LIFO as a bootstrap

[elainegrey]

LIFO, Last in-first out, is in my impression an "anti-pattern" for personal effectiveness. Get to the requests that came in first, respond to the oldest emails, etc.

I'm not 100% certain of that. I have grown to appreciate that opportunities are constantly making themselves available, and i periodically strike off old to-dos ("punt"), file old emails (email and comment bankruptcy), and in general focus on the present. So, that's what i tried to do this morning to get myself going instead of the "read the whole internet" strategy that i have been employing lately.

I must say, Usenet kept me fixated MUCH LONGER than the internet does today. I suppose the surfeit of choice makes me more picky. Facebook is excluded from my "read the internet," so that removes all sorts of trivia. I do have an extensive list of web comics, but they are optimized -- i have reading lists for each day of the week, and i simply open all the tabs in my bookmarks to have a cascade of amusing reading to do. I've added various local news sources that don't have RSS feeds.

--== ∞ ==--

Oh oh oh my soil tests are in!!

Fairly acid, pH 5.5. Potassium is good, but it seems like there's very little phosphorus. The report is given as an index, and the lawn area reports very very high phosphorus. I don't know if the index is so different because of the difference in planned planting (a grass that doesn't like being over fertilized vs a vegetable garden) or if the previous owners fertilized the fenced in lawn area to death. The area near the lawn, that has been the target of much of our clearing, i specified would be for apples. It took seems to have an extremely low phosphorous rating.

I want to find out if tobacco cropping leaves phosphorus depleted soils. That might hint at the land's history.

ETA Hrm, this 1927 report http://www.ct.gov/caes/lib/caes/documents/publications/tobacco_bulletins/tb_7.pdf says tobacco is not a heavy phosphorus feeder.

Comments

[amaebi]

Man, I need to get my soil tested. I will try to take a lump up the net time I go to Fort Collins to lunch with a friend.

[elainegrey]

In NC it is free until the first of December, when the "rush season" begins. The local extension office had nice little boxes and instructions for getting a valid sample. I took three sample because the history of the three sections was rather different -- perhaps you'll have differences based on where horses were kept and not.

[zlabya]

I haven't seen much use for LIFO myself. Even for paper in copiers, if it hangs around too long the papers on the bottom get humid and tend to get stuck in some part of the copier machinery (at least in humid central Maryland). But yeah, sometimes you just have to abandon the older stuff and focus on what's timely. When you're a procrastinator, which I am too!

Yay for you getting your soil tests back! I've been using mostly packaged soils (organic) or compost-and-manure-enriched soil but still I should probably get ours done. We are living on a former tobacco plantation so I bet our phosphorus is low too.

[elainegrey]

Apparently tobacco is NOT the phosphorus issue. At LJ (where i cross post) someone found a much more recent soil science article that indicated that grains were a heavier feeder than tobacco on phosphorus.

Apparently chicken manure is good for phosphorus: one more reason to get chickens! But i think we're going to get a d-o-g first. Not sure how to break it to the cats.