One good thing about having a house, I can plant perrenials without feeling like a sucker.

Things I am thinking of planting this year:

Kentucky green beans
Snap peas
Brandywine tomatoes
Steak Sandwich tomatoes

Early Girl tomatoes
Bell peppers
A mix of hot peppers
French radishes
Fingerling potatoes
Garlic
Green onion
Endive
Spring lettuce mix
Long thin carrots
Golden beets

Zucchini
Fennel
Artichokes
Sunflowers
Raspberries
Herbs: thyme, oregano, basil, sage, parsley, chamomile, rosemary, lavender
Nasturtium
Peonies

Also:
Two cherry trees
A kumquat
A pomegranate
Rita the fabulous lime tree (already potted)

Haven’t decided on:
Other flowers
Crocus
Another kind of squash
Your suggestion?

To Make The Garden:

Step 1: Rent a rototiller
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Eat things

P.S. Beautiful or weird?

If you happen to be around San Jose tonight, Kyle is giving a talk on computer-things for the Silicon Valley Linux User’s Group. Based on Kyle’s book Knoppix Hacks, Kyle will be going over how to re-master Knoppix or something like that! The free event will be at 7 p.m. at Symantec in Mountain View.

If you can’t make it to that, Kyle is also speaking on Tuesday at the North Bay Linux Users Group, which he is also president of. I quote:

In this talk Kyle Rankin will provide an introduction to performing forensics analysis on Linux machines using the popular Sleuthkit tools with their easy-to-use Autopsy web-based front-end. The talk will cover initial installation and configuration of Sleuthkit and Autopsy, basic concepts and considerations for a forensics investigation, and at the end there will be a demo with a compromised Linux image.

That talk is Tuesday, February 12 at O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol.

Kyle is also speaking on similar topics at Penguicon this March, but unlike that conference, these speeches are free to attend. Hurrah!

UPDATE: Also, check out Kyle’s most recent article in TechTarget, Server names: A checklist for scalable schemes, about naming schemes for servers.

Now that Kyle and I have a mortgage, we have to be more frugal with how we spend our free time. So we are being more creative, picking activities that cost less but are oddly enriching in their variety. This weekend, for example, I made Spanakopita for the first time, went thrift store shopping in the rain, visited the San Jose Museum of Art, and had Indian buffet (among other things).

The art museum has long been one of my favorites in the Bay Area. It’s smaller, but more discriminating in what it displays. I find that the art they have there is often more relevant and interesting to me than art in other museums in the area.

This time, they had series of Picasso sketches and Goya etchings. The etchings were Goya at his creepiest. They are called Los Caprichos, a set of 80 etchings that are satires of the church, society, etc. Even though Goya made these etchings in 1799, they are still somewhat disturbing to look at what with the witches and goblins and decapitations and pedophilia and whatnot. This is, after all, the man who painted Saturn Devouring His Children. I thought they were fascinating. You could just stare and stare at each one. (However, I did have to raise an eyebrow at some of the parents who were showing these etchings to little children. Talk about the stuff of nightmares. Some art is for adults!)

Church in San Jose shot through an art museum window.

We also hit the thrift store jackpot this weekend. I got:

Three owl trivets

A fondue set

A $15 leather office chair

Also: A monkey bowl, a vintage casserole dish, a water timer for sprinklers, a scoop for the cat food, and a new (never worn) shirt. There’s something so satisfying in bargains.