My Garden - Peppers and Tomatoes Today

Nick is supportive with my gardening. Which is a good thing, because he didn't see very happy a year ago when my parents brought me my first plants in containers.
Nick has been so supportive, he has his own pepper section in the garden.

Initially Nick picked out a nice pot and planted some Habaneros from seed. He didn't tell me what he was planting.

Nick's original Habanero Fire Pot

A couple days later, I got tired of my flooded and dying pepper plants, so I went to the store and bought my own Habaneros. Oops. (This is how they looked a month ago when I bought them, and the picture was taken today.)

My store bought Habaneros

We realized we were going to have a Habanero overdose, and thought it really was too late in the season to start a plant from seed, so Nick gave me his nice big pot for flowers, and moved some of the Habanero dirt inside.

Nick's Habanero's grown from seed (on left) with our kitchen herb garden.

Nick ended up buying more pepper plants from the store, and put them in yellow pots. So far, so good.

Nick's Yellow Pots of Pepper Spiciness
(store bought plants)

The fruit of success
(store bought plants)

As for my tomatoes, they are doing pretty good (except for the weird yellow leaves). I have baby cherry tomatoes and plenty of blooms.

My Garden - Flowers Today

I've been doing so much planting and container buying since April, that I was afraid Nick would stage an intervention for me. I've slowed down a lot, however I did buy another 18" container at Home Depot today. (I needed to buy something, since they gave me a bag full of sawdust for free.)

The spring flowers died back, so I pulled the rest of my tulips and all my hyacinths and daffodils today (which is why I needed sawdust). Since I had space, I planted the rest of my dahlia's and cannas. They recently started coming up, so I'm hoping these last few plants will grow and bloom later this summer.

All in all, my garden has been pretty successful. A lot of my plants grown from seed didn't make it. Some because I moved out too soon (and then there's the peppers I flooded...) and other because I started them too late (and over thinned them, I think). But since this is my first time gardening, I'm very pleased with my plants.

The garden

Flower Boxes

Pots

One of my day lillies

My impatiens (grown from seed)
They are doing a lot better now that I've moved them outside.

My only blooming iris (And it smells so good)

I've been experimenting with several types of annuals: dahlias (from seed), salvia, portcullis, violas, impatiens, double impatiens. My area is on the north side, but there is still a lot of sun. My impatiens are under the porch. Next year I may put more containers up there and plant more impatiens, but I'm not sure yet. I have a double impatiens in the flower box spot that receives the most shade. I've decided that I'm going to go with violas from my primary annual next yet. It is nice and full, and there is a huge variety of color. I will also look into seed dahlia's. My current seed dahlia's are doing well and so far bloom regularly. I also think I can plant a whole lot denser than the directions advise.

This year's perennials have been hyacinth, tulips, daffodils, irises, dutch irises, day lilies, lily of the valley, cannas, freesia, and dahlias (from tuber). The dutch irises and lily of the valley didn't do anything. I haven't seen any freesia yet either. The day lilies blossoms last just that long, a day. So I've been disappointed. I need to learn about more lilies (such as star gazers) and see about growing those instead. I'm also impressed with my tuber dahlia's. They came up pretty quickly after I planted them. I'll have to wait until later in the season, when they bloom, to make up my mind entirely. But I think I'll be adding them as a staple to go with Irises. (Hint, hint, Cooley's would make a fabulous present.)

Gardening - Spring

(These are pictures I originally posted at Facebook.)

Winter was pretty long and hard this year. I did move 4 hours away this past year, and wasn't expecting the climate to change that much. I don't know if it is because I'm 2 hours north, or if it was just a rough year. But I have too say, I was impressed. This was definitely the best winter I've had since we left Alaska in the mid-1990s. By the time Spring came, I was ready to plant. This is the first time I've had a front yard. And while I can't tear up the grass, I did mange to set up a container garden out front.

Here are my tomatoes and peppers, after they were first set out.

The peppers really don't look very good. (They got worse.)

Dirt is fun.

Gardening - Background

For Christmas, Leslie got my dad a book called "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver. I started reading it while I was at Leslie's during the holidays, and enjoyed what I read. A few months later, I bought my own copy and read the rest.
I loved it. I call it my hippie book, because it changed my view on food economics, and made me want to run off, live in the woods, and hug trees.
I really can't adopt that lifestyle at this point in my life, but the book did influence me to start my own garden. And in February 2008, I went to the store, bought a bunch of seeds, and started growing peppers and tomatoes. I ended up with way too many seedlings, gave a bunch to coworkers, lost some peppers in my attempt to move them outdoors. (Oops, I should have holes in the bottom of that container.) And now I have some little cherry tomatoes growing on my surviving tomato plants.

Moving

I'm moving in about a month and have been really busy with getting stuff together for that, plus work. I probably won't get around to updating my NWN2 module until July.

Who is Kaycei?

First of all, Kaycei isn't my name. It's nothing close to my name. It's the online name I decided to use in college, to protect my identity from the scary World Wide Web. Now that I've been using it for so long, it's stuck with me.

I'm one of those people who walks around with her head in the clouds. I'm a day dreamer.

When I was a growing up, I loved to read. I would always have a book with me, reading by the headlights of the car behind me, reading by the light of the midnight sun as it passed through my window blinds during Alaskan summers. I sometimes used the flashlight under the bedsheets, but not that often. Batteries were in short supply in my household, plus I was never much of a complete rule breaker. It was too easy to get caught staying up past my bedtime with the flashlight.

I especially liked fantasy. C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle were two of my favorite authors. I enjoyed the animated movie for "The Hobbit" and "The Last Unicorn." I remember playing "Lord of the Rings" with a couple of my friends, pretending to be wizards and elves.

At this time, Dungeons and Dragons was growing in popularity, and was attracting the attention of the "Christian" community as being Satanic. I also remember not being allowed to watch "The Smurfs" for the same reason. (My parents deny this, so I may have just been a confused child.) Although I am a rule follower, I do have a slight rebel streak. This made fantasy even more appealing to me.

My uncle gave us a computer, along with some of his old computer games. He had a lot of fantasy games as well. One was Ultima 4, which I loved to play on our Apple 2e. It had different classes to play, a plot line, and spells. I spent hours playing that game.

During the summer, we traveled to my uncles and spent time there. He had a couple computers and even more, and better games at his house. I was in heaven. I played Dungeon Master and Elder Scrolls Arena.

I moved a few times and then I headed off to college. Well, while I was there, I ran into my "Lord of the Rings" friends again. It turned out they continued pretending to be wizards and elves, and were Role players. They invited me to join their role play group. After a few months I accepted. This expanded group of friends defined the rest of my college social experience.

We primarily played two types of campaigns, fantasy and superhero.

I didn't read comic books as a kid. My parents wanted me to read books with words, not pictures. But I still enjoyed my Saturday morning cartoons, especially "The X-men." I had a bit of a cartoon-crush on Wolverine. I couldn't understand what he saw in Jean Grey. So I imagined up a Catwoman type of character to be his mate. She was strong and sexy, my image of the perfect woman. (Laura Croft from Tomb Raider, played by Angelina Jolie fits this stereotype perfectly.)

Well, it was time for me to plan out my character for my first superhero campaign. I wanted to play my Catwoman type character. So we gave her statistics and planned her out. And she turned out pretty tough on paper. When a friend looked over her final character sheet, his response was "Hellloooo Kitty." We named her KC, for Kitty-Cat, and Kaycei was born.

Unfortunately I couldn't pull off the character properly, and it turned into a sick joke. The next few times we played a super hero campaign, I tried to play KC again, renaming her to Kaycei to make her a little bit different, but it never turned out right. See, I'm a bit of a tomboy too. And I just can't pull off sexy.

However, Kaycei stuck. So I use it when I want to be anonymous. And that is why I go by Kaycei.