![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Grumps and yays.
Apr. 25th, 2010 05:07 pmI've had a couple of minor disappointments in the past couple of days.
The League of Women Voters had their Annual Legislative Breakfast, in which we invite our local state representatives and senator to come and speak to the League, and anyone else who cares to bother, at a local restaurant on Saturday morning. I meant to go to this; I had it in both my PDA and my paper calendar, and I still forgot. Argg! I must call the woman who organized it an apologize.
I tried loading a copy of Parallels today so that I would be able to load Windows and then Visual Studio Express so that I would be able to mess around with object oriented programming. However this version of Parallels won't work with either of my OSes. I could load a trial version of a later Parallels that will work for 15 days, and I might yet. I can pay 86$ for the full program and I might yet. But money is tight and 86$ is looking like a lot of dough.
On the other hand, I have been removing dandelions from the front lawn steadily all week. My brother introduced me to the concept of something he called a "hound dog." He said it was about the size of a shovel, you step on it to drive it into the soil around the dandelion, and you lever it back (or maybe spin it) and it removes the dandelion plus several inches of root. Well, I found something called a Fiskars "UpRoot" that roughly matches that description. It's got 4 stainless steel prongs on the end, and a spur on the side you can step on to drive it into the soil. When the prongs are buried, you use the spur against the ground as a fulcrum, lever the long handle toward the ground, and the spurs draw together, pinching whatever underground thing is unlucky enough to be between them, and pulling out a roughly pyramidal divot of soil. It will reliably get about 2 inches of root, if you center it properly on the dandelion, and sometimes pulls up as much as a foot.
On the average I think I get a little bit more of the root with a dandelion fork. On the other hand, the UpRoot is much quicker. At a guess, about four times as fast. It cost me 22 dollars but it was worth every penny.
Now for the side yard.
The League of Women Voters had their Annual Legislative Breakfast, in which we invite our local state representatives and senator to come and speak to the League, and anyone else who cares to bother, at a local restaurant on Saturday morning. I meant to go to this; I had it in both my PDA and my paper calendar, and I still forgot. Argg! I must call the woman who organized it an apologize.
I tried loading a copy of Parallels today so that I would be able to load Windows and then Visual Studio Express so that I would be able to mess around with object oriented programming. However this version of Parallels won't work with either of my OSes. I could load a trial version of a later Parallels that will work for 15 days, and I might yet. I can pay 86$ for the full program and I might yet. But money is tight and 86$ is looking like a lot of dough.
On the other hand, I have been removing dandelions from the front lawn steadily all week. My brother introduced me to the concept of something he called a "hound dog." He said it was about the size of a shovel, you step on it to drive it into the soil around the dandelion, and you lever it back (or maybe spin it) and it removes the dandelion plus several inches of root. Well, I found something called a Fiskars "UpRoot" that roughly matches that description. It's got 4 stainless steel prongs on the end, and a spur on the side you can step on to drive it into the soil. When the prongs are buried, you use the spur against the ground as a fulcrum, lever the long handle toward the ground, and the spurs draw together, pinching whatever underground thing is unlucky enough to be between them, and pulling out a roughly pyramidal divot of soil. It will reliably get about 2 inches of root, if you center it properly on the dandelion, and sometimes pulls up as much as a foot.
On the average I think I get a little bit more of the root with a dandelion fork. On the other hand, the UpRoot is much quicker. At a guess, about four times as fast. It cost me 22 dollars but it was worth every penny.
Now for the side yard.
