Ok, I'm kinda proud of this.

So due to a lack of foresight on the Noise Temple's renovator's part, the light switch for my room is located on the opposite side of the room from the door. This has resulted in countless haphazard, toe-stubbing, blind journeys across the vast expanse of the room in the middle of the night.

So what does a reasonable person do? Why, build an elaborate (ok, not that elaborate) system of levers and pulleys allowing me to now control the incandescence of my bedroom from the entrance of the room, of course!

So it all starts at the inconveniently-placed light switch, with a taped-on clothespin for added leverage. Two strings allow the toggle to be pulled both up and down, independently.

Eye-hooks guide the strings up the wall, around the room, and over the fireplace/mantle, and then down to the hand-pulls.

Easy as that! Works like a charm.

And here's some oh-so-gorgeous hibiscus kombucha, carbonating itself to perfection. I sampled some while bottling it, and I have to say it was quite delicious.

Oh baby, things sure are cookin at the Noise Temple. You better get on down here and catch the fever.

Plants know what they're doing.

It would appear that the trick to a self-sustaining home container garden is to let your landlord install a sprinkler system, position your containers strategically, then leave town for a couple weeks.

I had been getting kinda nervous about the state of my meager stand of veggies as I drove around the midwest, from one "excessive heat warning" to another, and I hoped that no one had re-positioned the lawn sprinklers that had been so graciously sharing their bounty with my garden.

The first thing I noticed when I pulled back into Eleanor St. after two weeks away was a gigantic frenzy of vines floating at the top of my bean trellises. Luckily they were actually the Tennessee Cornfield beans, and not some volunteer weed from the flower bed. And what was that, hiding under the canopy of vines? Could it be a tomato? Indeed, each of my mystery tomato plants now bears a single fruit whom I have named Abraham & Sarah, in hopes that they will be the first of many blessed tomatoes.

The potatoes are doing fine. I guess. Won't really know until I dig them up. Mustard greens are harvestable and boy do they pack a punch. The broccoli is still sterile, not much hope for them.

Also found this guy crawling around on the beans and thought he might appreciate a photo-shoot.

The other thing I was a little hesitant to abandon for two weeks was my kombucha scoby. I didn't have the supplies on hand to prepare a full batch for it to work on while I was away, so I just left it in a couple inches of leftover tea with a bunch of sugar and crossed my fingers. I guess it appreciated my effort, since the culture was twice as thick (about 3 inches) when I got back.

I went ahead and split it since it actually tore while I was trying to get it out of the jar. I've been trying to think of new experiments to try with it, instead of just using the standard black tea + sugar combination, so I brewed up a couple quarts of super-concentrated bissap (a Senegalese drink made from hibiscus flowers and LOTS of sugar, similar to agua de flor de jamaica in Central America) and plopped the thinned-down scoby on top. Fingers crossed.