Muchacho Polaco

So far the hydropronics have been going pretty well. I have been growing a variety of things. It is the bok choi that is doing the best. I believe it’s supposed to take around seven weeks to full maturity.

I’ve been in Indianapolis for the last week. It seems like a nice place. Tonight we toured the football stadium.

I am attending a conference in Indianapolis this week. Ed Slott is a CPA that does pretty spectacular workshop on taxes and tax planning.

Matt and I took a trip to Kentucky last weekend to visit our friend Dan who has 200 acres in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. As far as I can recall, this was my first trip to Kentucky. It is an extraordinarily beautiful place – so green.

This is the barn where we stayed. Dan is building an apartment inside, so it’s not as rough inside as the outside.

He bought an old tobacco farm and this barn was used to dry the leaves.

We used his side by side to travel around the property. I believe he said it’s about eight miles to circumvent the parameter.

The layout was pretty diverse. From prairies to various rock formations, waterfalls, and rivers.

Dan had a cow recently butchered and in the freezer so we had red meat for nearly every meal.

The baked potatoes sitting in the coals below the meat turned out magnifico.

Cigars and bourbon each night around a fire. The weather on this trip was really pleasant. It did rain a bit, but mostly clear and 50s and 60s.

Our last day was sunny.

We traveled home on Tuesday, but got stuck in DFW for hours. Fortunately, we have access to various lounges now which makes for a pleasant time.

As we prep for the construction of our wall, I had Gab up for some tree trimming. A lot of crazy neigjbor’s trees overhang over our existing wall, so they needed to be trimmed. He made pretty solid progress yesterday and today.

I had our roll off emptied of the rock so we could fill it with trees. This is maybe 30% of what I have to trim, but we will do the rest another time.

I leave for Kentucky early tomorrow morning, but am hoping the existing wall is 7 feet tall when I get back next week. We have been waiting so long.

Driving home from mesa now and the monsoons have begun.

I had my 2nd of 2 darkroom classes this evening. This was a difficult and long day and I didn’t have time for this sort of disttaction. I’m so glad I went regardless.

Tonight we developed the film we processed last week.

I really don’t take great photos. Even so it’s still fun.

Above is the enlarger I used to make my photos.

Over all the process is very simple. I did this a lot and the eighties when I was a cadet. Although I was mostly self taught then and didn’t do much correctly.

Overall a great experience.

Back in the 80s I was into film photography and developing film in the darlroom. I had negatives of thousands of photos. Sadly those were all thrown away.

Kim recently bought me a film camera, the same one I started with decades back – Pentax K1000. So I thought it would be fun to take up a local class on developing film and enlarging photos. I had my 1st class last Tuesday when I devwloped my first roll. Everything seemed to go well. My next class is this Tuesday where I can make some prints.

This hideous koi pond has plagued us since we’ve moved in. It would have been a small investment for the former owners to have removed and would have significantly increased the price of the house. So I guess in that sense we are grateful.

Last weekend we spent about twelve hours jack hammerung on Saturday. That nearly killed me.

But as a result we have mostly removed everything. We have yet to figure out what we’re going to put in place of what was there.

The tree trunk, roots and everything that was in this corner are now all completely gone. No leaks. We are hopeful to add pavers in the near future to improve upon dirt.

Here’s another 20,000 pounds of rock we got into a rolloff. This is the second load since I started.

Got a good start to my hydroponic system. I am tring the Kratky method now and seeing good growth.

We hope to have our north facing wall raised to 7 feet by the end of the month.

Abe and family visited us last Sunday.