I got some new flowers on the way home tonight. I love the color on this one.

 

The Lobo Men basketball team won another round in the NCAA playoffs this afternoon. I don’t really follow basketball, but several people in the office do, so a couple of staff set up laptops in one of our conference rooms and watched the game on the big screen while they worked on maps and web pages. Other staff had the score updates rolling across the tops of their screens, so it was hard to miss the game this afternoon.

In Plain Sight is filming on our block tomorrow morning, so they are going to have the streets closed around the office. A site manager came in this afternoon and asked for permission to use the front of our building and the reception area to do some special scenes using a small crew next week. I didn’t see any problem with it as long as they don’t damage the building.

I dropped by the pharmacy to pick up some pseudoephedrine for allergies and there were two women in front of me. I noticed they were taking a long time. When the clerk had finished ringing up the first woman, she made three trips between the register and the consulting area to move more than a dozen bottles of medications to the consulting area so the pharmacist could explain them to the woman and bag them for her.  The second woman picked up nearly as many prescriptions. I thought to myself how it’s sad that people have to have so many prescriptions. I feel fortunate that I am not currently taking any prescription drugs. I only take an over-the-counter drug daily to control acid reflux, a couple of supplements, pseudoephedrine and ibuprofen occasionally, and drink super strong, black coffee.

 

Our little 5-in-1 dwarf plum tree is always the first to bloom, and inevitably it’s always the first victim of frost. I believe we planted that tree about 10 years ago and have never got fruit from it. One year we carefully covered it every night, and by beginning of May there was fruit set on it. We thought we were going to get plums, but around the middle of May we had a very hard frost that killed all our fruit and several roses. I don’t know how people who farmed this property early last century, before “global warming”, survived.

 

Diné and Rosencrantz were trying out kitty ear warmers for Laurie and Tristan this afternoon.  Rosencrantz got tried of me photographing him and covered his face. Kitties are an endless source of entertainment.

 

 

Tristan’s Valentine’s tarantula is a great model.

 

 

 

There was about a half inch of snow on the ground this morning. I went out to see if the crocus were opening in the morning sun, despite the snow, but they remained closed until almost noon. By the time they decided to open all the snow had melted; however, it was warm enough for the bees to be out working the crocus — the first bees I’d seen this season.

I got caught up on my French homework before I started cooking a big batch of NM gumbo this afternoon. While I was cooking t

he rice, browning the meats and thawing the vegetables, I managed to get a week ahead on my French homework. Now that’s what I call cooking!

The number system the French use is base 60, which is based on the Babylonian number system. There are no single names for the numbers 70, 80 and 90 in French. Seventy is soixante-dix (60+10), eighty is quatre-vingts (4×20), and ninety is quatre-vingts-dix (4×20+10). You add the numbers 10 through 19 to 60 to get from 70 to 79, then you add the numbers 1 through 9 to 4×20 to get from 80 to 89 and finally you add 10 through 19 to 4×20 to get from 90 to 99. One-hundred is “cent”.  The numbers make sense seeing them on paper, but listening to people rattle off numbers in the exercises and trying to write them down made my head spin.

Stretch was laying on the window sill sunning himself this afternoon. I went out to see if there was water in the ditch and talked to one of our neighbors for a few minutes, then when I came back inside Stretch was sitting on the window sill with the strong light shining through the window almost env

eloping him.

 

 

 

 

Talk about antiquated: daylight savings time should be abolished. Governments need to let us leave our clocks set on standard or DST and then leave us be. In the 21st Century there is no need to be changing our clocks every spring and fall.

I am really worn out after cleaning the house, washing the rugs, pruning the fruit trees, adding a rounded edge to Laurie’s study desk, doing 3 weeks of French homework (I’m still 3 weeks behind), and buying ingredients to make a pot of my NM gumbo. Losing an hour of sleep tonight will not help me recover.

The sky was overcast all day, which was nice for pruning trees, but it made the light flat for photographs. Thus I used HDR for the photos today. HDR is high dynamic range imaging where you take at least 3 exposures (under exposed, properly exposed and over exposed) and merge the images to create a more dynamic range in the image.

The orchids that surround my computer are in various states of being. One has almost completely faded with one dried flower hanging on. The flowers have all turned yellow and brown on another one, while the other three orchids are still in full bloom. The cut flowers we got about three weeks ago are slowly fading, but still looking good enough to come out nicely in B&W.

 

Stretch knows what to do on a cold, windy day — curl up on a shelf with math books.  The forecast was for snow today, and tomorrow. I didn’t see any snow today, but there was plenty of wind . We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

As the moon rose over the mountains while we were on our way home tonight, we noticed the details were almost completely obscured by dust that fills the air from the strong winds that blew all day. A woman who checked my receipt on our way out of Costco asked if I had gotten any good pictures today. I thought for a second and told her I hadn’t done any photos yet today.  After we got home, and unloaded everything from the car, I went out and photographed the moon as a cloud was blowing by. There was still a lot of dust in the air creating a nice glow around the moon.