Well as I mentioned in my last post our daughter decided to show up early. April fools day baby!
Katherine Elizabeth Nielsen. Already a month old. It is mind boggling how the time flies!

HA!

So I suppose those of you who have kids probably saw my original idea for this blog and said something like, yeah, new dad. Thinks he's going to have time and/or energy for writing a blog. Well ok. I've learned a lot in the almost 2 years since James joined us. Anyway, our daughter is due any day now. The date is the Monday after Easter but the doctor said since James was a month early don't be surprised if this one is early too so it could really be any day now.

James Alexander Nielsen

So a little over a week ago, on my birthday, my son arrived! James Alexander arrived at 4:58pm on June 11. 6lb 14oz, 20 in. He was facing the wrong direction and the cord was wrapped twice around his neck which resulted in the need for a c-section. Thank goodness for drugs because the doctor was really tugging to get him out but baby was fine and Genny is recovering nicely now. Genny's Mom came up to help out for a few days which was nice. Getting into a groove now with feeding and diapers. Long story short, he's pretty damn cool.

Signs of Spring and updates

Azaleas bloomed a week or 2 before memorial day. Rhododendrons had just a few blooms on them by our Memorial Day party.

I've got all the sheetrock up in the kitchen and a coat and a half of spackle so that's coming along.

All my tomatoes are planted! Yeah! Still have some other stuff under grow lights to get into the ground.

Spent yesterday smoking some ribs on my new smoker and they came out awesome. Also we were getting rooms ready for baby. He'll be here soon!

Oh, and my allergies were the worst for about 2-3 weeks before memorial day until now they are dying down again.

(Some of this stuff is just notes to myself....)

Update from the last few weeks.

Two weekends ago, Genny's Dad came up to help us out with some work we're doing in the kitchen. What a big help. We got all of the electrical work done and got the counters cut and in place and the sink and stovetop are in. Still no drywall up, but it's nice to have counters again! I did manage to give myself a little bit of heat exhaustion working in the attic because there was a freak heatwave and it was in the 90s that day. The attic must have been at least 100.

Sunday of that weekend after Gen's Dad left I got to try out my new roto-tiller that Genny got me for Easter. I only tilled a couple rows of the garden. Just enough space to put my asparagus in the ground. People keep saying be careful it tends to take over but I say yum. Either I'll eat more asparagus or I'll cut it back, big deal. The weekend before I got a bunch of free horse manure and added it to my compost pile and gave it a good mix. It was up to 130 degrees!

So Genny ordered the tiller online and went to pick it up at the store. They gave her the wrong model but it turned out to be the $300 one not the $200 one she ordered. She tried to tell the person that she thought it was the wrong one but they insisted that it was the right one so Genny brought it home. Yeah, there's no way I'm going to go fix that error...

Ok, on to this past weekend. Last fall I was in the habit of buying half dead plants from the home centers at huge discounts and nursing them back to health. It seems to have worked out very well. I bought 3 big black eyed susan plants and divided them into about 16 plants and put them in my vegetable garden which by that time of year was done with veggies. Some russian sage, salvia, and a couple varieties of echinacea. Well they all came back this spring so I dug them up and planted them in the various beds around the house. They are all deer resistant varieties so hopefully the ones I put in the un-fenced rock garden will make it. We fenced in the garden by the driveway with the daylillys, spiderwort and hosta because the deer broke through the netting last year. Hopefully this will keep them at bay this year. The rock garden we built out back though we want to keep unfenced. So far they only thing they never eat are daffodils but at least we like daffodils. I stuck some of our divided plants in there so we'll see how that goes. Also, I mulch both of those beds with compost. It looks good, it's good for the gardens and it was free (aside from my labor in turning it a few times) Speaking of which my compost was down to about 80 degrees so I gave it another good turn and it's back up to over 100 again. Nice.

So the neighbors are great but one of them has a big winnabego in their backyard which is kind of an eyesore. So we've been planting along the property line there in hopes that it will be hidden eventually. We've got mostly forsythia along there up until this past weekend. I bought Genny a little lucky bamboo plant last year because she liked the pot it was in (an elephant). Since it was starting to look a bit sickly, I took all the individual bamboo pieces and planted them along the yard too. Hopefully the will grow fast and take over. If it gets out of hand, I'll just have to import some pandas. I'm ok with that. Ok, time for some pictures...

Oh yeah, you know those raspberry bushes they sell at the home center that look like a couple twigs sticking out of a box? This is one of those things after only 1 year. I never thought it would be this enormous. Awesome!

Signs of Spring - right around earth day

Finally have some hostas peeking out!

Compost

Last week I went on craigslist.com to find some free manure. I found a horse farm in Morristown that was happy to get rid of some. I could not believe the size of the pile they had. Unfortunately I don't have a pickup or I would have filled it up but instead I took 3 contractor-type garbage bags full. So this past Saturday I went to work on my compost bin. It's 3 bins and I had one bin sitting since last fall and another that I have slowly been adding to just this spring. I took the new pile and turned it into the empty bin and added some layers of manure and layers of shredded leaves. It's about 3 feet tall and 4 x 4 feet. I have a 16 inch long thermometer that is supposed to be for grilling but I bought it for checking my compost. It's 50 degrees out today and the inside of the pile says 120 degrees! I also took the old pile and turned that. I added a little bit of manure in layers while I turned that pile too because it didn't really look finished enough for me yet. That pile however has not heated up at all although it did last fall. I guess it all of that out if it's system already but I figure a little extra manure never hurt anybody's compost.