1.  Have a Sexy McSexy breadwinner of your own.
2.  Have a nanny ± maid service.
3.  Like food.
4.  Spend all day at Panera "studying."*
5.  Grocery shop for essentials like monster bag of Laffy Taffys, peanut butter M&Ms, and Salt 'n' Vinegar Pringles.
6.  Sit on your tukkus in front of the sweet goodness that is a flat-screen TV, warming your ridiculously entitled, dying little soul in the soothing glow of The Gateway to Obesity and The Moral Corruption of Society.

Repeat ad nauseum.





*And by "studying," you know I mean fighting to stay awake, zombie reading through chapters of long-forgotten physiology (Starling forces for $500, please), and systematically working my way through THE ENTIRE MENU.  (The mac and cheese is the best eat-out mac & cheese I think I've had - just don't look at the calories.  'cuz yeah.  Then you'll understand why it's the best.)

Let's recap.  (Or not, because now that I think of it I have not told you a thing about where we live - or maybe I have, and it has just BEEN SO LONG since I've touched this little blog doohickey that I simply DON'T REMEMBER.)

Anyway.

We live in an apartment.  With a little balcony.  And no yard.  (Whatsoever.  Which is fine, tradeoffs, understood.)  Fruit Loop christened the balcony "our yard" during my second foray into gardening last year.*  That was somewhat successful, especially if you measure success by the dumbfoundingly pervasive number of petunia seeds that are sprouting this year (in my reused dirt).**

Anyway.

Last year's garden was a trip to the local big box home fixer upper store with a garden center***, wherein I purchased plants - heirloom and cherry tomatoes, petunias, pansies, snapdragons.  Somewhere I picked up some green peppers, plants or seeds I cannot recall.  (I suspect they were dollar section seeds.)  And things were good!  The heirloom tomato plant was appropriately prolific, though I think my choice of container limited it somewhat.  (Similar here.  But not really, because mine was the cheap red plastic version on clearance.  Score!)  The green peppers followed a similar course.  Overall, successful enough to make me ambitious this year.

This year, the garden has expanded.  Flowers were relegated to a few spare, small pots - pansy and snapdragons seeds from last year.  (Please, please let the sprouts I see NOT be more rogue petunias!)  The bulk of the garden -- 2 of my beverage bins of red plastic awesomeness + 2 balcony boxes + a raspberry bush!  That is flowering!  (I am worried about a distinct lack of bees / pollinators of any sort.  Maybe I should send the ya-hoos out to stick their grubby little fingers all over and hope pollination happens that way.  Oy, I know there's a terrible joke in there somewhere related to puberty and general boy grossness.)  The green onions are already growing, and a cucumber (or zucchini...I don't remember which box is which at this point), sprouted today!  Overnight - literally!  (Clearly these are fascinating times.  And I don't get out much.  Whatever.)  Green pepper seeds harvested last year are being given a second shot with more space, and jalapeno seeds have been planted in the hopes of diversifying our pepper output.

So.  Not one of those sophisticated setups, but it's a start.  And it's more than what we even have time for right now, but something about growing my own food has always appealed to me.  Even if it's just a little bit at a time, I'll go for it.



* Two years ago was the first "yard" - balcony boxes of cosmos, calendula, and marigolds galore.  They were beautiful.  Unruly, but beautiful.  Harvested bajillions of seeds, especially cosmos and marigolds.  Will have to add those to the list to plant next year.  Because seeds last indefinitely, right?  :)?  Also hit up a well-known dollar section, ("the fun stuff section," as the ya-hoos are wont to call it), and snagged seeds for a strawberry plant and a basil plant.  The strawberry plant was given approximately 3 years before I axed it, (sacrificing a few measly unedible "berries" a year for the space to plant! more! things!)


**I think this may be my new business venture.  Mail-order petunias.  Purple.  Only.  Forever.  Because that's how many seeds were apparently sown.

***Which thankfully was NOT Lowe's, those Muslim-hating bigots.  :)

Appalling.  I cannot believe stuff like this exists.  Given an unbelievably thin veneer of "wanting to help," the website FindMyAccident.com crassly publishes motor vehicle accidents across the US.  With details apparently garnered from a hodge-podge collection of sources, including police reports, accident victims, eyewitnesses, and random voyeuristic users (all of these people unverified, mind you), this site composes an erroneous summation of any number of vehicular accidents.  The worst part - aside from the blatant insensitivity (to put it mildly) - is that FindMyAccident.com participates in rampant supposition and furthering of unfounded claims regarding those individuals involved in the accident.

Please don't tell me you are trying to help victims of accidents by offering lawyer connections, bolstering accounts of accidents with putative eyewitness information, and being a general community do-gooder website.  BS.  This is far and away purely voyeuristic, and the folks who conceived that site and are in charge of running it should be ashamed of themselves for allowing very real tragedies to become just another piece of rubbernecking fodder.