13 posts tagged “gardening”

Well this Easter Weekend we did a lot of relaxing and nowhere near as much gardening as I had hoped.  The weather was mostly grey and changeable and just didn’t inspire us to be outside very much.

We took some green waste to the recycling centre, visited a garden centre and did a little planting out but I did not manage to take the compost heap apart and finish building the raised bed.

We went to the garden centre to get some more herbs for J to put in the front garden.  We replaced the thyme, tarragon and fennel and I got some more garden mint which I planted in a huge pot by the front door.

I also got some flowers to plant out which is rare for me (I tend to prefer vegetables)  – a Night Scented Phlox and something called "The Love Plant"  both of which are very pretty and should be flowering well into Summer.

Unfortunately J discovered he had missed the boat on planting potatoes which should have been done much earlier in the season but instead he has decided to plant them in August so that we can be eating potatoes come Christmas Day.  This will also give me more space for vegetables which will have been dug up by August getting two crops out of the same bed.  Next year we really must get ourselves more organised earlier in the year for potatoes!

I got several more recipes made from Nigella Lawson over the course of the weekend since we were doing a bit of entertaining:

The Mexican Flan – very nice, like a crème caramel but much faster and less hassle to make.  Even J liked it and normally he doesn’t like creamy things.
Sweetcorn Chowder – very quick to make and everyone who had it during the gaming session said it was good.
Deep fried squid rings – I splashed out and bought some fresh squid from Abel & Cole to make Nigella’s deep friend squid rings with garlic mayo.  The recipe was very good and I was surprised at how well the squid came out with its semolina coating.  The meal was really rich though and despite having it with some steamed purple sprouting broccoli neither of us could finished it. In fact I packed up probably another portion of the squid rings with some tzatziki and a salad for my lunch on Tuesday.

J also made quail boiled in a lemon sauce with mashed potato one night and that was also fabulous.  The quail had a lovely flavour but it was so fiddly to eat I am not entirely convinced it was worth it.

We spent a lot of last Sunday out in the garden working on our vegetable patch and herb garden.  So far I have dug over what will be the root vegetable patch near the shed and created about half of a slightly raised bed using some concrete edging that the last owners of the house left behind.  The compost heap is right next to this bed and our plan is to dismantle the heap and spread the old compost on the raised bed and dig it in.  Any remaining compost will be going on the courgette and squash bed nearer the house which could do with some enriching as well.

Then all our future composting will be done using the hot johanna and rotating compost bin in the future.

J spent much of the weekend viciously hacking back at the growth round the edges of the squash and courgette bed at the back of the garage which is where I think we will end up putting the Hot Johanna.

The afternoon was spent with me potting out our seedlings and starting off the courgettes and squash and with J weeding and tending the herb bed.  We have ended up with 24 coriander plants (giving 8 away to the next door neighbour and reserving 3 for friends) 8 aubergine plants (probably 2-4 to be given away eventually) 14 black cherry tomato and 3 unknown chilli plants.  Many of these will be destined for the newly fixed greenhouse.

Black Cherry Tomato seedlings

Our Sorrel and Chicory are both looking really healthy and strong and we are starting to look into planning for the time when we will be picking meals based on what is good in the garden.

Sorrel

Chicory Herb

Lovage

My other job was to weigh Sorrel leaves.  We have a book of herb recipes (which we have used to plan the herb garden) and all of the Sorrel recipes are by weight of sorrel.  Two largish leaves weight 22g and so we shall be using this to work out how much we need for recipes so we don't harvest more than we need.  In fact in recent weeks we have used rosemary, chives, sage and oregano all from our herb garden and so are already reaping the benefits (I am certain the chives and rosemary have made back their start up costs.

I feel more and more that we are getting into good rhythm for sustainable living, we are saving all our egg shells ready to use as a slug deterrent when the squash are put out.  We are planning are meals to use our garden produce.  We plan to eat roast meats the day before we have a weekend or a working from home day so that we are able to make and freeze the stock.  I haven't had to buy chicken stock cubes in ages through using up the game/chicken stock in our freezer (which tastes so much better anyway!) and I am hoping we can get even better at this game in the future.  For such a long time I saw all this work as tiring and a chore and now it is a game to me I am finding it quite fun.

Aubergine seedlings

Today we saw the first signs of Oyster mushrooms growing on the straw base.  They must have come up really quickly as I check them every day and saw nothing until this morning I am hoping that this means that the rest of the growing will be really fast and that we will be taking our first harvest soon.  By the number of buttons on the side we should be getting a lot as well!

Oyster Mushrooms (first stage of growth)

Well I have been following the To Do list formula (write a to do list on Friday night so I feel I get the most out of my weekend time) for a few weeks now and I am very pleased with the way it is working out for me.  I get a childish pleasure out of being able to cross things off the list and feel really good on a late Sunday afternoon when I can see all the great things I have accomplished over the weekend.

The weekend the list is shorter as we are spending this afternoon visiting my parents and their chickens.

The second biggest task on my list was 1/2 finished by 9.30 this morning and that was potting up.  My aubergines and tomatoes are big enough to handle and the tomatoes were clearly far too big for the try they were in so I prioritised potting these out before leaving for my parents as I wanted to give a some of the seedling to my dad for his plot.

We have ended up with 11 aubergine plants (only 1 seed didn't make it!), 14 black cherry tomato plants and bout 20 coriander seedlings.

Now I am keen not to repeat the great tomato mistake of 3 years ago when I grew 40 tomato plants and couldn't bear to ditch any of them.  40 was obviously far too much for us to copy with and we didn't get a great yield because we couldn't look after them all properly (not enough time in the day to water, pot out, pinch out, feed and tie up).  So of the aubergines I plan to keep no more than 6 plants maximum.  3 at least are going to my Dad and then another 4 to give away to other people.  With the tomatoes we will keep at least 6 - I managed 6 last year fine, although I might go for 8 I haven't decided.  Again 3 are being taken to my parents today and I have gardening friends I might give the rest too.

Luckily I read a very good post on potting tomatoes a week ago which said that it is a good idea when re-potting them to cover the first inch or two of the stalk in earth as the stalk can send out roots and the more roots the better. 

Both the aubergines and toms are outside the front for a couple of hours as I am trying to harden them off before planting them out in the greenhouse in the next week or two. 

The coriander is somewhat trickier.  I have a huge amount of it.  I figured that it takes a lot less care and attention than tomatoes and we eat huge amounts of coriander.  I would go so far as to say we have a coriander bill each month and I am sure I can cut this down but growing lots of it.  I might just plant it all in giant pots straight away and put it straight in the greenhouse with plastic bottle cloches on top for extra protection as there just isn't room on the kitchen table for it all at the moment.

I also want to start off my butternut squash and globe courgette plants this weekend.  The bed for them is nowhere near ready but it will be sometime before any plants are big enough to plant out (and survive the slugs) so we will have plenty of time to deal with it.

I have already put one cunning plan in motion to deal with the slugs...I am collecting egg shells.  I read a tip on a gardening blog that said that crushed egg shells were a good slug deterrent AND at the end of the season can be dug into the ground and will just compost down and enrich the soil.  So for the last two weeks J and I have been collecting egg shells in a pot ready for protecting the butternut squash and the courgettes.  We have also got a line of garlic on the right hand side of the bed since slugs hate plants in the Allium family so I am hoping that by combining these two crops in the same bed we will reduce the slug damage.

I am particularly excited about growing the garlic and the butternut squash as both plants keep well and this means we can be eating them well into the winter if we can dry out the garlic properly. 

Other things that are happening in the garden today:

1. The bluebells are almost ready to flower, we have loads of bluebells and I think they have another week 2 at the most before they are out.
2. The raspberry canes we viciously hacked back have started to regrow - I was concerned we had pruned them so hard we wouldn't have any this year, I don't think this is going to be a concern.
3. Some of our strawberry plants have survived and are starting to flower.  Historically we haven't done well with strawberries we planted them in a spot which was far too shady and we always lose the battle with the slugs on the strawberries but if we are doing more in the garden this year I might try and nurse them a bit better.
4. The rhubarb is looking very good.  We don't have a great deal, only one small plant but it was enough for jam last year and this year I have a Nigella Rhubarb Sundae recipe we have just enough for.  I think we will be eating that in about mid April. 

As part of our move towards growing more of our own food.  J and I started off our first batches of mushrooms a few days ago.  J bought 2 starter sets one Shiitake and one Oyster mushroom being the most exotic options and also the mushrooms that cost the most to buy in the shops.  They appear to take quite a bit of nursing and there is a good possibility we will be taking them on holiday to the lake district in a few weeks so that we can keep up the regime of checking and spraying with water.

Unfortunately they have two different care regimes which means we have plastic boxes with instructions taped to the top sitting on our windowsill

These are the Shiitake mushrooms, you can even see that one has started to grow already.

Shiitake Mushrooms

These are the Oyster mushrooms - nothing doing yet but I have high hopes.

Oyster Mushrooms

My plan with these two is to weigh all the mushrooms per harvest and work out just how much money this saves us (if we get any mushrooms that is - otherwise we will have made a loss.

In other gardening news I hope to be planting the butternut squash and courgettes this weekend and in a short few weeks our Hot Johanna will be arriving.

I want to compost more seriously and that means worms - hot composting with worms looks like a great way to get rid of cooked foods, meat, bones etc and all the things that can't go in a normal composter.  It will even solve the problem of recycling our confidential papers since they can be composted down as well. They are very expensive (over £110 including delivery) but our local council subsidises them very heavily - we will be getting ours delivered for £30.  Which is very good.  I will be updating on how well it does as we do still buy compost for the garden and I would like to move away from that if I can.  My hope is that now after I have made stock from a chicken carcass I can compost it as well and what we send to landfill will now be dramatically reduced.

I wrote a exhuberant and lyrical post last weekend all about the joys of spring to celebrate the Vernal Equinox and Vox ate it - boo! So this is round two with some added extras after J and I completed another day of serious gardening to prepare for the growing season.

The Spring Equinox came calling in several ways for me this year.

Firstly I have been growing seedlings for the garden - here are my coriander seeds.

Coriander Seedlings

Now every year there is always one batch of seeds I fear won't make it and this year it was the aubergines.  I knew that they took 10-14 days to germinate so it shouldn't have been a surprise that at day 11 I had no seedlings.  I had 3 more days to wait.  However I started to assume for various reasons that this meant the seeds had failed (largely due to my own fears about using the *wrong sort of compost*).  My first aubergine shoots arrived on the Equinox and I felt stupidly relieved.  By day 14 of the cycle it looked like I had 10 aubergine plants.  So far so good.

Aubergine seedling

The gardening theme continued and for the first time (ever I think) J and I took flowers from the garden - which we were pruning back anyway and put them in vases inside the house.  I don't know why we haven't done this before.  I like cut flowers but feel that they are not very ethical or sustainable and so have viewed them as a rare and guilty pleasure.  This might just be a way around it.  I would be tied to the seasonality of the flowers I want to buy but I like seasonality in my fruit and veg (It is nice being able to look forward to stawberries and raspberries and enjoy them for a short time but at a time when the flavour is unparalleled) so it seems to follow I could looked forward to seasonality in my flowers.  I already love it when the daffodils come out and this time was also able to remember how much I love the smell of hyacinths.

Lastly I cast on (and have even finished one whole sock of a pair) the Absinthe pattern from the Spring Knitty.  This seasons Knitty has been my favourite for a long time.  Some great socks and two shawls I would love to knit.  These socks caught my eye because the bright green was so perfectly seasonal and because I too love Art Nouveau design.  I have had a skein of Wollmeise in Frosch in my stash for a very long time.  I was bought for me before Wollmeise got so popular that it became a scrum trying to get hold of her yarns.  I had been saving it for a special pattern as I doubt I will be able to get any more for some time (I do like Wollmeise and it is exceptionally well dyed with an interesting and unusual base.  But I just can't be bothered with the contest for getting hold of it and the nastiness which can come with that - I am going to happily wait until updates are less crazy and if they never get less crazy I will enjoy all the other great yarns which are just as good).  Anyway.  This was clearly the perfect pattern for Frosch.  The semi-solid aspect of the colourway wasn't going to swamp the pattern and the green colour (which some have called Chartreuse) looked really good as an Absinthe. 

Absinthe Socks

Now I have knitted a fair amount of this up I am enjoying it incredibly.  The colour palette is sophisticated and subtle and the base is still unusual and interesting.  It is a great shame that this is my last skein but I am determined to enjoy every single inch of it and knit up all my leftovers.

I was reading the Simple Green Frugal Co-op blog (as is my habit) and read a very interesting post about time and specifically weekend time.  I know as much as the next person how abused the phrase "I don't have time" gets.  This post takes a particular look at weekends and how to structure them for yourself to ensure that you get the most out of them.  Not necessarily in terms of packing in as much as you can but in terms of feeling like your weekends have been satisfying, productive and relaxing.

The idea is to start by listing what you like to do most at weekends.

Step 1 - In general I like my weekends to be a balance of:

Gardening
Exercise
Seeing friends and family
Reading (which I do a lot less of these days)
Trying out new recipes
Mindful housework (the sort that makes me feel satisfied and set up for the coming week at work and which I discussed in a previous entry)
Knitting
Roleplaying and board gaming (although this often also counts as time spent with friends)
Watching movies
Creative writing (which I also do a lot less of these days

Looks like an awful lot I know and the point of this exercise is not to cram it all into one weekend.

Step 2 is to examine those things which prevent me from doing items from the above list.

Laziness
Overbooking one activity so that the others suffer
Allowing internet browsing/watching rubbish TV to eat up all my time without me noticing!

I love seeing my friends and family but due to the culture of my friendship groups everyone gets booked up very far in advance, meaning that if you don't also book things up then you tend to find that no-one is free for the next 2-3 months. This leads to a sort of binge mentality.  I currently have a diary with a decent amount of friend and family bookings from now into May.  Then I and my partner find we get exhausted, or are behind on our chores etc and then have a weekend or so when we see no-one.  Last weekend was just such a weekend and it was very very relaxing.  But too much solitude and we get itchy feet to see our friends and book another binge.

The biggest casualty in all this is our garden.  I think that we both wish we spent more time in our garden, caring for it, having BBQs, growing our own fruit and veg etc. but we are usually collapsing at home or out seeing people.  Last weekend was a good example of an at home weekend except this time we specifically built in time to do the gardening and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  And this is where step 3 will work for me.

Step 3 - planning.

Now in some ways I already plan the hell out of my weekends, I plan to see people.  But J and I are bad at planning in weekends at home.  I would like to plan to have various weekends at home (where if we do see people they are fairly local and do require us to hike into London) but structure the weekends at home according to a gardening calender.  So that on our free days when we just want to spend some time pottering around the house and garden that it is a good time of the year to prune, dig over the veg patch or do some planting.  Later the in the year I would like to plan my weekends at home around the produce in the garden.  For example I know I need a weekend at home in early September to make jam out of the last of the raspberry crop.  We would still be seeing lots of our friends but just making sure that we had enough weekends at home to spiritually nourish us and at times which are convenient for indulging in the hobbies which are seasonally dependant.

This weekend just gone I made a good start on this idea (I was already thinking about such things before the blog post went up - great minds eh!) and prepared the greenhouse in plenty of time to recieve the tomatoes and aubergines I planted in seed trays in the house.

It is probably also important to try and plan weekends with one day seeing friends and one day enjoying pottering around the house.

But then I come to the next time killer - a combination of laziness and getting sucked into fruitless web surfing/crap TV watching which wastes hours and leaves me feeling unsatisfied and faintly frustrated at myself.  I am not actively *enjoying* the fruitless websurfing (I don't count checking my email, google reader and ravelry for a bit - more the constant refreshing to see if anything new has happened) or TV watching.  It is just noise I am using to ensure I am not being bored.  I also find that if I get into the trap of doing this for any length of time I feel to *tired* to do anything more interesting instead.  I have noticed this pattern for some time now and am keen to break it.  I think that the key to breaking it is planning my weekends at home and not exhausting myself with so much socialising that I feel unable to do anything but veg for hours on end.

This was a timely article because as I have already mentioned, last weekend was unusually productive, satisfying and more like the way I would like to spend my time at the home based weekends, possibly with a little more exercise thrown in (for which I am seriously considering getting a Wii fit).

I think that the key is twofold.

A) Planning my weekend before the weekend hits or as soon as I wake up on Saturday morning. (this isn't really a chore since I am a born list maker and love to both make lists and tick things off said lists)

B) Starting my day as soon as I get up.  I find that if I get up and do something active or get started on some housework straight away then I will have a good day.  If I stay in my PJs surfing the internet for 2 hours then I will find it really hard to motivate myself to do anything useful.  The trick is clearly either seriously limiting my internet time in the morning or not having any internet time at all until I have already got dressed and done some other stuff first.

Of course this is slightly compounded by the fact that J and I have very different body clocks.  I get up a lot earlier than him - sometimes as much as two hours earlier.  I think I got into the habit of surfing the net until he was up and we decided what we were going to do that day and partly because he complained a few times that I got up at 7.00am on a Sunday and spent an hour making noise (usually loading and unloading the dishwasher) waking him up in the process...so I decided (on some level) that surfing the net until he got up was quieter.

Now I have recognised these behaviours it does seem trivial that with a little planning I can crack this and go back to having the sort of fulfilling weekends I had when I was a student, before I felt the pressure to cram everything into a weekend to make up for the fact that in the week I was at work.  Since we are seeing lovely people all weekend again this weekend I won't be putting it all into practice just yet but I have shifted some of the weekend jobs into this evening to make up for it.  This evening I have baked banana, chocolate and almond butter muffins for my breakfast next week, cleaned the kitchen and written this (very long) blog entry.  I have limited my TV time to one hour of Louis Theroux and will shortly be going to have a bath and read a book.

Which leads me with the immortal words of Sandy Denny from the same song as the title of this blog entry

"I have no fear of time..."

I sometimes get stressed (like everyone) however unlike everyone I have to be really careful to manage that stress because I have a chronic neck problem which is aggravated by it and is a bit nasty when it flares up.  This week at work has been a bad one for stress, long hours, very difficult negotiations and no time to take stock and think - next week will probably be just as bad as most of the team are away and I have lots of work backed up from this week which I couldn't get done.

So I had to think hard about how to approach my weekend mentally and emotionally to make sure it did get overwhelming.  Thanks to the Down to Earth Blog I have got a really excellent coping strategy. But first I should describe the sort of blog it is.  This blog is part of the simple living movement which I have lurking on the fringes of for a while and may have mentioned here before.  It is a way of living which embraces a variety of different things such as being green, doing things for yourself (be it mending things, gardening, home repairs, cooking etc), cutting down on unnecessary consumerism (and recognising when you are unconsciously buying things to fill up you life), living consciously, and slowing the pace of your life.  Most people do as much or as little as want to so there are people like Rhonda on the Down to Earth Blog who grow and process from scratch almost all their own foods, whilst others may just use it to shop more responsibly.  A lot of things about the Simple Living movement were important to how I already live my live - trying to eat good food cooked from scratch, not throwing out clothes just because a button falls off etc etc.  I don't think you need to be a part of a movement but the label "simple living" has definitely become a useful search term to find resources about things I am already interested in. 

Rhonda has written several posts about how she uses housework as a sort of meditation and I have been approaching it this way for a few weekends now with some success.  So the idea is to pick a job that needs doing around the home and to do it consciously without worrying about everything else you have to get done today.  I find that this becomes relaxing and afterwards I have the continued satisfaction of enjoying whatever it is I have accomplished.

So today I decided to do some serious jobs medatitvely and purposefully and I am feeling much calmer than I have any right to be.  I have also got some great stuff sorted out to set me up for the week (like washing) and also to be more green. This included a long session in the garden for J and I taking advantage of the good weather this morning to get a head start on this year's vegetable gardening and pruning.

A list of those things would be:

1.  Used the food processor to make bread crumbs for a stale loaf - these are now frozen waiting for a recipe that might need them.  J often makes something using bread crumbs such as lime encrusted salmon so it is much easier to have a stash in the freezer ready to go.

2. I made some banana bread to use up a couple of almost black banana's - I am still using John Barrowman's recipe from last time and it is still the best.

3. Washed all the handknitted socks by hand - not a small job but much easier when I realised that I could use the spin cycle to get most of the water out after I rinsed them.

4. I dug up the last of the parsnips from the vegetable patch (a good haul of about 6) which are now keep in a covered bucket by the front door.  The veg patch can now be dug over ready for planting in April/May.

5. J spend most of the day pruning chopping down bushes we don't want and then burning them in the incinerator we bought last year.

6. My big achievement today is sorting out the greenhouse.  Our greenhouse is not in a great state it still had the debris of the great tomato crop from 2 years ago which I just couldn't face cleaning.  That was the year that we grew 40 tomato plants and then couldn't look after them properly because there were just too many.  The greenhouse was covered in plant pots with dessicated tomato plants in them, cat poo since some local cats were using it as a toilet and broken glass courtesy of the young lad in a nearby house who has smashed 3 panes in the greenhouse in the last 18 months (colour me distinctly unimpressed).  So after cleaning out all the old plants and throwing them away, I tidied up all the pot, dug the ground and then flooded the whole greenhouse with water.  Alan Titchmarsh says that one must flood one's greenhouse every Winter.  I assume that this is something to do with the fact that the soil in a greenhouse never gets rained on and therefore is like dust by the Springtime.  Indeed I think I have inhaled half of the soil in the greenhouse during the digging.  The flooding rehydrates the soil.

The next stop on the gardening task train is to fix the broken panes in the Greenhouse with gaffa tape and heavy duty plastic sheeting and then to dig some manure into the beds in preparation for the coriander, aubergine and tomato plants (in moderation) we will be planting this year.

February's planting

I still have a bit of creative writing I would like to do today but it is not vital as I still have tomorrow when apparently the weather will be horrible, I can plant my seeds then as well in the comfort of my living room.

Tonight we are having a roast chicken.  I owed J a roast (can't remember why) and I find chicken more versitile than other meats (the relevance of this will become obvious).

Firstly I started with a chicken and added 3 cloves of garlic and one quartered onion to the cavity.  Then I mixed 100g of softened butter with parsley, 3 crushed cloves of garlic and salt and pepper and spread it in between the skin and the breast meat.  After covering the whole thing in bacon it is now roasting gently in the oven using Delia's instructions.

I am a member of a frugal foods and a crock-pot lovers group on ravelry which is giving me lots of helpful tips.  J and I are doing ok financially but I don't see that as a reason to be wasteful so I am trying some ideas from both forums and trying to get into good habits because you never know when something might go wrong.  Firstly when the roast is done I will be putting the carcass (stripped of meat) in my slow cooker overnight to make stock.  In the morning I will strain the stock and put it back in the slow cooker adding pearl barley, vegetables, chicken, dumplings (any leftovers basically) and put it on all day as a stew for our dinner.  So we will get many portions of food out of the chicken (which was expensive because it is free range) and apparently the slow cooker has a much lower energy usage than an oven (even if you leave it on all day) so it is more environmentally friendly.  All good stuff.

With the roast chicken we are having roast potatoes, peas and kale and homegrown parsnips.  I am so proud of these parsnips.  They are quite small (because the ground was very stoney and probably too well composted) but they smelled just like I remember my Dad's homegrown parsnips.  In fact peeling them in the steamy kitchen smelling of roast chicken took me right back to my childhood.  We have a good few left, for another couple of meals and the big family Christmas dinner.  These are one of my favourite vegetables, I prefer them to potatoes in every way and it is so lovely to have them on tap in the back garden even for only a few weeks.  We are slowly making headway on the vegetable patch and although it doesn't impact much on our fruit and veg bills yet we are learning more every year about how to make it work better for us.

IMGA0704

Today was a much better day.  The house is clean (er), many Nigella recipes have been successfully cooked and enjoyed and I have really taken advantage of my garden's delights.  We ate raspberries with our pudding and then I gave my mum a good couple of pounds to take home.  Raspberries are Mum's favourite fruit and whereas they have a  late fruiting variety we have an early one.

I picked all the ripe blackcurrents (one of my favourite fruits) and pricked them all over and put them in a large bottle of vodka on a sunny shelf.  There are still plenty of blackcurrent left to ripen which I can use to make ice cream or jam.

Finally we filled a big bowl with gooseberries and tomorrow night I will either make gooseberry jam or gooseberry granita (or maybe even both).

I also got to catch up with my family which was really nice, I haven't seen them in a long time even though they only live an hour away so I had three sets of birthday presents to give out!  My dad then started to tell us about his fabulous plans for the garden.  There are some plots of land at the back of my parents house which can be rented from the railway line owners.  Dad rents two plots but is now about too rent three more.  Not only so that he can expand his fruit and vegetable garden but also so that he can get chickens and bees.  Being someone who has aspirations of being a smallholder I am so excited by this and very keen to see how it all goes and to pop down as often as I can to help out.  I tried to persuade him to get a pig as well but sadly he wasn't interested.  I guess that is one dream I will not be able to live vicariously.