Knitting For Bears

So they really are better.

They aren’t prettier. I don’t know what I did to make them crack. Too much water? The bottoms of these babies aren’t all that pretty either. It really doesn’t matter though.

One of them got guzzled down immediately. I picked it, waited to make sure it was ripe, then sliced and ate it. Tried one slice with salt. Salt didn’t really add much. Shared one slice with Bear. He was not appreciative enough. Ate the rest myself. I cannot tell you how good these were. If you’ve only ever eaten store bought tomatoes, all I can say is that these are almost nothing like them. The other Beauty tomato got made into a sauce thing with some shrimp then tossed on top of some pasta. Bear only had the one tomato so the flavor was very light, but it was soooooooooooooo good.

The cherry tomatos continue to be little happy pieces of candy that I pick off the plant, rinse, then enjoy.

Y’all! I have tomatoes!!

Now lemme tell you why they aren’t still on the plant. So on Sunday I notice we have ripening tomatoes. I am freaking thrilled and I drag Bear outside to look. (Currently two more from this bunch are turning pink.)

Aren’t they darling looking? I’m pretty sure they aren’t ripe yet though, so we leave ‘em there. Then on Tuesday night (technically Wednesday morning I guess since it was 1am), Bear comes upstairs and tells me, in all seriousness, that we probably won’t get to eat the tomatoes. I ask him if something ate them. I couldn’t imagine why else we wouldn’t get to eat them. He tells me it’s because the frost probably got to them.

Now lemme tell you what happened on Tuesday. A slight cold front came through and it rained for about 15 minutes and the temperature dropped down to 57 that night. And for some reason, probably because we already had the windows open, it was 57 inside the house too. Bear figured that if it was 57 inside the house that it was 37 outside, which meant the tomatoes might not survive. He has me traipse outside “save” them from the nonexistant frost. The whole time he’s telling me, it’s so cold!

So now I have 4 ripe tomatos and 7 more have turned pink. I expect that in the next week or two I’ll have many tomatoes turning pink and ripening.

Those front three are turning pink (you might not be able to tell with the further back one, but it is).

Then two more there are turning pink.

The rest of the garden is still green.

I have a metric for how a day is going. It goes by the kind of book I read that day. I always read. Every day.

Great days are anything goes. I’ll read a bit of something spectacularly bad on a great day. I’ll read nonfiction. I’ll sometimes just read the news or my blogs.

Good and mediocre days are for good and new books. Great writing, plot, characterization. New novels. New fiction. I’m adventurous on these days. Life is going ok, but there’s room for some special piece of fiction or writing.

Bad days require comfort reading. A familiar author, a happy ending. It must be fiction. The writing must be tight. The story must be compelling. Something to pull me away from whatever is making my day suck.

Really bad days require old favorites. Novels that are on my keeper shelf. Books that consistently make me feel better.

Then there are the days when nothing helps. When my keeper shelf looks like it’s full of bitter dreams. When my eyes are just tired and my brain fuzzed and my heart heavy.

I’m off to see if I can find a book on my keeper shelf to keep this from being a no book day.

So the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Olympics are going on right now. I go online to check out the schedule and I notice that they have video. I’m estatic. Sometimes the coverage sucks and sometimes I miss things I want to see because I’m at school or whatever. Then I notice that I can’t play it. I’m on my laptop that has linux. Then I notice that you have to have Vista in order to watch. Forget annoyed. I understand them doing something wonky so that linux can’t play. Linux gets marginalized all the time. I figured I could find a fix or watch on my desktop. My desktop has XP. Except that none of the computers have Vista. Vista is a crappy OS. I don’t know ANYONE except my family across the freaking country who has Vista installed.

I realize that this isn’t something imperative. I realize that this is an experiment. But it’s a freaking Microsoft experiment. Microsoft is using Olympics coverage to encourage people to buy their CRAPPY OS. *breathes*

I’m so so so ANNOYED.

But damn this opening ceremony is gorgeous.