Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
What a beautiful Sunday. Starting to truly feel like spring in Northern Nevada. Didn’t do much journalistic journalism, but I did some Brian-y stuff outside. More preparing for what I hope to be the real season than anything.
Started out in the hoophouse with three sprinkler buckets—too soon to hook up the hose to the sprinkler system, but man, I’m tempted. I can’t believe it’s April 10, and I’ve got spinach, onions, lettuce, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, garlic, Swiss chard growing like it’s the middle of June. The Hoophouse of Gibraltar stood up to all the winter winds.
It was only a moment later we were picking spinach for my friend’s omelet—second ham and cheese and fresh-grown spinach omelets of the year. A guy’s got to count himself lucky when he gets slapped in the face with the bounty of the earth.
Later, I dug around the yard’s irrigation system’s backflow preventer. I foolishly forgot to turn off the system’s main valve in November, and of course, where the brass fitting meets the plastic PVC, freezing water broke the piping. That’s all right, it’s probably 10 minutes work when I get around to replacing the pipe before it’s time to start watering the lawn. If that’s the most of my problems, I’m going to be OK.
Then, because Hunter seemed to have too much time on his hands, I made him stand against a particular wall in the bathroom and drew a line. My 13-year-old is now 68.25 inches tall. That would be 5-feet-8-and-a-quarter inches.
With that in mind, I used his long reach to help me repair the “lid” to my propane patio warmer. The lid didn’t handle the winter winds well, but it should now. We’ll see. I might not even have to heat it up again until fall. I hope not, but I’m pretty realistic with regard to springtime in Nevada.
To cap things off, we had pulled-pork sandwiches on the deck for dinner. It’s our habit to eat outside whenever the season allows, and this was our first for 2011.