First the Random:

• Today I did an interview with the undead. Specifically with Chuck and Kreg of Technorama, which, despite the rumors, is not actually dead. I’m not sure when the show will air, but I’ll let you know!
• May 31 I’ll be at AstroZone in St Louis, and I am planning to take live questions in person and over the internet via uStream
• There will be a New Media meet during the AAS/ASP conference June 1-5. If you are a podcaster and will be there, let me know so I can get you on the “Who you can meet?” announcement. If you are interested in coming, keep an ear out for more information!
• June 6, I will sleep a-l-l day.

And now onto the off topic.

When I started keeping this blog, my personal and for friends blog died. I only have so many hours, and something had to go. This means that when I have a day that really just needs to be shared, I generally keep it to myself. That said, today I decided I’m going to inflict some off topic silliness on you because, well, this is my blog.

My husband and I live in irony. While this is not as fun as living in sin, it is perhaps more amusing. Today was an ironic day, and not in the Alanis Morissette pathetic kind of way. It was actually ironic.

For instance, we have (possibly had) a very dumb snake living in our yard. A couple weeks ago I was dismantling a poorly re-constructed a fire pit to stabilize it and found this snake between two of the stones where it was apparently waiting to be set on fire. I picked the disgruntled thing up and re-homed it to the much safer wooded area in our backyard. Today, I was picking up a random pile of wood that didn’t quite get made into a fence and found a same size, same breed, (possibly actually the same) snake apparently waiting to get made into a fence. I picked it up again, walked it over to the same wooded, should be much safer, area, and watched it slither off. Later today my dog was acting the same way she acts when she is hunting turtles in a pond, only she was in the underbrush that shouldn’t have turtles. I assumed she was hunting moles, but when she finally pounced and picked something up it was a snake, the same size and breed as the one I had twice so carefully rescued and put somewhere “safer”. While it had no obvious injuries, it didn’t exactly slither off with the same verve as earlier in the day when I put it down deeper in the wooded area.

Not to be out done by reptiles, the inanimate objects in my yard decided to be ironic as well. Specifically the bricks. The house we bought almost two years ago had been neglected for about 5 years, and the former flower beds had been completely overrun with ivy (poison ivy in many cases!). As part of my mission to systematically destroy ivy, I have been outlining all our gardens with edging bricks (all the better to contain bark mulch). Having finally finished edging everything this morning, I started to actually put in a garden (peppers, tomatoes, cukes – beginner plants). Image my horror when I found a grid of bricks about 5 inches below the surface from where some prior owner had built a garden in a similar but not identical place. I removed an entire buried “L” of bricks that ran parallel to where I’d put the garden’s side and front edges. Since everything has already been edged, I now have this pile of ironic bricks. Perhaps if I leave them in place, and if the snake lives, the snake will move into the pile of bricks…

Tomorrow I will work on IYA projects from my screen porch while admiring my ironic yard.