Almost two years after first admitting I watch it, I was pleased by the season premiere of PBS' History Detectives earlier this week. I only yelled at the TV once for one of the researchers not wearing gloves when touching old paper.

I found last week's House, MD rerun (ep. #1.5, "Damned If You Do") more satisfying than this week's (ep. #1.11, "Detox"), though it was funny-weird to recognize the actress playing the patient's girlfriend as the dead girl from Veronica Mars. Heh.

Last night's episode of American Masters was Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice; I watched it alone since Vogon got too much of a gospel vibe off them for his taste. It's too bad I couldn't tape it because I know Laurel likes Sweet Honey too (Still The Same Me was the first album I bought for her) but we still thought of her -- at the point in "Nature Song" when Aisha wails, Vogon thought Laurel was crying and came out of the study.

...

While digging up the post referenced at the beginning of this post (I was approaching it while tagging old posts), I decided to replace the pseudonyms for the base clinic staff in my summer 2003 hormonal hokey-pokey posts with their real names. The pseudonyms were mediocre from their inception, but it's unlikely they could threaten me with legal action now (Himself's ETS date was 5 October 2003, no IRR) and if they do find the posts, they can leave comments in rebuttal. I also made a user picture (right) that pays homage to when I finally got a Pap smear after three months of anovulatory DUB and my primary care manager literally couldn't find my cervix with both hands and a flashlight. It's hilarious in retrospect.

...

Semagic started supporting tags with version 1.5.1.5, but it doesn't offer the capability of downloading a list of user-defined tags from the server like it does with user pictures or Friends. I'm looking forward to that. Version 1.5.1.9 was released a few days ago, so I'll be installing that shortly.

...

Gardening has been interesting this week:

• On Tuesday night we found a half-dozen large (as big around as a pencil and a bit over 1" long) caterpillars had taken up residence in our hanging pot of lemon thyme and were busily stripping the leaves off the poor thing, so I picked them off the plant into a plastic cup and sprayed them and the plant with pyrethrine spray. I found one more caterpillar on Wednesday, but I think we've beaten them back for now.


• Some of our cabernet grapes are starting to turn purple, although the grapes in general are much sparser than they were at the beginning of the month. Vogon thinks they need to be repotted, so we'll see to that this weekend. I'd prefer to wait until they're done producing fruit for the season, but they look like they're getting rootbound and the one plant I tentatively moved to a slightly larger pot (a six-inch diameter pot from a four-inch) appears to be doing better than the other two plants.


• When I was watering the plants on Wednesday, I sprayed the patio floor to clear some dropped leaves and a little Hispanic girl ran into the grass below and stared at me. I waved and said hi, but she ran off. I'm not sure where she lives, but I'd guess she ran over from one of the adjacent apartments not facing on the grass our patio does or is one of the kids that like to play in the shrubbery alongside the buildings.