Lost in Translation? Not anymore!

On two recent blog posts here, there are comments written in Chinese characters.

This one: http://vollmerdp.blogspot.com/2010/03/big-top-cupcake-love-it-or-loathe-it.html

And this one: http://vollmerdp.blogspot.com/2010/04/garden-season.html

The first one went up on March 14th, and I get the comments sent to my e-mail account. So there's all this Chinese in my inbox.

What do you THINK I'm going to do with it? Yep, sent the e-mail to the trash and didn't think anything else of it.

Until it happened again 2 days ago. This time I said, "Let me throw this into Google Translator and see what I get."

I put in the comment that I got in the Garden Season post and got this text in return:

"Simple act of spiritual joy to others, prayer is better than thousand bow"

Awww....how sweet. Next to the comment is a bunch of ellipsis with a link. Like a moron, I clicked the link.

Go ahead, click the link. I dare you! Get the kids out of the room first, please!

The second set of text? The one on the Big Top Cupcake post? Well, I'm not putting that translation here. You may go check it out yourself, just go from Chinese to English on the Google Translator.

I'd like to remove the comment, but not before my billions (cough!) of faithful readers get a chance to copy/paste it into the translator and get a smile. Once again, get the kids out of the room!

Garden Season!

Hooray! The weather has finally warmed up well here, and the birds have returned! The grass is returning to a lovely green color, and the kids would rather be outside playing then cooped up in the house.

With the warmer weather comes one of my favorite things, starting our family's garden! It's been very exciting to see what perennials are returning...about a month ago, the snow pack had melted (after about 90 days!) near my herb garden and it was great to see the parsley, chives, sage, oregano and thyme all returning for us. The hops are coming in with incredible enthusiasm, and just yesterday I saw the first peek of rhubarb!

From 2010 04 Garden

From 2010 04 Garden

From 2010 04 Garden

Chives, Parsley and Hops all returning!

So I have quite a challenge being such a gardening enthusiast having to move her family every 2-3 years: it seems that as soon as something gets well-established, it's time to move on. In Florida and North Carolina, it was so difficult to say goodbye to gardens that were in their peak productivity in the month of July. Dave and I have made efforts in each-and-every home we've had to grow our own flowers and veggies. In fact, I even wrote a letter to Organic Gardening Magazine in 2006 about it after reading about Hanscom AFB's successful community garden.

Here's the article that spawned the letter.

It was like a breath of fresh air, since typically OG magazine leans towards more, shall we say, liberal topics. So I wrote a letter to the magazine expressing such (click on the image to zoom in):



Anyway, this past weekend we planted our lettuce and cabbage, and sweet onion sets are waiting to go into the ground. I have tomato plants ready for my upside-down planters, which I buy from this company here so I can just purchase the refill sets every year. They did a wonderful job last year...they took a hit during our 16-day vacation, so hopefully I'll manage its care better this year.

It was fun hanging out at Lowe's with Timmy last week to pick up some gardening supplies. I noticed that Ferry & Morse has quite the marketing campaign going...they've attached so many of the kids' favorite characters to gardening:

From 2010 04 Garden

From 2010 04 Garden

From 2010 04 Garden

From 2010 04 Garden

From 2010 04 Garden

I get a bit camera happy when I see great-looking veggies and flowers, so I'm sure you'll see more photos soon!