Thursday, March 28, 2013

The never end saga of the tomatoes in my back patio

I was a bad tomato farmer last year. I let the fruit fall and I didn't pick it up before it sprouted and made tomato babies in my flower bed. This is called self-seeding. I honestly though that the flower bed would never be any good for growing anything but weeds. For years I did just that. Two years ago I gave it my best shot and landscaped that thing, pulling up all the weeds and laying down black landscapers cloth and topping it with bark. Then I planted three topsy turvy planters with various varieties of tomato plants. They hang over the flower bed off of the roof beams from the right side of my neighbor's condo unit which buts up to my patio area creating the back wall of my patio.

In 2011, I first started with three:
Chika Japanese cherry tomato
Pink Lady
Beefsteak

In 2012, I got ambitious and planted four:
Chika Japanese cherry tomato I grew from seed (the star performer from last year)
Sweet 100 cherry tomato
Cluster tomato and
another cherry

So at the end of the season in March which is also the start of the next season and coincidentally is when the batteries decided to die on my rainbird automatic watering system, I salvaged two stalks from the two best performers, placed them in a vase full of water and threw the rest out. And on the day before I was scheduled to pack and leave for my trip, I bought all of the supplies to plant my tomatoes for this year and promptly left. It appears I'm still a bad tomato farmer. We'll see if I can salvage the drop when I return from vacation.






Sunday, March 10, 2013

Dumping Sprint, kind of...

Have you looked at your cell phone bill recently or do you blindly pay-pay-pay through the nose for service because it's what you've grown accustomed to shelling out monthly?

I'm not a big talker and yet I pay $89 something for my Sprint plan. I've actually been a Sprint customer for years. Once I got the Android smartphone (I'm on my second one) and the iphone came on the market, everyone's bill at Sprint got jacked up by $10 a month for 'premium' service which allows your smartphone to stay online and this, Sprint says, it expensive.

And then there is Virgin Mobile.  This company is also on the same Sprint network and charges $55 a month max for the same unlimited 3G/4G service. Why pay more? I mean, what can you do with an extra $34 a month?


Match.com 2013 Update

I'm on the third month of my Match.com membership and I decided I had to update the zip code and mileage range on my profile because I'm getting too many responses from...(wait for it) Beverly Hills. It seems some men don't even bother to read the fact that I wrote my geographic dating range is between work - El Segundo and home and BH is nowhere near my normal route. Do you know when the last time I was in Beverly Hills? It was so long ago, I couldn't even tell you because I don't remember either. Maybe before 2000 for an IRC picnic meet? I may gave driven through to get to somewhere else like my friend Mimi's house, but even that was in 2006? Yeah, so I don't see myself traversing all over LA county for a relationship. Oh, and speaking of which, my cheapskate lunch's suggestion was a bust because his broker friend got married 9 years ago. Nice.


Thursday, March 7, 2013

So you had a bad day

There was something in the air today. Or a planet in retrograde somewhere. Maybe it's the impending Spring Forward time change this weekend and the notion that we'll all loose an hour of sleep. All I know is that something was up. One of my peers at work freely used the code word 'bizarre' today. It's an insider buzzword for something that went wrong and we all know who did it, but that person won't take responsibility for it.

How is it that I get to be called confrontational by You when You were the one who came to My desk to talk to Me about fixing a problem someone on your team created and then Secondary asked you to take care of? Huh?

Leadership: Are you Teflon or Velcro?