After taking off last week from work, the garden is mostly planted. All that's left is broccoli and cauliflower, which I might just put off until next weekend. I transplanted my corn sprouts yesterday, then when I got home from work today an animal had dug up most of them : / I then sprayed some chemical rabbit/deer repellent around the beds, but I suspect it's actually a cat. There were some cat droppings in a pile of dirt, and I saw some footprints nearby. There are two skittish roaming cats that I see around every couple days. But what would a cat want with corn? Then again, Jibblin does eat corn on the cob. Whatever it was didn't destroy every single sprout, though, so hopefully the chemical can turn things around. If I had more motivation and was willing to spend more money, I'd get some sort of cage to protect them until they're big and strong.

I'll post a pic of my corn and lettuce sprouts soon (it's dark right now or I'd go photograph them).

Know what's fun? Take a clove of garlic, stick it in the ground pointy side up, and water. They grow super fast (mine are 6" tall after a week), and in a couple months I'll have heads of garlic instead of the cloves I planted. And they were just normal garlic from the grocery store. I'll post a pic of the garlic, too.

So I finally went back to the office today and worked on my manuscript. It was actually easy and quite fun- "writing" my discussion section consisted of cutting and pasting sections from my grant proposal and maybe writing a total of 4 or 5 sentences for transitions. I also fussed with my figures a bit. All that's left of my rough draft is an abstract, then I can take another couple days off until my advisor gets back from Maine to read it. I'm torn between feeling like a total slacker and being super proud of my accomplishments of getting the grant proposal and manuscript done. I don't know, it just seems too easy. I like this whole "do the work once, reap the rewards multiple times." And remember, if this gets published, it'll count as a thesis chapter!

Speaking of easy, Ryan stunned his SCUBA instructors by only getting 1 question wrong on his written test yesterday. Seems most of his class got 15-25 wrong. In fact, after one person answered the same (multiple choice) question wrong a couple times, the instructor said, "I'm going to leave the room for a minute. Why don't you ask Ryan about it." Ahh, it's good to be in the 99th percentile. Btw, Ryan and I aren't having kids unless I have a major change of mind. But wouldn't they be smart if we did?