Sunday, September 26, 2010

Big Spider

This one built a web right next to our barbecue last night. She's a huge one! (click on the image for a closer look)



In other news, those green tomatoes we picked all ripened at the same time so we've been eating as much as we can and giving away the rest. I suppose in the end, the tomato harvest wasn't a bust after all.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

NaNoWriMo - Attack of the Commas!

I think I use too many commas when I write prose. With 5 "nanos" under my belt, I figure I have enough data to see what I'm doing, comma-wise, over the last few years.

I wrote a quick python script and here's the output for my 5 nano novels:

#--------------------------------------------------
#file    :  nill_1.txt
#commas  :  3609
#words   :  50046
#commas per 100 words is : 7.2
#
#--------------------------------------------------
#file    :  icarus.txt
#commas  :  3319
#words   :  50002
#commas per 100 words is : 6.6
#
#--------------------------------------------------
#file    :  horace.txt
#commas  :  3392
#words   :  50006
#commas per 100 words is : 6.8
#
#--------------------------------------------------
#file    :  jute.txt
#commas  :  2703
#words   :  50102
#commas per 100 words is : 5.4
#
#--------------------------------------------------
#file    :  jute2.txt
#commas  :  2267
#words   :  52449
#commas per 100 words is : 4.3

Wow, that's a pretty drastic/impressive drop off in commas. The "horace.txt" story had a ton of dialog in it, which inflated the commas a bit, I think.

So yeah, a great excuse to play around in the python today. My nanowrimo script does all sorts of useless things already, and this year I'll add "commas per 100 words" and maybe a few other fun/useless features or metrics.

Oh, and I should see how my comma totals compare to other 50k fiction novels. Maybe tomorrow...

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Some Harvesting / Some Planting

Due to the mice, we pulled out all of the tomatoes. Wow, we had a LOT of tomatoes growing in that box! As we cut and pulled, we kept finding more and more half-eaten fruit. It was a painful process. In the end, though we found ourselves with more tomatoes that we could eat anyway. Too bad they're all green. We're hoping to ripen them indoors -- many of them are still on large sections of vine.


So, the potatoes weren't too big, but the kids had fun digging them up.

And there are still some cucumbers growing out there:


And where we once had tomatoes, we've planted a bunch of lettuce starts.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Desperate Times/Measures

So the mice and squirrels are winning the garden war. There's no disputing that. Here's what's left of the indian corn:



And this one hurts the most:


Aside from putting out mousetraps (which we do!), there's just not much I can do. Poison is certainly out of the question, and in my cozy neighborhood, so are firearms. I'm going to try odd/pointless things like this:


Of the original dozen or so pomegranates, there are now just three remaining. I'm hoping that when the squirrels come to eat this one, they'll laugh so hard they decide to leave it alone and go bug a neighbor.

That corn though... We have about 10 little tiny ears of strawberry corn (popping corn) and 1 ear of indian corn left. Tragic.

And the tomatoes... The mice have just plain destroyed the tomatoes this year. Today we're going out to yank the tomato plants and try to ripen the remaining green tomatoes in the house.