Still Alive!

Today I am supposed to be dead... or at least dying.  Maybe it wouldn't have been until this evening, but it didn't happen.  Today is the last day of my 6 month prognosis.  The doctors at U of M originally gave me 6 months to live back in February.  That has since changed, but this day is a day that HB and I have been counting down for months now.  Dreading, terrified of, and trying to prolong.  But, as the song above suggests, I'm still alive.  STILL ALIVE.  

I woke up this morning with happy, sappy tears in my eyes.  I saw HB off to work, and then I made myself a celebratory pork chop for breakfast.  My buddy Wayne was coming down to get on the train, so I drank some coffee on the front porch with him, and then I dropped him off.  I went to Meijer to get some groceries for dinner tonight, and I just beamed.  I was just in a really happy mood.  I never smile when I go to the store, it's one of my least favorite things to do.  I got my stuff for lasagna tonight, and what I needed for a cake for desert.

By the time I was home, I had realized that my happiness couldn't overwhelm my energy level, and in the excitement I had worn myself out a bit.  Woops.  Tonight, I'm making lasagna for dinner (one of my favorite meals) and a baking a cake in honor of the event.  It will be great.  

HB and I had originally kicked around the idea of a party, but neither of us had the time or energy to plan it, and it was going to be difficult to find a place where people for all sorts of locations could come.  We were going to call it the "Ron beat Death Extravaganza".  So I guess that's what the cake and lasagna will be tonight.  Now I'm off to go get some tomatoes from the garden to start on lasagna.

A note on the song, it's the end credits song for a video game called "Portal".  The voice is the villain in the game who is a computer that is leading you through a laboratory trying to kill you (Think HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey)

The Garden: AKA "Operation: Hobo's Beard"

After reading my friend Amber's fantastic new blog (http://staywellfed.blogspot.com/), it has inspired me to tell you all about my garden.  This has been a project that has been in the planning since last summer, when I first moved in with HB.  With some awesome help from Doug and Heather, and Ryan's truck, we successfully built 2 8'x4' raised beds in our side yard.  The placement is quite perfect.  It gets full sun all day, except for the last 3 hours or so in the afternoon, when the sun seems to be the hottest.  It's close to the outside faucet, which means that watering is rather simple, which is good considering how dry this summer has been.

Doug and I got the dirt from the city of Kalamazoo's free compost pile.  The material is composted leaves and yard waste from the previous fall's curbside leaf pick-up.  Thanks for the great tip Kara and Dan!  The compost was dark and rich, and had a great earthy smell.  Some light sifting was required, as there was various debris that had accumulated.  Heather and I bought 2 flats of vegetables at a sale sponsored by the local fire department, which is a great cause, and has proven to be pretty great starter plants.  I made the way over-ambitious mistake of getting mostly tomatoes, one and a half flats to be exact.  (Note to self: next year, we can get away with significantly less, not that having too many tomatoes is a bad thing).

The plants were put planted in the first week of June, which is probably a little late, but things are exploding now.  When planted, the tomatoes took up all of one box, and 3/4 of the other, leaving little room for the cauliflower and cayenne pepper plants that we also purchased.  In fact, the tomatoes have now kind of overtaken everything, and killed off the chiles and all but one of the cauliflowers.  Also in my over-ambition, I bought 20 packets of seeds of various other vegetables.  Heather and I did manage to make some room for 2 corn plants, which are flourishing.

Why Operation: Hobo's Beard?  Well, when first planted, the plants all made neat little rows, that were quite manageable.  A few weeks later, things were starting to get a bit unmanageable, as the tomato vines starting spreading out all over the place.  Dustin and Carrie came over, and with Heather's help, they built some dividers out of some old lattice for the tomatoes to grow up on.  A few weeks later, and the garden is now stretching out far beyond the reaches of the boxes.  My two 4'x8' boxes, with 4' of clearance in between, is now one mega garden, stretching out about 4' outside of both boxes.  It has the unkempt appearance of a lush Hobo's Beard.

Today, I munched on one of the cherry tomatoes that I plucked from the garden earlier this morning, and it was a near religious experience.  There is something so extremely gratifying about eating a sun-warmed, fresh from the vine tomato, especially one that you've spent time and money and love and care developing.  I imagine that this is sort of what it's like having kids, except I doubt kids are that delicious.  I've been able to pull out about a dozen cherry tomatoes so far, and about the same of a variety called "Sol", that are a little larger than a golf ball, and have an amazing fleshy texture, and not too acidic.  As soon as these start exploding (which is any day now), I think they will go into a delicious soup.

Hope you all don't mind a non-medical related post, I'm just super-excited, and super-proud, and super-thankful for this thing, like a kid showing off his new shiny toy.  I'll post some pictures of the whole process soon.