Two-Headed Blog

With another semester behind me, it’s time to (finally) get started on my summer reading. Here’s what’s on my bookshelf, all lined up and waiting to be read:

The His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman)

The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (Neil Degrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel (Jonathan Safran Foer)

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

The World Without Us (Alan Weisman)

What’s on your summer reading list?

The First Annual Doggy Derby benefiting the Central Oklahoma Humane Society was a smashing success, and a lot of fun. Even though my scalp got sunburned. (I carefully applied sunblock to every area except that one. Now the part of my hair is a shocking pink. I look freakish.)

Moving on.

The best part of Doggy Derby was, obviously, all the dogs. There were the performing dogs, and the dogs entered in the OK Humane mascot competition, of course, but most people just brought their dog(s) to hang out. For an afternoon, the infield of Remington Park was turned into a giant dog park. If heaven exists, it’s hopefully a giant dog park filled with guys like this:

Or, if you prefer the fuzzier type:

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of my favorite dog of the day, a 200-pound mastiff named Todd. His owner told me that having Todd was like having a “ stoned 15-year old kid who gets off the couch only to get something to eat.” I loved Todd. And last night, I dreamed of mastiffs.

I’m not kidding. I will own one some day.

The Frisbee dog team was fun, although it took no time at all for me to get burnt out on hearing, “Who Let the Dogs Out.” I suppose it was inevitable that it would get played. I so hate that song.

There was also a pretty interesting police dog demonstration, in which we watched a German shepherd from Slovenia try to remove the arm of a volunteer. It was awesome.

And finally, there was the OK Humane mascot competition. While I was rooting strongly for a fellow volunteer’s pit bull to win (she did make it to the final round, however), the honor went to a cute, scruffy little terrier mix:

It was a good day. Fun was had by all.

So it’s been nearly a month since I began my lettuce-and-tomato-growing experiment. And so far, it’s going pretty well. After making it through a rough patch with the tomatoes, in which several of their lower leaves began turning yellow, I think we’re in the clear. Everything is still alive and relatively healthy-looking.

I have learned a few lessons, though. Thanks to last week’s episode of You Bet Your Garden, I discovered that I probably “rushed the season” a bit with the tomatoes. I thought they would be okay outdoors once there was no more danger of nighttime frost, but apparently they’re tropical plants and don’t take kindly to nighttime temperatures lower than 50, either. I also learned that when I planted my tomatoes, I should’ve put crushed-up eggshells in the planting holes for extra calcium, and I should’ve buried more of the plant’s stem. (Did you know that you can bury about two-thirds of a tomato stem, and it’ll grow roots all the way up?)

I also learned that most real gardeners were planting their last crop of lettuce and spinach in April. So I probably waited a bit too long to get started with those.

It’s a learning process. I won’t make those mistakes next year.

But even despite my clumsy, novice attempts, my lettuce and tomatoes are still alive and relatively healthy-looking. It’s amazing to see how much the lettuce, in particular, has grown. Although it’s weirdly colorless – the Romaine lacks that deep green I associate with Romaine, and the red leaf isn’t quite red – I still love to look at how full and lush my little baby lettuce plants are becoming. Here they are at the beginning of April:

And here’s how they look now:

The tomatoes, although they haven’t grown quite as dramatically as the lettuce, are no less exciting to watch. About a week and a half ago, they started producing little yellow flowers, and a few of the plants have grown tall enough for me to stake. I’ve added a couple of little basil plants to the pots, since I read that tomatoes and basil often grow very well together. (To say nothing of how good they taste together – look! I’m growing my own bruschetta toppings!)

Best of all, though, is the discovery I made last night while inspecting my “crop”:

Omigod! Omigod! Omigod! It’s a baby tomato! My first tomato! Isn’t it precious?

We at Two-Headed Blog recently learned of a South Korean cloning experiment gone horribly adorable – seven yellow Labrador retrievers, all poised to become The World’s Best Drug-Sniffing Dogs. This got us thinking…

If you had the means to clone your favorite pet, would you?

I find I blog the most when I’m strenuously avoiding the things I should be doing. If a career could be made out of procrastination, I’d move up that corporate ladder so damn fast…