Why I Oughta...

2025 has come to a close here on the blog with this non-gardening post being the 366th post.  I seem to have over-posted in June (31 posts), but otherwise have hit my annual goal of posting everyday for the year.  Never-the-less, That means that 2025 is not a Gold Star blogging year, but still got the job done. Last year, I put up 367 posts (Leap Year)  - another non-Gold-star year due to duplicate date posts. This is the 11th straight year of 365+ posts and the 21st year of blogging on my own domain.    I broke the streak in 2013, but there were 3 other years (2010, 2011, 2012) that I went the distance before taking off to write on a political blog for that year.   At 11 (2014 --> 2025) years, that makes it 4000+ straight days of flexing this writing muscle.  Pretty, pretty, pretty good.   Of course, the bulk of the posts were focused in my [garden diary] and I once-again failed at trying to distribute the content beyond being indexe...

I'm not exactly sure WHY I started to try to learn how to solve - after all these years - a Rubik's Cube, but over the past three-plus weeks, I've been working on scrambling and solving whenever I'm sitting on the couch and have a little time to waste.  Thanks to YouTube - and the fact that you can slow videos down playback speed-wise - I have gotten pretty good at solving a lot of the cube by memory.  I still don't have the last few steps memorized, but I'm continuing to work on it. The video that I used was this one that features WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez showing the steps he learned.   What solves and algorithms do I have down? Bottom white face.  Done. Bottom two rows.  Done. Yellow top face.  Done. What algorithms don't I have committed to memory (just yet)? Setting the corners.  Sometimes this just happens naturally, so I skip it.   And doing the final solve.

Back on May 7th of this year, I shared a couple of photos and talked about my initial excitement of giving the art of bonsai a shot with a piece of nursery stock that I picked up at Home Depot for $10 .  It is a Cypress Hinoki and had one large(ish) trunk that seemed to have decent trunk taper, very little reverse taper and priced so cheaply that if I killed the poor thing, I wouldn't be that upset. In that initial post, I talked about how I was following some of the Mirai Bonsai Basics video directions and started with the roots and trunk.  More recently, I moved on to the next few steps and began to try to prune the Cypress into a bonsai of sorts. I know that every article you read talks about how you aren't supposed to prune more than 30% of the tree at any one time and that pruning an evergreen like this Cypress is best done in the late fall when it the tree is heading to dormancy.  But, I couldn't, umm, help myself.  I dove right in. I began by prun...