Finally I am resisting temptation no longer. I did what I always knew I would do and opened up a Cafepress store. My first product: the Defend Lighthouse Point t-shirt!

Why “Defend Lighthouse Point”? Why the carefully rendered silhouette of an AK-47? It's partly a homage to a shirt that Adam Savage wore on Mythbusters that read “Defend Brooklyn”. It's partly a reference to tongue-in-cheek orders I gave my roommate when I was in California during our last hurricane. And partly a ha-ha-only-serious nod to the idea that maybe our little corner of suburbia is worth defending, dammit. Anyway, if you have to ask, it ain't for you!

Check this space for more exciting products allowing you too to “Live the Eiki Martinson Lifestyle”!

Tonight was the first dinner of our second Culinary Adventure Week. The theme: Google recipes! Simply type two ingredients into google, plus the word “recipe”, like so: “chicken bacon recipe”. Then hit the “I'm Feeling Lucky” button and cook whatever comes up! You really place your stomach in the hands of fate with this one—but so far with good results. Even unusual test cases like “italian sausage mussels recipe” came up looking tasty.

Sheraz wasn't home tonight, so we feasted on forbidden fruit: pork and tomatoes. Google came up with Pork Chops with Fresh Tomato, Onion, Garlic, and Feta, which worried us somewhat but turned out to be really very good.

My roommate Sheraz and I suffer from a certain indecision about what to eat; nothing seems good to us anymore, and this results in discussions of the “What do you want to eat? I dunno, what do YOU want to eat?” kind and in disastrous expeditions like today's, in which we drove around aimlessly for an hour looking for something that would hit the elusive "spot". I have no illusions; this is a mark of decadence, one more of the minor pyschological problems that comes of limitless opportunities and a complete lack of survival pressure. But to hell with that—we decided to solve our problem by turning it into an amusing adventure, applying our favorite tool for doing so: eccentric wagering.

Mr. Mark Miller, true friend, pipe-crawling engineer, vagabond musician, gentleman-scholar, got married this weekend to his girlfriend Nicole in a lovely ceremony followed by a crazy party and supported by three days of various other entertainments. Per request, I am providing here a copy of my toast:

I was woken one day by my father, who had been visiting my house. He asked me about my tomato crop. I am no gardener and went outside, mystified, to see what he was talking about. Sure enough, growing in a line on a patch of sandy dirt outside were 10 or so tomato plants, many with small green fruit already in evidence.

We stood around scratching our heads until one of us spotted the obvious. The long narrow barren patch in the middle of my lawn had been caused by our sewer pipe rebuild of a month or two previous, in which we replaced with PVC an ancient tar-paper pipe, ruined by tree roots and leaking torrents of sewage into the ground. We turned this fertile soil over with shovels in the course of digging out the pipe and refilling the ditch, and the current theory holds that this brought close to the surface tomato seeds planted there by the old method that fruits of all kinds evolved to exploit.

That's right! WE planted them, every time we ate tomatoes and flushed the remains. Although some members of my family have expressed uneasiness at the history of this harvest, I'm sure that they'll taste far better than the supermarket product, cruel suggestions of the flavorful terroir coming through notwithstanding.

UPDATE: April 7, 2006

Fruits are being harvested and indeed they do taste better than commercial ones, like a typical tomato but more. Apparently we "planted" no less than three varieties: cherry tomatoes, nice mid-size round ones, and some kind of lobed Ugly-Ripe looking tomato.

Unfortunately, maybe 10% of my produce has been lost to boring fruitworm. Infuriating! Lecture me all you want on Organic Gardening, you lose your harvest and you'll be just as ready as I am to gas em' all and let God sort em' out! For now I've settled for moving the plants to the backyard (away from the sewer pipe insect-incubator) and tying them up higher to a plastic fence which I've installed (also keeping out marauding possums).