Notes From Zone 4

The snow is retreating, I’m happy to report. The temps were in the mid-60s today, and it no longer sounds like it’s raining all the time with the snow dripping from the roof. Big blue skies today, contrasting with the still snow-covered ground and warm temps gave us spring fever in the worst way!

On the way home from lunch, we stopped by Brashears’ (my favorite local nursery) to put in an order for two six-packs of melanpodium, since my flat of them from seed has failed miserably. I wonder if I can find a picture from two years ago when I had them? Ah, here it is. They looked so pretty right next to the bridge like that. I didn’t know what they were called, and so I had a really hard time last year finding them again, and Brashears’ later told me that their crop had failed, which is why they didn’t have them. But hopefully this year, for sure. Too bad my crop failed too.

We could hear the creek running through the swamp all day today. Frank went out and took many pictures of his favorite view, standing on our balcony, looking out over the swamp. He pointed out that the huge stand of pine across the swamp is both beautiful and wood for our future barn and addition. Such is life.

The report from the seedlings in the basement is good today. I officially gave up on the tray of coleus seedlings, as nothing germinated in them at all. Last night I reused that same (now warmed to the perfect temperature) flat and planted the Cosmos in it. When I came down tonight to water the babies, those seeds had turned into inch and a half seedlings in less than 24 hours. Holy Cow! I’m going to give them one more day on the mat, and move them off tomorrow, I guess. I wonder when I should transplant them out of the plug tray and into six packs? I wonder if I should fertilize them now, or make them wait until I fertilized everyone on Friday? Precocious little buggers, they are.

Webalizer has been being it’s usual pain here at the vast Richards web empire. (Sorry too much news-speak this week). Besides all the usual failures to run with a terse “I won’t” left in the log, I’ve been getting the same statistics on all the sites, something that’s obviously wrong.

Well, I’ve got it set up with a different webalizer.conf file for every site, and I’m invoking it with the -c flag in cron.daily. Being lazy, I had the main site (www.therichards.org) using the default file in /etc.This used to work under Redhat 7. However it seems there was an update in Redhat 8, and webalizer now checks the default location before it checks the command line flags, so it will only use a conf file specified on the command line if there is no default file.

I admit, this is what the man page seemed to say, and I vaguely recalled that it used to say the -c flag overridesm but, but, but, this is bizarre. The custom of the command line overriding the defaults is both ancient and well respected. It makes sense, damn it. And changing a running program to violate a custom it used to follow? Weird.