Friday Follies, New Poll, etc.

Well. Now that the thunderstorms have passed through — and God knows we needed the rain here — I can say hello once again.

It has been a week. Actually, it has been a month. In terms of time sinks, April was almost as bad as August usually is, although it (mostly) didn’t involve chicken houses. I’m less than 3,000 words short of completing FAR Future, which is maybe 1,000 words less than where I was at the beginning of the month. But at a post a week, I could sit on my hands all the way through July before I really have to start worrying. Next week will have (for the first time in quite a while) a double feature of FAR Future, because it’s really a single (long) episode split into two pieces. They’ll come out on Monday and Tuesday mornings, respectively. What I’m saying is, I want to get it done so I can start in on the next project… but there’s no pressure otherwise.

I’ve finally gotten started in earnest on a little garden here at the manor. I bought some yellow pear and Rutgers tomatoes last week, along with some jalapeños (my cash crop) and various herbs. The tomatoes, peppers, and lemon balm are now planted (the latter two just before the rain). The lemon balm was starting to wilt, so I knew that had to be addressed pronto; I picked one of the areas where the butterfly bushes were uprooted, then got rid of the violet-weeds. I'm trying to figure out where to put the two oregano plants; the one I have now is turning invasive, so they need to be out of the way but close enough to harvest. Wherever I decide to put the mint and rosemary, it won’t be anywhere near the oregano.

A couple of news articles caught my eye, besides the whole swine flu thing. One was about Congress starting to put a leash on credit card companies (especially since they’re taking bailout money). It doesn’t go nearly as far as I’d like, but it’s a good start. Another was about how an open-source programmer cussed out Adobe over the Photoshop PSD format. Personally, I think Adobe needs to be cussed out (and more) on a daily basis, but that’s just me.

Moving on to the poll gone by… here’s the final tally.



Most of you guys are efficient tax-filing machines… January and February indeed! Those of you who filed in April — the last two weeks before the deadline — I can relate, that’s where I landed too. I really wanted to file right away, joining that Jan/Feb majority, but one thing led to another and next thing I knew it was April. The latest poll is more of a fun little guessing game… let’s all try to guess where gas prices are going to go.

Daughter Dearest is nominally done with college — her last final was Tuesday — but she had to go back this evening to sing at the baccalaureate, and I have to take her tomorrow morning to sing at the graduation. She’s going to be nice enough to give me her network password so I can get some surfing done tomorrow (I don’t have a ticket to the ceremony)… if I really get inspired, I might finish FAR Future right there in the performing arts center.

After the Storm

I just wanna see the love in your eyes,
After the storm has passed through and gone.
— Crosby, Stills, & Nash

And the cleanup begins:





Snow on Tuesday, tornadoes on Friday. Even the weather is psycho on Planet Georgia. But I’ve always said that the weather here has attitude. Getting home from work became an adventure starting around 6 p.m. — up to this point, there had been clouds, light rain, and the occasional streak of lightning to make things interesting. As I came into town, the skies opened up and the first piece of hail spanged off the windshield. I made a quick detour to the gas station and waited it out under the overhang… not the best idea I ever had, perhaps, but it was the idea of just about everyone else behind the wheel. I just thought it first. Fortunately, I wasn’t trying to keep the car dry: the wind brought the rain under there with us. Some hail came in with the wind; some bounced off the pavement and landed on the car

Album 88 started barking the EWS alerts — they couldn’t get through a song without at least one coming in. The first one was for a storm forming over Reinhardt and heading south of town. Since I knew Daughter Dearest was on her way to the manor, I called her, got her voice mail, and told her to be careful coming home.

After a couple of minutes, the hail let up and the real fun began. As I signaled my turn onto my own road, an SUV at the stop sign flashed her lights at me. I stopped long enough to find out that there were trees down across the road. Fortunately, there’s another way in, past the in-laws’ place, so I gave that a shot. Nope! trees both in the road and getting ready to fall. Third way around: more of the same. Some of the trees here were not in the road only because the power lines were holding them up. At this point, I called Mrs. Fetched (no answer), the house (no answer), and her mom. Third time’s the charm.

“Looks like I'm not going to get home,” I said. “I’ll try to find a place to hole up for the night.”

“Yeah, well the power’s out here. Trees are down everywhere. Mrs. Fetched is sitting in the truck, waiting for the hail to stop.”

I called Daughter Dearest, getting her this time. “Don’t bother trying to get home,” I said, “you can’t get there. Just meet me in town and we’ll come up with something.”

“I’m already home.”

“Oh… well, you won’t be getting out, then.”

DoubleRed called: “I’m up in Blue Ridge, taking refuge in a church. The tornado was coming right at me and the only reason I got inside was because the cleaning lady just happened to show up. Then four more people came in right behind me." With all the FAR Manor denizens accounted for, my inner Sheltie laid down and took a nap.

Shortly after this, I returned to the intersection where I’d first planned to turn off, and a guy in a car with Florida plates waved me down. “How can I get to the lodge from here,” he asked. “The road is blocked.”

“All the alternates are blocked, too,” I said. “There’s one more chance, but it’s out of the way.”

“Can you take me that way?”

“Sure… I live that way too. Let’s try it.” I led on, reminding myself to go a little slower than conditions would allow… from getting behind a few, I’ve learned that Florida drivers aren’t much used to curves. There were trees down in the road this way, too, but fortunately they left enough room to squeeze past. At one point, it got really foggy, and I slowed way down… figuring this would be the perfect place to drop a tree. I was right, but not immediately. At one place, there was an old guy with a pickup truck, cutting a tree off the side of the road. I shouted him a thanks, but he didn’t hear me above the saw. Eventually, I reached my turn and sent the follower on his way, hoping that his last five miles were navigable.

The first thing Mrs. Fetched said to me as I came in was, “Change your clothes, we need to get a generator started down at the pump house.” She also gave me time to grab the lantern from the shelf in the garage and light up the living room. There’s a large (10KW) diesel gennie at the pump house, but nobody ever goes down and runs it to keep the starter batteries charged… so it’s never ready when it’s needed. The chicken house generator has a gadget that keeps the batteries topped up and the coolant warm and circulating, so it doesn’t have these problems, but the evil little boogers need water too. They have a small (4KW) portable gennie that can run the chicken house pump; it leaves the renters high & dry but they have drinks in the fridge. To my amazement, it started without much protest once I remembered to turn on the fuel… it ran a little rough at first, but the gas in it was old and that didn’t surprise me much. What also didn’t surprise me was the lack of an extension cord with 240V connectors; there was a 120V cord there so I scrounged a couple of the other plugs off unused equipment and got it going. Hooray, no die-off to deal with in the morning! We swung by the chicken houses and Mrs. Fetched turned the lights on so the birds would get up and drink.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Fetched’s mom was on the horn to the guys who installed the old Air Force surplus gennie at the pump house. I’d tried the starter switch when we were down there, and it didn’t even click, so we assumed the batteries were dead. They promised to grab a pair of fresh batteries and come down… and I got tagged to drive them down, since their truck isn’t 4-wheel drive. I had plenty of time for a sandwich before they arrived, then went on down. All quiet at the pump house: in the intervening hour and a half or so, the portable had used up the old gas. “Well, with any luck, that won’t matter,” I said. They popped in the new batteries and hit the starter button: after a little chugging, it coughed to life and spun up… and kept right on spinning up. The voltage meter, which is supposed to read 140V, swung all the way to 300V.

“It’s not supposed to be running this fast, is it?” I yelled above the roar.

“No!” he grabbed the “shutter” (throttle) and pulled back, bringing the engine down much closer to where it was supposed to be… but as soon as he let go, it spun up again. Then he smelled antifreeze and cut it off entirely. To make a long story slightly shorter, the gennie was toast: the governor was shot, the radiator had a pretty good leak, and a voltage regulator was kaput. Seeing that the thing’s a WW2 vet, finding repair parts for it would be rather difficult. I took them on back, then got a can of gas and a funnel to get the little generator back online. Mrs. Fetched later turned off the lights, figuring the chickens would have gotten enough water, then turned it off for the night.

My wind-up flashlight performed much better than I’d expected… I thought it would run a half-hour, but it ran for two hours (perched on my shoulder as I started Rama Revealed) and was still going strong when I went to bed. The power came back on around 11 this morning, so we won’t have that to deal with tonight. Just have to get up early-early for sunrise service…

A walk around the yard

The wild violets are in wild riot all across my lawn. This was the first pic I took with my new f1.8, 50mm lens — it worked pretty good in the dim of a drizzly evening:



Cutting one out of the herd and getting really up close and personal (with a +4 close-up filter, back to the 28-135 zoom lens):



For whatever reason, this dogwood is always the first to go full-bloom around the manor. Maybe being between the studio and detached garage puts it in a warm spot or something:



Directly to the right of where I was standing for the shot above (in front of the attached garage), Mrs. Fetched put a couple of tulips in a flower bed. She’s thrilled that they’re doing so well.



You can see the edge of the cold frame just to the left of the studio, back in the dogwood picture. I have spinach, lettuce, and onions in the three trays… of the three, the onions (on the right) are doing best so far, but you might have to click through to the Big Picture to see them. I've also got some lettuce in the ground, it seems to be slow to sprout. Maybe it’ll get going soon.



I don’t know if I mentioned that Mrs. Fetched and her mom really got medieval on the butterfly bushes last week. They actually yanked some out of the ground! They’ll come right back, though — they’ll take over if you let them. They’re starting to green up, so we’ll be getting plenty of buggy visitors soon…



Another plant that’s working on what Iowa Victory Gardener calls “weed status” is the oregano. It has developed a clever strategy of staying low and creeping through the winter, then shooting upward with the temperatures. I thought it had strangled the mint, but it’s still in the game… just surrounded.



The blossoming cherry is also doing nicely, although some of the heavy wind we’ve been having knocked a few off the tree. But it’s still in pretty good shape. As I was focusing, one of the substitute pollinators came up over the top to see what I was up to… once he realized I was taking pictures, he turned the other way.



So why am I showing you all this now? Well… looks like we’ll be getting a freeze Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, with lows of 28°F. So it might all be gone in a few days.

Weekend Cinema

We made it!

Violets and Business Models

While I was working at home today, Mrs. Fetched had a client in for some video work. Ironically enough, this client makes (wait for it) poultry processing equipment. I had to take a gadget out to the studio for a little shooting, and noticed the wild violets were once again springing up all over the yard (clicking the photo will give you something larger than life):



Going back inside, I reminded Mrs. Fetched to tell the client that I did product photography for my day job… gotta make these Shiny Things earn their keep, after all. I’d started a blog post about a month ago called “Musings on Photography and Copyrights,” but never got much farther than the title. Technology has dealt a serious blow to photography as a profession these days…

• $1500 will buy you a pro-level (or at least prosumer) DSLR and the essentials — the barriers to entry have never been lower. But the only photo I ever sold, I took with my late lamented PowerShot (which cost about $300).


• Digital photography itself has all but wiped out the darkroom. As an old friend of mine (who now shoots weddings) told me, “I used to spend a lot of time in the darkroom, now I spend it all in Photoshop.”


• Scanners and computers have wrecked the traditional photographer’s business model. People are going to scan their portraits and print copies — it doesn’t matter (to them) if the copy isn’t quite as good, they’ve been trained to not care about quality. And their attitude toward copyright is something like, “I paid some hundreds of bucks for this, it’s mine!”

The guy with the medium-format camera and the account with a commercial film processing facility are still around, but their niche is truly a niche these days. Of course, there are always the people who work for Sports Illustrated or Time; major media will always need skilled photographers, even if they end up becoming web-only publications sooner or later.

The business model of the independent photographer has taken a mortal blow. But perhaps a new business model might work.

One facet could be summed up as “Photography and” or even "and Photography” — in other words, photography becomes a part of the business… and not necessarily the primary part. As I mentioned, I already take product photos as part of my technical writing job. It was something that needed to be done, and I learned how to do them well with basic equipment. But even if photography is secondary, it can provide a competitive edge to the business — if the client needs a good photo, there’s no need to contract with another person who might also take your primary work too.

The whole copyright issue needs to be addressed. With no negatives, digital photography might be best approached as a “work for hire,” the same way technical writing contractors work. Ideally, both you and your customer would hold joint ownership — the customer can fling a copy into Photoshop and mash it up or whatever, while you can license it as a stock shot or use it as part of your portfolio. To get people interested in your work to begin with, consider placing a few good shots under a Creative Commons Attribution license: this allows other people to use them (and spread them around) while you get credit for your work. You might as well make this whole file sharing culture work for you, right?

Of course, I might be completely off base. But this is part of my backup plan in case my day job goes away.

Yellowbells

From the Sunday photowalk.



Everything blooming that day was yellow. Today, the Bradford Pear trees are blooming, and those are more white.

First Fruits

I was kind of surprised to see the huckleberries/blueberries getting ripe already. There were only a few ripe ones, but there’s a lot more where that came from. I think there will be enough by Saturday morning to have blueberry pancakes.

In a couple weeks, they’ll really come on the pipe and we’ll have to figure out what to do with them. Probably a pie or two.

The blackberries will be ripe in another month, and I shouldn’t have any trouble getting all we want and then some.

Flowers of FAR Manor: Lilies

Mrs. Fetched was pleased to see these guys blooming out front.

Like the rhodo’s, they don’t have much modesty, sticking their IBs out for all to see.

[Another smellphone shot, taken 6/1]

Flowers of FAR Manor: Thistle

To follow up on the alien onion, until I have something else to talk about, I will post pictures of the flowers currently blooming around FAR Manor this week.

This thistle was actually in the pasture on the way to the chicken houses. It’s kind of like a rose — it has pretty flowers and nasty thorns — but as Mrs. Fetched puts it: “Cows won’t try to eat roses. They’ll eat thistles, and choke on ’em. You should have sprayed it after you took that picture.”

I suppose I could have peed on it.

[Taken with the smellphone, 5/31]

One (or two) for the Road

A couple of cellphone shots to wrap up the week…

Besides the huckleberries, we have some higher blueberry bushes growing wild on the place. They run a couple weeks behind the huckleberries, for whatever reason. Last year, I was waiting for them to get ripe and then they… disappeared. I guess the birds were waiting too, and they got there first. I was bummed out, but hopeful that we’ll get some of them this year. Maybe I’ll get some cheese cloth or hang some tinfoil around the area to keep them out.

On the way home from work, I took a ride out a back road that I knew dead-ended at a river. I just wondered how far it went and what was out there. Looks like it might have been a bridge at one time.

Well, that’s the end of the road for the flower pix, at least for now. FAR Future episodes will be posted at least on the next two Mondays, and I should be able to make it three. I hope things will continue to work out that way.

Sage

The sage is absolutely covered with these purple blooms now. Up close, they look like tiny iris flowers, don’t they? As long as it’s blooming like this, I really can’t cut it back. Clever little beastie.

I like the lighting in this second shot. The detail, not so much.

Rhododendron InSAnItY!

I needed an excuse to try out Blogger’s new “scheduled post” feature, so I went out and took pix of some of the stuff sproinging up around the manor. We’ll see how it works over the next few days.

The rhododendron out front of the garage is, to say the least, happy. Then again, it doesn’t care what time of year it is — it’s either blooming or about to. It runs down the long side of the garage and is clearly visible from the kitchen window (about 20 feet long). But this spring, it’s even crazier than usual. This particular cluster is about the size of a child’s head.

Click for larger versions, of course. I’m pretty happy with this shot; the IBs are pretty clear (although the rhodo is a bit of an exhibitionist in that regard).

I couldn’t decide which shot to post… so I posted both!

Flowers in her hair, flowers everywhere

There are some compensations to living at FAR Manor. One is the explosion of color we get, usually around April Fool’s Day. This year, with winter hanging on just as long as it could, things were a little slow to get moving… waiting, of course, until we were on vacation. On the other hand, this is what we came home to: everything is in bloom.





Boran2 asked me to post a photo of this episode of “When Sage Goes Wild.” It’s sprawling about 6 feet across at the moment. Iowa Victory Gardener suggests I prune it back, and that’s probably a good idea.

The rosemary (over to the left) needs a little fertilizer and trimming back, but it too is blooming at the moment. I’ll wait for it to go back to just being green (instead of green and purple) before doing much more than getting a little cutting for the homebrew (which I have yet to start, dangit!).



I’d mentioned that the oregano I planted last fall was hugging the ground and slowly creeping around, under the weeds and under the frost radar. Now that things are warming up, it has made its presence known. This thing is nearly 2-½ feet across, enough to flavor a few dozen pizzas with enough left over for salads.

Meanwhile, the mint held its own through the winter and is now feeling ready to do its thing. I have a feeling these two will put on an Herbal Death Match this year.



The flowering cherry tree sits right outside the bedroom window, and stands higher than the house itself. It makes for a nice view this time of year when I’m working at home and sitting at the window.

The picture doesn’t really do justice to the tree, unless you click on it to get the full-size view.





Just in case you want an even closer view…

So anyway, this was a weekend of much going on (the good parts of FAR Manor tend to be rather brief that way :-P). At least I didn’t have to deal with the chicken houses… but yesterday morning I cleaned out the fireplace insert and saved out a small bucket of charcoal, maybe enough to grill out once. The Boy has been helping to start building up the fuel supply for next winter, and he’s about ¼ of the way there.

After lunch, we started shopping. The lawn mower had Epic Fail last fall, so we started looking for a new one. I decided I’d rather spend a couple hundred bucks and get something that won’t give us a bunch of grief, and ended up with a Cub Cadet. Mrs. Fetched went berserk in the garden section at Home Despot, and I picked up a couple of annual herbs — purple basil? Must try! Finally, I learned (much to my dismay) that the only place that sells composting bins around here is Wally World.

So we got home, and I put the lawn mower together (mainly the handle) — then realized we had no gas. Daughter Dearest had been pinging us occasionally through the day about getting cat litter while we were out, but Mrs. Fetched’s dad was with us and he was getting tired before we managed to get to the grocery store. So once more into a vehicle, and off to the grocery store. We got cat litter, and much more (of course), then stopped to fill a couple of gas cans on the way back. Naturally, it was dark before we returned home, so the lawn had to wait.

And wait some more. Mrs. Fetched was hot to get those flowers planted. She knew I wanted to deal with the lawn, so she simply had me drag out the Mantis and dig up the beds. I got most of the weeds out from around the oregano as well. But when I was done with the lawn, I was dragooned into digging holes for the larger stuff. Again, it was getting dark before we finished… so I guess Mrs. Fetched can try getting The Boy to do some weed-eating this week.

I’m ready for bed. Back to the office, where I can maybe relax a little.

Revenge of the Pines

It’s that time of year again.

Planet Georgia, being one of the original 13 colonies, has a long history of environmental abuse. The old-growth forests of Southern Pine or hardwood are long gone, with the exception of some truly impressive hemlocks I’ve seen along the Appalachian Trail.

Development, especially in the Atlanta area, involves mowing down every single tree as a first step. Sometimes they’ll plant replacements. Sometimes. Usually ornamentals, lashed down with guy wires and surrounded by pavement to prevent them from escaping.

Somewhere around 1985, we hit a tipping point of sorts — and the pines started to fight back. Atlanta has never been The Place To Be for allergy sufferers during the spring, and things have only gotten worse since then. The official pollen count can get crazy this time of year. A pollen count over 120 is “extremely high” — and during dry spells it regularly soars above 1000, 3000, or even 5000. I think it actually hit 10000 once or twice. I think they need to add some ratings to the scale: “Ridiculous” up to 1000; “Judas Priest!” up to 3000, and so forth.

Pine trees are, as a matter of vengeance, a major contributor to the pollen count. On windy days, I’ve seen yellow clouds of pollen flying from the trees (you can grab a limb and shake to get the same effect). It doesn’t matter what color your car is — around here, in springtime, it’s yellow. Don’t bother washing it off; you’ll just have to do it again tomorrow. And every spring, they’re standing along the roadside, giving us all the finger.

I’m not allergic, thank God, but I still feel it when the pollen count gets above 5000 or so. Fortunately, rainy days like today rinse out the pollen and bring relief to the allergic.

Flowering trees

More sproing! — these are trees at a nearby church. There are similar trees in a traffic island on the way to work; I was going to grab a shot of those last week from the motorcycle, but the light turned green before I had a chance.

If anyone is keeping score, I took this one with the cellphone… the light was strong enough that I felt confident about getting something usable.

Sproing!

I had gone into the studio Sunday to grab a couple of tools I’d left in there, and saw no sprouts in the starter pots.

What a difference a couple of days makes. I checked again yesterday evening, and nearly all the tomatoes have sprouted — one tray has Rutgers, another Tommy-Toe (seeds from some friends), and the third is the little yellow pear tomato that volunteered from nowhere in the herb bed last year (the latter are very sweet and keep for a long time). The sprouts are bent over because they were covered in plastic (on the advice of Mrs. Fetched’s mom) and weren’t able to push the plastic out of the way on their own. Naturally, I didn’t mark them and have no idea which one is which. The peppers are still thinking about things and remain covered.

At the bottom left are some basil and cilantro I planted from saved seeds. I see one in each tray, so they’re beating the peppers up…

Spinning Wrenches, Spinning Air Columns

Ah, spring… when a young man’s fancy turns to— HOLY $#!+A TORNADO!!!!

The first Big One of spring paid a visit to downtown Atlanta, and took in many of the tourist sites: the Georgia Dome, Phillips Arena (interrupting a Hawks game in overtime), the CNN Center, and many many more. The usual Saturday cartoon fest was thrown aside for a wall-to-wall news orgy of the Disaster On Our Doorstep (DOOD!).

But more storms were on their way for the afternoon, and we had stuff to do, so we turned off the TV and got to it. The Boy miraculously showed up in the morning when he said he would, which took the pressure off me to once again throw my plans in the dumpster and tend to the chicken houses (wasn’t gonna happen anyway). Big V’s husband came by with his trailer; we rolled the red Civic (which has stopped shifting) onto it and took it to the mechanic. From there, I went on to the motorcycle shop and their “sidewalk sale,” shopping list in hand and rear wheels from both motorcycles in the trunk. As I’d hoped, heated gloves were in the discount bin, so I found a pair that fit me and scratched that one off my list. Then it was off to the parts counter for some serious denting of the checking account (recently augmented by the addition of a bonus check). I came home with:

- a cargo rack for the Suzuki (a miracle: they had it in stock!)
- heated gloves
- brake pads for the Virago
- the Virago rear wheel, with fresh rubber
- fresh oil for both bikes, filter for the Virago
- chain lube
- cable lube (plus a lube tool)

Stuff I’ll be picking up later in the week:

- Suzuki rear tire, with fresh rubber
- Acerbis 4.25gal tank for the Suzuki
- garage stand

I got home just in front of the rain, and found the all-day news-orgy had shifted from the past to the immediate future: a pair of strong storms were heading in from Alabama, killed some people in Polk County (terrible news there), and continued almost due east at 50mph (those spring storms move FAST) in single file. The weather dudes were waxing poetic over their new technology, that allows them to build 3D models of storms and display them in different ways, and to zoom in on the immediate area and show roads and locations that were in the path of the storms. This particular storm was highly radar-genic, so they were having all sorts of fun showing us just about everything they could do. As it turned out, the really bad parts of the storms (F2 tornadoes, 2" hail, 70mph winds) went 10 miles south of us. After things died down a bit, I headed to the garage to work on the bikes.

I got the wheel back on the Virago, with only the usual difficulty plus a brain-fart (where’s the spacer? duh, I left it on the axle so I wouldn’t lose it!), then put the cargo rack on the Zook while draining old oil out of the Virago. I was about to tackle the brake pads, when Mrs. Fetched asked if I was interested in food. Being 6pm (already?), I realized I was ready to eat. Of course, Mrs. Fetched rarely delivers the whole story: we had to stop at a couple of places to pay bills. The second place was Home Depot, and we picked up a couple minor things while we were there — including a new light fixture for her closet. We ate (at Up the Creek) and then got to Office Max, five minutes before closing, to pick up card stock for Daughter Dearest’s graduation invitations.

After church, I’ll finish up the Virago brakes and wire in the heated gloves, then perhaps I’ll take a (ahem) short ride! The Boy came in with Snippet a few minutes ago, “disappointed” that he missed his shot at the chicken houses, but willing to come to church. Time to jump in the shower and get ready…

(Basil) Survivor: Winter

I brought three basil plants in for the winter. As you can see, one managed to make it to spring. But it looks like it will live long enough to go back outside when it stays warm.

I’ve got plenty to do and not enough time to do any of it. At least Daughter Dearest’s car (which has been spewing oil) turned out to have the cheap problem: a bad oil sensor gasket.

Plants, flowers, bees [UPDATED]

[UPDATE: I added a picture of the mountain laurel.]

Mrs. Fetched snagged me from the comfort of a lounge chair this evening, where I was reading Cell, to plant a few things out front in the dusk. I dug, she planted, and we both scooped dirt back in.

Looking out the bathroom window this evening, I saw a huge mountain laurel in full bloom down at the edge of the woods. Click the picture for a closeup of the flowers.

Some of the lilies that run riot around the manor grounds are also starting to bloom, purple varigated with white, that look somewhat like large versions of the wild violets that I couldn’t get rid of even if I wanted to.

The mountain laurel was getting plenty of attention from the large carpenter bees, and my strange old friend the Hummingbird Clearwing Moth was also getting in on the pollination action. I haven’t seen any honeybees in about a month, when they were buzzing around the wisteria. Colony Collapse Disorder is a terrible thing to have happen, but it looks like other bugs are already picking up the pollination slack. I hope so, anyway.

Are you seeing honeybees at your place, or are other bugs stepping in?

Ridiculous

Middle of April? check
Planet Georgia? check

Now could someone explain WHY there is SNOW mixed in with the light rain this afternoon?

As if it couldn’t get any worse, my hands smell like a chicken house.

Someone just shoot me.