PC card died

3/22/08 Saturday
It’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m still wide awake. I figured I would have crashed out quickly considering how hard I worked yesterday but that’s now how it worked. I got the strawberry beds I planned done and Cherie helped me get them planted. In my mind the areas I prepared would have held all the plants but it ended up being only half of them. No problem, I’ve got a killer tiller so will just make more beds tomorrow for them. That machine is going to see a lot of use over the next few weeks. I hope I can get some sleep tonight but at this rate may not. Hope that doesn’t slow me down. I know I’ll hurt, mostly from moving the telephone poles and about fifteen wheelbarrow loads of dirt. Thank God for the pain medication.

I kind of drifted off around 5:30 but never really got any sleep all night. Doesn’t matter, I’ve got things to do. I got up and out by eight and the first thing I did was fire up the tiller. Then I went to carefully put mulch around the strawberry plants we so carefully put in the ground last night. Because it was getting dark and we worked till we could not see there were some areas I had to fix. As I worked I saw the puppies wrestling on top of the south bed of strawberries. OH NO!!! I thought as I got up and screamed at them. My yelling and pointing to the area saying “NO, Bad Dog” didn’t do any good. They were in it just minutes later. Then Trixie decided it was a good area to sprawl out and lay. Each time they heard it from me. When I looked at the bed I could see it has already been a major pathway for them. I don’t know how many of our strawberries they have destroyed yet but will when I mulch them. I’ve worried and thought on how to deal with pests such as rabbits and bugs but I think our biggest problem will be the puppies. Last year the destroyed seventy percent of the melon patch as they exuberantly played. This is a major problem. I think I will have to go online and see if there is a way I can make an electric fence for cheap. I sure can’t afford fencing for the large area we want to plant.
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I tried to post that for about an hour and gave up. I think that our pc card is failing in addition to Alltel’s signal bouncing in and out. There are times the card shows no signal at all but my cell phone shows that Alltel’s signal is strong. I often unplug and plug the card back in several times and then suddenly there is signal. Janie suggested we take our card in and have it tested. It really doesn’t matter cause if it is bad there is no warranty and we couldn’t afford one anyway. Besides that, if it is bad and they know then we won’t be able to get out of our contract. So I’ll leave it be.

I’ve got one of those splitting headaches now. That on top of being slow. I called Cherie to find out where some peanut butter is and she said I should take a break and rest, or maybe even call it a day. My reply was a simple “No”. I explained that we were under the gun and couldn’t afford to take a break. I’m not moving too fast as it is so the work is going in slow motion. I am tired.

I’ll try to go online again but really don’t have much hope.

Nah, it ain’t going to happen. There is not much signal registering on the cell phone so even if the card is working it couldn’t make it.
Here's how much I've dug out of the big compost pile so far.


It looks like our PC card has bitten the dust. There is no signal of any type no matter how many times I put it in the laptop. It doesn’t work in Cherie’s either. I’ll take this laptop to Midland when we go to church and go online through one of the free Wi-Fi sites to be found like we used to when we first moved here. So I won’t be posting everyday for sure. There is so much else I need the internet for beyond email. It’s the greatest source of information for anything, like details on how to plant and grow different things.

We got all the strawberries planted. I worked pretty hard and after not getting any sleep last night am pretty tired.
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This is for my new blogosphere friend, Jim. You mentioned how my problems make your's seem less. Here is my philosophy. I carved this while recovering in St Louis. You know, I used to complain about having no shoes till I met a man with no feet. Many have it much worse than I. I am blessed with life period.


3/23/08 Sunday
It’s one of those mornings where I had to take a pain pill when I got up. The combination of bone pains that come with weather changes and the effects of all the work I’ve been doing are like a one two punch. It hurts but I remind myself that this is part of the blessing of still being alive. I remind myself of that all the time as it really puts things into perspective. Regardless of the pain and a brain that doesn’t always work well I am a lucky and blessed person. My life is a gift. Pain I’ve lived with for eight years now and the first five of that with no medication so it’s just something there. I would gladly endure more for a brain that worked like it used to. I’ve always had a high tolerance for pain.

You can see the strawberries I just put in behind the puppies doing what teenagers do.

We were blessed with some rain yesterday with little sprinkles during the night. It was disappointingly light and I stayed out in it putting mulch on the new area I planted with the remainder of the strawberries. I haven’t been outside yet this morning so don’t know how wet the ground is, but the dog’s paws were pretty dirty so that’s a good sign. They weren’t out for long for Cherie looked out the window and they were again dancing on the strawberries. I’m not anxious to go out and see the damage. Those puppies to more to try my emotional control issues than anything else. It bothers me when I get so angry I scream and throw shovels around. At least I am able to restrain the urge to hit them but it scares me when I get this angry. Fact is though that I have always had an anger problem going back to childhood. Part of it I inherited from my dad. My memories of him involve lots of explosive anger, much of which I triggered but he was easily set off in general. I was held back in the fifth grade, not because of my grades but because I was deemed emotionally not ready. I feel this is another evidence of Asperger’s syndrome. I wish my dad and mom would talk to me so I could learn more about these problems I had. Hell, I just wish they would talk to me.

The rye grain is growing well in spots.

This is the first real rain we’ve had this year. Up till now the highest recorded level of moisture was five one hundredths of an inch. Here’s another of the glitches from the TBI, I’m not clear how to write that out numerically. Is it .05 or .005? It’s a small thing but the testing at the neuropsych really brought that out. So the rain is a reminder of how far behind I am on the garden. Much of our seed needs to be in the ground and if I had it together there would be lots of tomatoes and peppers growing in flats ready to plant. Next year will be better as things like the greenhouse and seed starting shack will be finished and ready for use. Plus once the beds are made it will be much easier to just amend the soil in preparation for planting. So we are creating the infrastructure of the farm so to speak.

We are sitting in Steve and Janie's driveway and taping into their WI-Fi so I can post this. It works better than the PC card did anyway. We didn't want to go in and bother them just to go online.