Firstly, someone has posted some group pictures from the Steampunk gathering at the Renaissance Festival last Saturday. Steampunk invades Larkspur Renfaire on The Colorado Chrononauts' League website. Three pictures and I'm in two of them. One before the rain, the other after the rain when it was cool enough to actually wear my duster.

Secondly, tonight was a Film on the Rocks night. A live band and a movie at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Tonight the band was Carbon Leaf and the movie was The Princess Bride. I was there with the girl from the coffee shop of last week, whom I'll be calling Elle here at least until I talk to her about blogging about her.

Much fun was had and things are going very well with her, so far as I can tell.

The worst part of the evening was the intermission between Band and Movie, wherein the promoters announced the winners of a couple of contests, threw t-shirts at the audience and had an Animal Planet quiz that many people weren't paying attention to (no audience participation was sought). I was also disappointed Carbon Leaf didn't play Mary Mac, my favorite song off of their live album, "5 Alive!" They're coming back to Denver in September to play a couple of smaller venues. Smaller than the 8000 person capacity amphitheater anyway. The show tonight was apparently sold out.

Tomorrow I pick my mother up from the airport, so I should probably get to bed reasonably early tonight.

Goodnight internets.

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.