jjstautt

I can’t find any news references online this morning, but I heard on the radio (CHYM FM) that the city of Waterloo has allowed the Bay to build their planned wind turbine at their Conestoga Mall store. This is great to hear and I congratulate the Bay on their success and for fighting the issue.

I was going to write a pros/cons post about the implications of allowing Elizabeth May to participate in the televised debates and eventually conclude that we should just allow it. However, now I don’t have to as Harper and Layton have ok-ed it. Woot!

So I have been avoiding writing about this for a while.  I wanted to avoid mentioning the hypocracy of promising fixed election dates every four years in the last election and then calling an early election. I wanted to avoid comment on the awful conservative attack ads, but I can resist no longer.

Harper has sprung a protest in Newfoundland and Labrador when one of Harper’s attack ads showed a puffin, the Newfoundland and Labrador provincial bird, pooping on Stefan Dion’s head. Danny Williams has since launched a campain against the conservatives to get Harper out of government. His speach is really good and I highly recommend you watch and take what he has to say to heart (quicktime, real).

Harper is shitting on parts of Canada that he thinks are insignificant to get him his majority… do you really want someone like that in parliament??

I have always been a fan of having some plant life in the home. They help with the air quality of the apartment, make me feel better for the environment and I’d swear they help relieve some of my stress.

I have had for the longest time two cactii that were given to me by my parents. These cactii love me. I ignore them, sparsely water them, and sometimes run out the door in a hurry in the morning without opening the curtains for them to have sunlight. Yet they flourish.

I also have some lucky bamboo that was given to me by my brother as a graduation gift. The lucky bamboo is now 3 years old and doing pretty well. I had to learn a hard lesson that lucky bamboo does not like the city water here in Waterloo. My guess is it’s all that fluoridation that Waterloo adds to the water. I now brita filter all of the water I give my plants and they are happier.

When 1337hax0r and I were living in the townhouse closer to the university we tried creating a small potted garden on our patio. We had lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries (which were kept just inside the patio door), a bunch of herbs, along with some other things planted. 1337hax0r had some really cool ideas for self watering systems that never came to fruition because unfortunately there was a huge infestation of earwigs that year. All of the plants that grew outdoors were ate up faster than they could grow by the earwigs. Surprisingly enough, I still have two of the strawberry plants now 4 years later. These are the toughest strawberry plants I have ever come across. I almost kill them every other month.

Part of my problem with growing plants is that the apartment I have currently is on the North-West side of a building. The apartment only gets direct sunlight from about 3:30pm on in the summer. The other problem I get is that the humidity is all over the scale. The water in the pot never evaporates at a consistent rate so I end up over watering or under watering quite regularly.

Over the last month or so I have been trying to grow some herbs from seed. I wanted to grow something that would be useful in my day-to-day life, and herbs yut that bill. I started some chives and dill in two small pots on my window sill at the beginning of August, and a couple weeks later some thyme. So far I have managed to get them to grow and keep them alive; although just barely.