Stupid Stupid Stupid

As you know, I have a garden.  I planted some things in mid-March.  Watering is a bit of a pain, because I didn't want to turn on the outside spigot until it was warm enough.  I decided to do this in mid-April, but as I was doing so, I reminded myself to turn the water off in case a freeze was forecast.  Fast forward to last night, when temperatures got down to 21 degrees.  Sadly, I forgot to drain the pipe to the spigot.  Around 11 this morning, Ashley hears water running, and sees a volcano-like eruption of water from beneath our back deck.  She was able to shut the water off, but sure enough, one of the pipes burst.  Sheesh.

We received some snow, but nothing too terrible.  It was cold, and I am worried about my trees--they had budded up so nicely and were starting to bloom.  I hope the hard freeze didn't do any irreparable damage.  I will check on them tomorrow.  I'm hopeful the carrots, lettuce, and peas that were coming in survived--they are fairly hardy, so I'm not too worried.  I have some raspberry plants that have been around for a couple of seasons, and I think I'll get a lot of fruit from them this season as long as they weren't too damaged.  Here's hoping.

My indoor plants continue to thrive.  Pumpkins can grow and grow and grow.  We could have our own pumpkin farm here this fall.

The corn is going great, and I hope to transplant it to the garden in two weeks.  Perhaps this year we'll get edible cobs and have a nice meal.  The corn from the last two seasons just wasn't ripe enough when we had to pick it.

I also have some honeydew melons...

and some peppers.

I'm very excited about the honeydew.  I had two or three on the vine last year; one got to the size of an apple, but then the weather started getting too cold at night.  I didn't plant the honeydew inside last year, so I'm hoping to get some good-sized melons.

I spent yesterday building a robotic arm.

I'm teaching an introductory robotics class this fall.  My department bought eight of these arms, and it's up to me to put them together and figure out what to do with them :-)  Actually, I already have most of the syllabus and lectures done, but learning the hardware will take some time.  I guess it'll give me something to do this summer because in two short weeks, I'm technically unemployed (at least til August :-)  Pleasant week to all.