Compost

You may be thinking, "Why does he have pictures of dirt on his blog?"




The top picture is of a handful of the compost from my compost heap and the bottom picture is looking down into the compost container.

Son Sneed and I have recently started composting in earnest and our compost pile is really taking off. In the spring this will be an excellent source of soil amendment for flowers and vegetables.

I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I opened the lid on the compost container and steam rose out of it. That is exactly what you want the pile to do. It confirms that the microorganisms are hard at work breaking the organic matter down.

I have found that composting is an art as much as a science. If you want compost in a reasonable time frame, it takes a bit of care. Nature can take her sweet time in composting, but I don't have years to wait for the results.

We compost leaves, fruits and vegetables and coffee grounds that I get from Starbucks. It is important to have a mix of brown (carbon) and green materials (nitrogen) in the pile in order for the composting process to work correctly. It has to be kept moist and turned periodically. A well-maintained compost heap should smell a lot like soil.

In other news, I saw in the paper that Greyhound has spent millions to spruce up their bus operation. I'm reminded of the times that I took long-distance bus trips. They were uniformly unpleasant.

My old man was a career Air Force man, so we moved around. In addition, he drank a lot. Since cars cost money and anything costing money cuts in to the drinking funds, he always bought the cheapest, oldest car he could get.

This meant that when we moved from one duty station to the next, it was done by public transport, not private car. And by public transport, I mean the cheapest he could arrange, usually the bus.

In 1963 we moved from Omaha, Nebraska to Tucson, AZ via the Greyhound. According to Yahoo Maps it is a distance of 1271 miles and the driving time is about nineteen hours. Of course, on the bus, it takes twice that long.

We left Omaha on a Saturday afternoon around three o'clock. The bus broke down near Lincoln, NE, about sixty miles into the trip. We sat on the bus for hours in the middle of nowhere waiting for someone to come and fix it.

Once we were on the road again, the driver told us that he would have to skip the dinner stop in order to make up for lost time. We finally stopped at Pratt, Kansas at sometime after midnight, where we changed drivers. The diner was closed, but the owner was there and gave us some apples. Then it was back on the road.

We stopped for breakfast at a place called Texoma, Oklahoma, which like the name implies, is on the Texas and Oklahoma border in the panhandle of Oklahoma. By then we were about seventeen hours into the trip and had gone less that six hundred miles.

After Texoma, the day was a series of stops in tiny, tiny in the middle of nowhere, where the driver would tell us that we could not get off the bus or if we were allowed off, it was for five minutes. By the time we got to Albuquerque in the late afternoon, all four of us kids were tired, hungry and cranky and my old man was on the verge of a major explosion. The fact that he hadn't had a drink in twenty-four hours didn't help his demeanor.

At the Albuquerque terminal, he blew. The driver told us that rather than having a dinner stop, we had to board another bus and head out for Tucson right away because we were hopelessly behind schedule. My father began to scream at the driver and was quickly joined by other pissed off passengers.

We all got tossed off the bus in Albuquerque, but we enjoyed a a hot meal and old Dad had a few beers to calm him down. We also got to enjoy the Albuquerque bus terminal until the next bus to Tucson left the next morning.

The trip from Albuquerque to Tucson is about eight hours by car and should have been about twelve hours by bus. That is unless the bus breaks down and you have to wait for repairs in the middle of New Mexico, which we did. Then later after the sun went down, a dust storm flared up and our driver made a scheduled stop in a small town in New Mexico. He stood up in the aisle of the bus and gave us a speech about how lousy the bus company was and how his bus didn't even have power steering. He urged all the passengers to write nasty letters and then he quit leaving us high and dry.

By the time a new driver arrived from God-know-where and we reached beautiful Tucson, we had been on the bus for about thirty-eight hours and it was five in the morning. We sat in the bus terminal for two hours until we could get a ride to the base and check in to our temporary housing.

The sad part is that this didn't even cure us of riding the bus.















Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky