Megabus: Like a Cruise Ship on Land

September 17, 2018

...ak. I didn’t test the WiFi, preferring instead to use my 8 1/2 hour travel time tackling Matthew Crawford’s anti-Kant rant, The World Outside Your Head (review forthcoming). The bathroom was clean and as pleasant as any bus bathroom can aspire to. The bus was near capacity but I was able to claim a row for myself. I suspect there would be more room on a weekday. Note that there is no overhead storage so you have to check your baggage. The LA to SF...

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An Awareness of What is Missing

Mr. Homegrown

June 18, 2015

Thoughtstylings

17 Comments

...rms. So what can we do? Perhaps it’s futile, but I thought I’d devote some time in the next few weeks to developing skills that run counter to the prevailing technological winds. I’m hoping to, as George Clinton put it, “Free my mind so my ass will follow.” At the very least I’d like to enhance my own skills in these areas, but I’d also like to develop some classes or gatherings around these topics. And I’m hoping to reduce screen time. The beginn...

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Admitting Gardening Mistakes

Mr. Homegrown

August 17, 2015

Garden Design, Gardening

15 Comments

...hatever is incorrect in the current situation will likely show up again in the execution of the new project. Gardening requires a ruthlessness and lack of attachment that I often don’t have the stomach for. Sometimes you have to embrace creative destruction and curse that fig tree (or, in our case, curse the diseased and unproductive Nectaplum tree; the fig is doing just fine). Time to get started . . ....

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Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

Mr. Homegrown

August 18, 2015

Garden Design, Gardening

2 Comments

...leasure. I think I’ve spent too much time in the installing and not enough time contemplating the placing. In so doing gardening has become more of a chore than a pleasure. Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. I take this to mean that a garden should express moods and ideas and not be just a collection of plants or a collection of objects set amidst plants. Finlay’s garden is a poem. While it has a lot...

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Our new front yard, part 2: theory

Mrs. Homegrown

November 13, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

12 Comments

...hy we continue to try to get away with it. So I don’t know about this one. Time will tell. For now, I’m praying we’ll get the new plants’ root systems established before the heavy rains hit. The primal landscape? Elephants on the Serengeti (Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons) The concept of legibility One term used by Rainer and West in Planting in a Post-Wild World that I really glommed onto was “legibility.” Landscapes have to be legible to...

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