Yeah yeah, Happy Valentine’s Day, etc. etc. WE BOUGHT OUR SEEDS.

I spent Saturday morning making a schedule for the garden, which mostly entailed looking up each of the herbs and vegetables we want to plant this year, and making a spreadsheet of which ones need to be started indoors (and when), which ones can be sown outside (and when), and so on. Hot peppers, it turns out, need to be started the earliest, 8-10 weeks before the last frost (which for us is ~April 11). That means, according to my calculations, the time to start them is RIGHT NOW OMG (Jan 31-Feb 14).

So Andy and I found ourselves a few hours later at this delightful store in downtown Kansas City called Planters Seed & Spice Co. And we bought alllllll the seed packets.

Behold.

Anyway, we’ll need to clear off our wire shelves (which are currently in our garage full of junk), bring them in to a nice out-of-the-way spot, set up our grow lights, and plant a whole bunch of trays ASAP. That’ll be our fun project for the upcoming week!

I’d better keep this update short since I’ve got a hot date with Mr. Dr. Funk, so without further ado…

I’m reading:

The Price of Everything by Russ Roberts

I adore Russ, and am an avid listener of his podcast Econ Talk (look it up! Try it, you’ll like it, don’t be put off by the “econ” theme, it’s really about everything.) This book is written parable-style, in which Russ attempts to craft a story and sprinkle economics principles throughout. But one of his characters is a college economics professor, which feels like cheating… I wish he would’ve just written the book straight, no parable. Anyway, I’d skip this one, but definitely check out his other stuff.

We’re watching:

House of Cards season 1.

Better late than never, eh? Minus the ever-cringy “journalist sleeping with a source” narrative that all journalists love to hate, this show really holds up. Definitely recommend if you missed it the first time around.

I’m listening to:

Reply All

Yeah, fine, I’m the last person ever to start listening the podcast Reply All. I just listened to the episode about the FoxConn-Wisconsin fiasco (#132 – “Negative Mount Pleasant”), which was extra fun since I was in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newsroom in summer 2018 and heard a LOT about it in the background, and yet never really understood the full story. Meanwhile journalism-Twitter is all abuzz about their latest two episodes, in which they dive into drama that recently occurred at Bon Appetit. I can’t wait to listen.

New stories:

Two stories I wrote were published this week!

Colgate Computational Biologist Finds New Genetic Mechanism for Adaptation for Colgate University News

Species that went extinct in 2020 for Stacker

As well as three stories I edited!

Systemic Racism Affects Wildlife, Too: A Q&A With an Urban Ecologist by Leah Shaffer for Discover

How One Scientist Is Giving Old Phones a Second Life With E-Waste Microfactories by Allison Whitten for Discover

Read a Science Book, Learn Something New: Check Out 'Mind Thief,' 'Beloved Beasts' and 'A Thousand Ways Denied' by Alex Orlando for Discover

How freelancing’s going:

It’s AWESOME. I love it so much. I have many projects and assignments and leads for new projects and assignments on the horizon, including a big editing gig for a Very Big Organization that I am very very very excited about. I’m still looking for more, so if you have any ideas, or need a writer or editor or anything else you think I might like, let me know!

Last week I spent 4 days at the AAAS annual meeting, and was pretty much too excited about all the other things I could be doing to really get much out of it. I did, however, reconnect with a bunch of writer/scicomm friends, so that was lovely.

But Valentine’s Day?:

OK, yes, we’re celebrating… including EATING THIS EPIC HALF-CAKE. It’s this awesome recipe from Life, Love, and Sugar that I made for Andy’s birthday in June, except I thirded the recipe. (The full recipe makes SO. MUCH. CAKE. and it’s so rich you can only eat a teeny piece at a time… and that’s coming from me, the Frosting Monster.) Anyway, I just made just one cake layer instead of three, and cut it in half to make the two-layer half-cake. I am quite pleased with it.

Alright, folks, that’s all for this week.

Stay well, please, and see you next weekend!

XO

Anna

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