Wavy Sphynx

Saturday my bf and I went out to admire our tomatoes. I'm not always there, so I am lucky to get to see them once a week. He's not always there, either, and his mom is the one who normally turns on the soaker hose for a while each day.

While looking at the tomatoes in the raised beds, we were noticing the plant that has always looked a little drier than the others, with the leaves a bit curled up and almost crispy looking, had some rather yellow small tomatoes on it This led to some debate because we had some little tags in there telling us which plant was which, but they are now buried beneath a bunch of straw and tomato leaves, so we don't really know how big the tomatoes should be or what color they will ultimately be.

While examining this plant, we noticed it also had a few even smaller green tomatoes that looked half eaten. My eyes followed a trail of them up and...my heart stopped and I just froze. There was a big-ass, huge, gigantic caterpillar munching on the next tomato up. My heart started beating super fast and my mind was racing...were there more of them? Are there a hundred of them all over the plant and they just blend in and we didn't notice? We brushed by a branch on the side of the bed, was there one on there? IS IT ON ME NOW??? Am I about to bump into another one? The thing was HUGE.

My bf was facing me and mostly away from the plant, so he didn't see what I was looking at, only my reaction as I grabbed his shoulders to use him as a sort of human shield. "What? What is it?" he said. I made a little motion with my head in the direction of the 4+ inch caterpillar and at first he didn't see it, but he was looking for a big bug or something and not a green caterpillar. That's because it's the same reaction he would have had if it'd been a big bug or a spider. When he saw it, he started laughing at me. I guess that's for all the times he's seen an itsy bitsy spider and panicked and I laughed at him.

We didn't see any more of these things, and we weren't sure what to do other than go around the tomato bed the OTHER direction on the way back to the house so we didn't brush into that one low outstretched branch JUST IN CASE.

I was saying we should find a big jar and put it in there with the branch it was on and the tomatoes it had been eating and then give it to one of his customers who had said to us once if we ever found a caterpillar in our garden, please save it in a jar for her along with some of whatever we find it eating. I think my bf wanted to cut off the branch and throw it into the neighbors yard (like they're not going to know where the big tomato branch came from when our tomatoes stick up about 7-8 feet in the air!) but he was amenable to saving it for his customer if we could figure out what to put it in.

We made dinner, which was sort of a practice for Thanksgiving. Last year I made a whole vegetarian dinner for his family on T-day and I was amazed that he let me do that, but it was a rather over-ambitious menu that included a fake turkey that wasn't very tasty and was still cold in the middle when we served, and this time we want to make sure things are both simpler and tastier, so I was previewing this loaf thing that is filled with soysage stuffing that they sell at Whole Foods for him, with some Punk Rock Chickpea Gravy from Vegan With A Vengeance while he made mashed potatoes for the first time ever I think with no butter or even Earth Balance in them.

His mom wandered in so we used her as our Thanksgiving guinea pig offered her some dinner and then were telling her about the HUGE GINORMOUS caterpillar on the tomatoes. She kind of shivered. She said she doesn't want to water the tomatoes for us any more. She thought we should kill it (she also wanted to kill the first ladybug we ever saw in the garden.) Then she wanted to see it. So, it was dark by this time but we went out with a flashlight, a scissors and a bucket. My bf had the scissors and the bucket and his mom had the flashlight. I had a glass of wine and was trying to keep far away from the plant, but my bf needed someone to hold the bucket.

Sooo...I took the flashlight from my bf's mom so she could hold the bucket for him. She didn't want to hold the bucket, so she tried to take the flashlight back from me. That was quite futile because I have a very strong grip and she is rather small and frail and sick. I know, I know...I should have been "nice" and let her have the flashlight but heck, she was the one who wanted to go out in the dark and poke around looking for the darn thing anyway! I didn't even want to go back outside, and I for sure didn't sign up to hold the bucket!

The branch got cut, went into the bucket, and another tomato that had been gnawed on already went in there. Then we took it inside and looked at it in the kitchen light. It is actually quite pretty for a big scary squishy thing with a horn on it and a giant face/mouth aperture that gnaws on our tomatoes. We put a thin flour sack towel over the bucket and fastened it on tightly!

My bf was convinced this thing must have arrived in the vermiculture that contained the earthworms we added to our garden a few months ago. That was a disconcerting thought...what exactly did we have shipped to us....and what state did it come from exactly??? Later when I was home, I thought I would try to look this creature up in "Peterson Field Guides Western Butterflies". That book doesn't show caterpillars for all of its butterflies, however, and it doesn't show any moths.

Finally I remembered that I live in the 21st century and I went to my computer and googled "caterpillar identification" and found a site that helped me figure out that this is probably a Wavy Sphynx, which will turn into a Sphynx moth and they don't normally eat tomato plants, they like the leaves from a few different trees and they like lilac bushes. So, just in case there are any more there, I ordered my bf a lilac bush. Next time, if he finds one on the tomato plants he can just throw the big, giant, creepy, squishy green monster thingy on the lilac.

Therebucks: what the heck?

I was just wondering if my Twitter page comes up in a search of Google or not so I checked it out. What I found was this article. At first I didn't even remember it, but after reading the whole thing, which tells people to visit the tbux website to buy discounted ThereBucks I realized that at the top it says "Idea for article by Jinx_tv".

What???

The "article" is from 2004, and I do seem to remember giving some eager young There reporter the idea to write something about where to get Therebucks. Who knew a few years later I'd be off selling tbux on my own and the article would still be up and directing people somewhere using MY NAME? Yeesh!

I did finally find my twitter URL. On page five.

Tomato Crazy

We finally got the first tomato out of our garden. Let's see, I guess we officially picked it on the 1st, so our first tomato wasn't until September! Next year we plan to get them in the ground before June, although of course we are also handicapped by the fact that the plants don't get full sun...there are trees and houses and fences and stuff that block them from getting as long a day of sun as they might want to ripen some tomatoes.

Of course my goal was to get the tomatoes up higher than the houses...since it's the leaves that need the sun and not the tomato fruits, I figured that would work great. My bf didn't quite see things the same way, though...he basically nixed the idea of putting up a second level to our cages, which would give them support up to ten feet into the air. Drat! Next year, I don't think he'll have a choice, though...it's not like they stop growing just because you don't provide a support.

We asked my bf's mom to stand by the tomato plants with the first tomato in her hand. I'm not sure what she's doing, trying to make it look like the tomato is still on the vine maybe? That first tomato actually came from one of the self watering planters, not the raised bed! We didn't want to try to tell her to do something else, though, since the real reason we wanted her to stand beside the tomatoes is she's so short we figured she'd make them look really tall. I don't know if it really worked, though. Next time maybe I'll get on the ground and take a picture of them reaching up towards the sky...that ought to do the trick.

In appreciation for her watering the tomatoes faithfully every day, we gave my bf's mom that first tomato. I think she was pretty happy about that, because she'd been going on and on about how some of them seemed ripe to her and I think she really wanted one. Did she eat it though? No! She stuck it in the refrigerator to chill it and then eat it later.

WHO REFRIGERATES A VINE RIPENED, JUICY, BEAUTIFUL, PERFECT TOMATO THAT IS READY TO EAT?????

Okay, my bf's mom, that's who. I kinda wish we'd eaten the first one now, since *ARGH* refrigerating a tomato causes it to lose flavor and develop a mealy texture.

Speaking of moms...we were going to FedEx my mom a few carrots from the garden, but we're running a bit low now and my bf gave a few big 'uns to his gardener's eight year old son the other day...I guess the boy was really impressed to see these huge carrots get pulled up out of the ground. Probably more impressed than my mom, who wouldn't actually be there to see them come up out of the ground anyway, but we are definitely looking forward to planting some more for our "winter garden" since we just attended a lecture on winter gardening in this area last week. Maybe we'll send my mom some "winter garden carrots".

Winter garden for us = fava beans...lettuce...garlic...onions...and carrots!

 

Yes, in case you didn't catch that before, I said my bf's gardener. His mom waters our tomatoes and he has a gardener come take care of his yard. When I described the raised beds I thought we should use in his yard, he had me take pictures of the plans and then printed them out for his gardener, and had his gardener build them and get the soil and compost for them. That's pretty funny if you ask me.

Monday holidays and white table wine

I'm not the biggest fan of holidays, generally. You will never find me wearing a sweater with a christmas tree knitted or appliqued onto it, with one of those plastic santa claus pins with the nose that lights up, with an elf hat on my head and a dish of red, green and silver hershey's kisses on my desk. You are not likely to find me waving a flag at a parade on July 4th. You are also not likely to find me coloring eggs in the spring. You MIGHT find me at a New Year's Eve party or cooking a big dinner in November or wearing a costume in October. Maybe.

And then there are the Monday holidays. I swear they were put there on the calendar just to annoy me. Rarely have I ever had a job where I got the day off, or if I did I probably wasn't getting paid for it. Or maybe everyone at work but me got that day off. I think those holidays just exist so that I can show up at the bank and find out it's closed, then open my mailbox to find it empty while whatever I'm expecting from UPS or FedEx is delayed by a day...AND shows up later the next day, since the extra day seems to get them a bit backed up on packages. It means the gym may be closed or close early, and restaurants are either closed or much busier than a normal Monday.

Still, I did enjoy my three day weekend this weekend!

I've been a bit handicapped wrt creating new models or working on any vMTV stuff because I got so fed up with Comcast I canceled my service with them and have been connecting to the Internet through my bf's Verizon Hi Speed Wireless card...which is pretty good although not as fast as Comcast (WHEN AND IF Comcast is actually working, because they suck and I have found their service extremely unreliable - but hey, who wants to watch the Olympics or maybe go online to earn a living anyway?) and the card does sometimes come disconnected in the middle of the night, forcing me to do my ThereBucks sales remotely while I sleep just in case. The thing is, I can only connect one laptop to the wireless card which leaves my two desktops unconnected right now, and it's pretty difficult to do anything developer-wise on them without the connection. I've toyed with the idea of trying to connect with my desktops to the Internet THROUGH the tablet pc, but I think I'll just have to suck it up and get satellite Internet ASAP.

The good news there is that when I first moved into my building 3 1/2 years ago, we weren't allowed to have a satellite dish on our balcony, and now there are FIVE of them on my side of the building (I don't think the other side of the building gets the necessary southern exposure, poor bastards.

Okay, this is getting really long and I haven't even gushed about my weekend yet!

Sunday my bf picked me up in the morning and we went to the Santana Row farmer's market. I thought it would be bigger but it was cool, we got some peaches and olive oil and walnut bread and fresh figs. Oh, and heirloom tomatoes! And one guy had the first pomegranate juice of the season but it was pasteurized so we didn't get any...he said during the peak of the season just let him know and he keeps some unpasteurized stuff in an ice chest behind the counter for regular customers that promise not to sue him for I dunno...if their juice ferments or something (he makes it sound like fermentation is a bad thing!) After that we went to a wine bar there that was pretty good and they were sort of advertising the movie "Bottle Shock", which it turns out was playing right at the theater in Santana Row, so we decided to see it, but first we did a little shopping (although all we bought was some chocolate and some $12 a tube lip balm) and we had lunch at some asian restaurant that I don't know the name of. The service was a bit off but most of the food was pretty darn good. We had cocktails and both got headaches later...probably should have brought our own bottle of wine instead, like maybe a bottle of the Luchador Shiraz we liked.

The movie was okay, not great but it was entertaining and I would recommend it to anyone interested in California wines/wine history. Actually, I enjoyed it more than Sideways. I mean, at least it's based on a true story.

So Monday morning...it was SO GREAT that it was a holiday. Not because of MY schedule, I'm basically always working and yet almost never working at the same time, as paradoxical as that may sound. No, it was because my bf didn't have to be anywhere. So we lounged around until we decided we wanted to have peaches for breakfast. Well, that was my bf's healthful suggestion which I somehow morphed into "let's mix some orange juice and peaches together in the blender and then add them to champagne", but we didn't have any champagne so my bf started digging through his wine stash for something white...there is always something white hanging around because we prefer red. He says "how about this White Table Wine from someplace in Napa" and I'm like "sure, whatever". So he opens the bottle and I'm like "should we try just the wine by itself first?" We both tried it and OMG...this white wine, served at room temperature, was sooooooo good. Like, the best white wine EVAR!!!

So we drank all our peach/orange/white table wine with some walnut baguette and took pictures of our garden, pulled a few carrots and picked our very first tomato. I'll tell you about that tomorrow or something because my bf has to send me the pictures first. While doing all this we decided "let's go to Napa RIGHT NOW and get some more of this white table wine!" "Right now" is a little relative though, because first my bf has to do soooooo much stuff like shave and spend an hour styling his hair.

That gave me time to check my business transactions, look up the winery that has this amazing wine and have a conversation with my bf's mom about how her nurse speaks very good spanish but english is much harder to learn because you have words like "glasses" which could mean drinking glasses or eye glasses but it's confusing that the one word can mean two things. I don't think she was really listening when I pointed out that they are both made of the material "glass", but one is for "drinking" and one is for your "eyes" and the proper thing to say would be "eyeglasses" and "drinking glasses" and that means you really just need to learn three words and then you can put them together and you know at least five words...and she already knows drink and eyes. The reason I don't think she was listening is because we've actually had the same conversation before. What I was really hoping was that she'd bring up jesus christ or church or something because I recently got the book "What the Bible Says about Healthy Living" and I wanted to quote her some juicy bible passages. Oh well, I don't have them memorized yet anyway.

Anyway, back to the winery...I looked up the Van Der Heyden Vinyards website and one page listing wines available didn't show the white table wine, but an ordering page DID show it, so I gave my bf the phone number and he called and asked them if they were open and they were, so we drove to Napa! I wondered if maybe we should have asked if that wine was still available, but my bf preferred to simply go look.

He said "we're lucky we can just drive to Napa and visit a few wineries any time."

I said "yes, somos afortunados!"

Well, actually I said something more like "nosotros suertemos", but now I know that was wrong.

So anyway, we got to the winery and we walk in and the guy is like "I hope you're not here for the white table wine because we've been sold out for a month and a half." Then he relented and let us know there were exactly two magnums left of the object of our affections. My bf said we'd take one but I bruised his ribs with my elbow until he said we'd take two. We'll probably serve them for Thanksgiving or xmas, so whomever is with us on that day will be muy afortunado! The winery has some other great wines as well...we had a fabulous, fabulous amazing dessert wine that I can't remember the name of but it was $125 for a small bottle so we didn't get any :( The guy, who not only works in the tasting room of Van Der Heyden but also cuts meat at Safeway, said he was giving us a taste of it because the owner was out cleaning some vats or something so he could get away with tasting us on it without charging us $10. I think he really just did it because he thought "here are two people that will probably spend $125 on a bottle of wine." Nice try, dude.

So then we went to some other winery that wasn't as good, then to a great coffee shop right in the center of Napa that appears to supply all the coffee blends for all the best Napa restaurants, and then to "Tuscany", the restaurant we reluctantly left on another occasion because we had reservations at Ubuntu. It was a bit of a challenge eating there this time...but I'll have to leave that for a Yelp review.

Oh...oh...and then we stopped at the outlet mall which was open late because IT WAS A HOLIDAY (so another reason Monday holidays are sometimes okay) and went shopping and I came home with some cute tank tops and a bunch of undergarments that my adorable bf bought me. Thank goodness Napa is so much closer than the San Joaquin Valley, because by this time we'd had a very long day and it was just "gps take us home." Okay actually it was more like I programmed the gps and then my bf ignored everything it said to do.

Nut: the other dead meat

So, Tuesday was my birthday (woot!) and I told my bf that for my bday I wanted to go to the San Joaquin Valley, someplace I'd never been before.

The reason for this choice was almonds. See last year the California Almond Board decided that raw almonds should be pasteurized, BUT they don't need to be labeled as pasteurized. So you go to the store, pick up a package of raw California almonds (and more almonds come from California than anywhere else in the world) or maybe some raw almond butter or something like that and you think you're getting all these livings enzymes in a live, raw food, but because they don't have to LABEL these pasteurized almonds, you are unknowingly purchasing dead almonds instead.

So I found a farm in the San Joaquin Valley that lets you purchase raw almonds directly from them (but no shipping allowed, you have to come and get them) and we booked a B&B room right above a wine tasting room and made plans to follow the San Joaquin "Fruit Trail" and I was really looking forward to coming home with a car full of fruit and almonds.

This was not meant to be, because the almonds are still being harvested right now on that farm, so they aren't quite ready. Also, the "Fruit Trail" is kind of a joke...I'd say you're better off at the local farmer's market (although I did have an AMAZING peach from Sanger, CA. this morning) and the B&B was a little weird with the owner (who when we first met her launched into a tirade about how dumb organic farming and biodynamics are and how the guy with the grapes at the next vineyard over should spray his crops but he doesn't because he's a jerk and he doesn't care) seemingly poking around in our room while we were out to dinner. (She also seemed distressed that we were actually "hanging around" until the official checkout time of 11am, and after ascertaining that we are completely vegan and eat no meat, cheese, eggs or anything like that suggested we go to a pizza place or another restaurant that makes cheese ravioli.)

So that was my birthday. I'm not complaining, though. I got to take a road trip (woo hoo!) to someplace I've never been before AND spend over 30 continuous hours almost totally uninterrupted by phone calls, emails, or anything like that with my bf (okay, so we cheated a little, he checked work email a few times, I paid some sales transactions and sent a few emails myself...but for US we were amazingly unconnected.) Who cares where we go or what we do? Oh, and I did get a 25 pound bag of oranges, some fresh figs and some dried nectarines, and we finished off our trip at our favorite wine bar and then we even went and had a papusa.

I'm now going to be looking for raw almonds at farmer's markets or maybe with a group buy or "tree share" through localforage.com

Tomorrow maybe I'll tell you all about who can go to hell!

Happy/Sad - an informal poll

Okay, check out the sort of crappy picture I took above from the book "Building Mental Muscle" and please let me know, either in comments or by emailing me at jinx.tv@gmail.com which face looks happy to you and which looks sad. The pic is driving me crazy.

Thanks!

People who steal money in There.com

Y'know, I like a lot of things about IMVU. One of those things is the fact that they work WITH trusted IMVU credits resellers to catch scammers, which makes sense because if they steal from IMVU, they are likely to turn around and steal from members reselling their currency, and if they steal from members, they are likely to use their same credit cards/mommy's credit cards, ex-spouse's credit card or whatever on IMVU directly as well. So everyone works together to prevent fraud, and it usually works pretty well, although there are certainly some people in IMVU trying hard to create that fraud in the first place. I recover probably 70% of all scammed credits.

There.com is better in some ways because it's more of a sense of a close knit community, and scammers are somewhat more rare. I have had a number of occasions where I have had PayPal chargebacks and people have jumped through crazy hoops to fix the credit card problem or whatever it was to make sure everything was alright. One unfortunate young woman found herself in the situation of owing me 2 million ThereBucks and actually spent about two months paying me painstakingly raising the funds and paying me back ThereBuck by ThereBuck. You see someone who belongs to a bunch of clubs, owns a neighborhood, has a bunch of buddies and you think "this person must be alright!" and usually, they are.

This is fortunate because There has a total hands-off policy toward theft. You steal from me, you make a chargeback against me, and There could really give a rat's ass. Oh, they're happy if I want to let them know about someone that I think is trying to sell ME stolen Therebucks...they're happy to come in, take the stolen Therebucks out of my account and say "thanks so much!" But when the table is turned they're like "sorry, it's our policy to sit here with our thumbs up our asses." A policy which seems strange to me simply because it is sooooo different from IMVU's policy, and yet both places have the same roots. How did they turn out so differently?

So, it's usually not much of a problem at There, but lately I've seen a disturbing trend of chargebacks. Like in July, there were $140 worth of chargebacks from Matt_Tobin and Sarah_G. As far as I can tell, Sarah_G isn't even a real person, just an alt avie for Matt_Tobin, and Matt_Tobin doesn't receive WhereMail and uses a dummy address. So who IS this guy who stole $140 from me? Hasn't he been around since 2004? Doesn't he own a neighborhood? Doesn't he have a bunch of buddies and is an active, "respectable" member of the There community? And yet this person joined my club, Jinx_tv_tbux, and then made a series of purchases from me on July 8th at http://jinx.tv and then reversed the transactions only one day later, and EVERY attempt I have made at contact has failed.

Is this what our There community has come to? We can no longer trust even the most involved seeming members?

And...does anyone know how to reach this Matt_Tobin person and why they would do such a thing? (I even heard he did the same thing to tbux.com.)