All you want!
Friday December 19th 2014, 12:03 am
Filed under: Family,Garden,Life

The second errand of the afternoon (I’ll tell you about the first one tomorrow) : getting a coaxial cable to go with the thermostat he already had, then on to the hardware store for an outdoor box to keep that in–but first the cable.

And so he had an excuse to browse his favorite shop. He got his ham radio license after the Loma Prieta quake, when the phone lines were down and we had twenty-four hours of Not Knowing, only knowing that his aunt and her family had been right there by the epicenter. That sense of helplessness wasn’t going to happen again.

They were fine; their house, not so much. And that is when he started volunteering with the city, county, and Red Cross communications teams, collecting a few ham radios along the way, portable here, (s0rt of) big stationary one there.

Oh but they had some big ones.

Here, let me zoom in a little on that sign on the door. “Hey Guys! Your Wife Called! She said you can buy anything you want!”

Well, but hey, yarn, so, I totally get the enthusiasm and the need to see what’s in stock now.

Speaking of which, Purlescence finally had Malabrigo as of this week and they had it on sale and after knit night tonight they have just a little less of it. I do totally get it–I’m just lucky the individual parts to my hobby cost vastly less than his.

And then we were off to the hardware store, where they not only had the weatherproofing box he wanted, they actually had non-LED white Christmas lights. We thought those had already been taken off the market.

For $4.80 a box. (!) Marked 25% more efficient, when we don’t want efficient at all we want heat for the Alphonso mango tree, but hey, just add another strand. Sold!

Turns out the salesman who found them for us has been warming his four citrus trees that way for twenty-five years and was keen to hear about how to grow mangoes.  He had room for one more fruit tree in his yard.

I told him cold prompts them to bloom but below 40 kills the flowers and fruit–but if a guy in upstate New York could do it, I could do it.

He was clearly already figuring out how to do his own setup to make that work.

You know? This could get contagious.


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Anyone attempting fruit trees in upstate NY is bold indeed! (My landlady when I lived there had planted a peach in the front yard. “It’s Zone 5 hardy!” she insisted when I expressed doubts. She’d come from Alabama, you see . . .)

Comment by Lanafactrix 12.20.14 @ 1:07 am



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