Ah, summer in Colorado.

Shortly after dark last night, I opened the windows and turned on a box fan to get a cool breeze through the house to cool it off overnight.

Not long after, it started raining. Then it started raining HARD. I ran upstairs and saw hail, saw leaves plastered to the window, and heard the hail hitting other windows in the house. I ran around closing every window I'd just opened and hid in the basement with the cat.

The power flickered a few times, but didn't seem to go off for long.

As quickly as it began, the storm was over. I grabbed a flash light and walked the house, checking the windows for breaks. Thankfully, no broken glass, and I didn't feel any damp spots on the carpet other than where windows had been open before I closed them.

In the morning I went outside to check the garage windows and my car, and to check the garden. Windows were fine. I was glad I mowed earlier in the day, given all the sticks and leaves now littering the lawn and plastered to the walk.

I got some pictures of the garden. The pumpkin has seen better days.

Other than the garden, everything around here seems to have weathered the storm well.

The morning started well enough, trended bad, picked up again, went South again and now seems back to mediocrity, pending reactions.

( The details are trivial and pointless. The reasons, as always, purely human ones. )

Yesterday, Saturday, was a Steampunk gathering at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. In character, many of the players were from their airship, the Lorelei. They meant to take a trip to the actual Renaissance period, but their chronometric-navigator had missed the coordinates. Instead of traveling in to the past, they instead went to the future, to a re-enactment of the Renaissance time period. My pictures of the event can be found in my flickr stream though I am not in any of them, for obvious reasons. There were several group photos taken. I'll link them here when I find them.

All in all it was a lot of fun, and I'd like to go back to the Ren Fest another weekend this year, in ren-garb this time.

Today, Sunday, Mike and Amy laid out a new garden bed in the corner of the backyard. Pictures of the area will likely show up in Mike's Picasa album before long. The bed that's pictured there now is one of the smaller beds, roughly two feet by five feet. The new bed takes up most of the corner of the yard, an area at least ten square feet, but oddly shapped. While they spread the manure, newspaper and cardboard, I "mulched" the weeds and other plants we hadn't planted in the back yard. The bed design is based on Amy's father's designs of permaculture; he believes in gardening without disturbing the topsoil much. The newspaper and cardboard act as barriers for weeds growing up in to the garden while breaking down and creating rich soil for the garden proper. I say I was "mulching" because in David's design, weeds are pulled but not thrown away. Instead they are tossed back in to the garden.

After the paper layer is set up, hay no longer suitable for feed is spread on top, along with more manure if you want to get things growing quickly. The weeds are tossed in with the hay, returning the nutrients they've taken from the garden, when mulched after the garden has gotten going anyway. More about David's designs can be read on his website: Organic Landscape Design.

We spread some hay on the bed tonight, but ran out of the bale David dropped off months ago. Tomorrow we'll get the bale David hasn't yet found a use for.

We have three beds in the backyard set up this way, including the new giant one. The small 2x5foot bed is a double-dug bed, tilling and mixing the soil two shovel heights below the surface, leaving the first shovels height mostly intact. We then spread the cardboard, newspaper, manure and hay on top.

Things are growing like mad. A pumpkin planted a few months ago has gone crazy with stalks stretching out in at least a three foot diameter, covering a good part of the six foot diameter bed it's in. It's gone past some stalks of Sage growing next to it, and actually wrapped a vine around a sprig of Spearmint a few feet away.

Mike is now turning a few leaves from the spearmint plant in to spearmint extract for use in making candy.