some macro pics to document the fecundity. (Some people post pictures of their kids. I post pictures of my garden.)

Rocket seedlings after three days.
Cauliflower seedlings, just poking their heads up today. (The weird green stuff is the slug bait.)

My snow peas are starting to look a bit more vigorous.

Jalapeno and tomatoes, enjoying the sun.

Sweet corn. If I manage to get actual edible corn off this, no one will be more surprised than me.

Petunias and lettuce. (This one has the coffee mulch.)