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The rule-of-thumb is that tomato plants double in size every ten to fourteen days. With the sun, torrential rains and warm evenings we've had here in Brooklyn, plus my magic elixir of Miracle Gro, epson salts and fish emulsion, these plants made the mark.



This year, I'm growing mostly heirloom varieties with bizarre names like "Mortgage Lifter" and "Black Zebra". The grower I got them through wrote some appetizing prose about each variety but kinda missed on the specifics. For instance, I didn't know if I was planting any cherry tomatoes until the first fruit appeared and I deduced that "Sugar Nugget" must be a cherry tomato. Just in case, I planted a Sweet 100 cherry from the local nursery too.

I was chatting with a neighbor yesterday, consoling him for the lack of progress he complains he's made with his house. He discovered my blog last month and couldn't understand how I got so much done with my house, especially insofar as he's lived here almost as long as me.

He assumed it had to be my prior construction experience, my shop and the fact that I didn't have kids. All are true, especially the kids part. I've only got two dogs and I know how much free time they consume every day: an hour at the dog run in the morning, 45 minutes of miscellaneous walking, 20 minutes of feeding, an hour of play time at night. That's three hours out of the day where I could be hammering holes in the walls. Kids? Fuggedaboudit!

Still, he missed it. The #1 reason is because I telecommute. Total up how much time you spend every work day getting cleaned up and transporting your body X miles to your job -- in many cases only to sit in front of a terminal logged into the same server you could have accessed from home.

By now, I was supposed to have posted about the successful completion of my stained glass construction projects. Maybe because I was coming off that year-long second floor renovation I needed time to recharge before throwing myself into another marathon. Instead, I got obssessed with maintenance, humdrum projects and pontificating on the Old House Web forums.

First up: the garden, or more specifically my nine hybrid tomato plants. I've had diminishing returns from my 'maters the past couple of years. Last year, half the plants died shortly after flowering. So I decided to consult with the masters: the greybeard Italian gardeners in the neighborhood. They said that my soil was probably DOA and that nothing I could add to it now would fix that tomato bed. Just mix in some manure and let it steep for a year or two. So I put the tomatoes in planters this year.

Within two weeks I knew this was the way to go. With the rich, bagged topsoil the plants took off.

I'm not saying anything that battle-experienced home renovators don't know. Sometimes, the simplest little task can consume gobs of time and a bucket of money before you realize you made a tragic mistake. Not always, of course. That's how you get suckered into doing it over and over again.

It started as a simple idea: I wanted to have music in my back yard. I could have bought a boombox a/k/a ghetto blaster for a hundred bucks and kept it under the deck. Problem solved and, when all is said and done, that actually would have been a more flexible solution than the mission I set for myself. Even if I wanted XM Radio (which I did) they make XM blasters too. The bonus would have been that I could have had XM in my car as well.

Instead, I wanted the speakers fed by the big, honkin' Denon home theatre system in the living room. Why? I don't freakin' know. Probably because it was there.

My Denon has two independent amplifiers. This way I can listen to TV on the big speakers in the living room and XM in the dining room. Have I ever actually done it? No. Why would I want to? The rooms are right next to each other. It would be like listening to two different records at the same time. So why did I buy the Denon? I don't freakin' know. You see the pattern here.

Whatever, in order to run back yard speakers, I needed a multi-pair speaker selector. It had to have independent volume controls because, even though both speaker pairs are Polks, the exterior speakers are quite a bit smaller and have another 75 feet of speaker cable. Also, I need to be able to turn off those outside speakers so my neighbors don't dump garbage in my yard at midnight.

So I picked up a Niles SSVC-4 speaker selector ($319), a pair of Polk Atrium45 outdoor speakers ($149) and seventy-eight bucks worth of Monster cable. Total bill, with tax and shipping: $547.98. Kee-ryst!