Interesting. I did not have a clue how he - [the Quadradactyl] actually traveled. By the way, I found your "quadremail" (email with quad imagery in it) to be very artistic. I looked at it more closely and cropped out the right side of the image to fully capture the surreal feeling of the piece. It reminds me of some (famous) artist's work, but I can't recall whose. Is it Dali? Who knows? Maybe you know. Anyway, that creature rocks -- or should I say "swing-drops!"

Abe replies -

Here are a couple of Dalis - interestingly, they are titled "Disintegration of Persistence" and "Persistence," which word of course reminds us of our interest in this approach to life discussed about a month back when you were in Safeway / Fred Meyer / Convergys mode.

I'm not sure Dali is our man but if there ever was an artist of the surreal, Salvador was it. Thanks for the artistic attribution.

Late Breaking! Quady update! I hurled little Quady onto the living room wall at 4:48 pm yesterday and am tracking his progress. A full 23 hours later (that would be now) he is still on the wall, having traversed roughly 58" (as the crow flies or should I say as the quad clicks?). I was motivated to do this because a while back I launched him against the same wall and watched for about a minute and he appeared to be quite stuck and was not moving. But maybe an hour later I happened to look again and my brain said "he looks different" but was not sure in what way. Maybe four hours later I looked again and it was clear that he had definitely moved as his position on the wall was definitely lower than what it was at the start. So ... Quady's velocity is a function of the surface he happens to have been hurled at. Glass velocity is about 1 yard / minute. My living room wall velocity is about 2 yards / day. A quick calculation :

there are 5280 feet in a mile
there are 1760 yards in a mile
there are 1 / 1760 miles in a yard
2 yards = 2 / 1760 miles
2 yards / day = 2 / 1760 / 24 miles / hour = .0000473 mph

Just in case you need to know. Oh, here's the latest Quady siting :

The following is included because it's awesome prose and definitely belongs in the blog archives as soon as you've got a few pictures to go with it. Your plant wisdom (and Spanish) are EXCELLENTE to the MAX.

Paul continues -

Ps. Just a brief(?) note about the community garden plot #9. I have suck-seeded in replacing all cold-damaged plants with newly grown seedlings which seem to be doing very well now. During the same planting of these new plants, I literally replaced 100% of the soil with a store-bought "Outdoor Planting Mix" which is much lighter and has a good amount of sand, compost, sphagnum peat, and other organic soil matter in it. I REPLACED the La Rue 1116 Atlantic seedling in the center of the garden as well (even though it was doing "semi-ok") I replaced it with THE ONE AND ONLY EL GRANDE E. SHAW 1181 pounder which in its seedling pot was doing EL EXCELLENTE! (Scared yet?) I also gave it some special treatment by adding a lot of horse shit (literally) and 78.6% decomposed leaf matter all around the plant as a "dressing." Water was added and this thing is about ready to LAUNCH itself into the wide open blue. We may need to make a call to the International space station to have them get set up for some significant aerial orange dot photography on orbit number 111,739,558.4 (a fall projection).

The bad news is that Rosie is struggling a bit. I think she has anorexia pumpinosa, a rare and unfortunate disease of the leaf and stem system -- in other words, pretty much the whole plant! I am thinking it may be caused by a partial sub-soil-surface stem break which is causing less nutrients to flow up the Xylum (now I am really showing off). Anyway, she seems healthy other than that.

The other piece of not so good news is that Sally's Glorietta (a temporary name) suffered a broken stem on transport TO the garden about 4 days ago. I have spent as many days acclimating a 2nd backup seedling with cool night temps so this does not happen again. After Sally's seedling gets planted I will officially be able to say everything is IN the ground and on its way.

I have also planted additional blue morning glories at the base of my fence AND 3 new sunflowers (from seeds purchased out here). They are all doing well.

I kind of splurged the other day and bought a whiskey barrel! In it, I planted an ORIGINAL Max seedling from the 2005 package. I put the whiskey barrel on my patio (on a 1 foot by 1 foot rolling "dolly") to maximize on the needed sun. [Editor's note: Geez - this note is full of Dalis.]

I've taken pictures but have been a little busy lately. I'll send them soon.

Pacific P