With chainsaw in hand, I can cause almost as much destruction as a tornado. I felled eight trees and dug out as many bushes in Tristan and David’s back yard this afternoon. I wanted to hire a tree company to take down the trees and chip them up, but after two weeks of failing to get one of them out to give us an estimate, I decided to cut them down myself. Now we need to find someone to chip them up for us. I thought the tree guys would be needing work, but apparently the tree cutting business is so good there is no need to bother to return calls.

I went to Annie’s wedding this morning. There were many beautifully tattooed people in attendance. They wedding was in her parent’s back yard, and the weather was great; however, the sun was a little harsh. The ceremony was really quite nice.

When I got home tonight, Stretch was pestering a wolf spider, so once I got Stretch away from it, I couldn’t resist photographing it. It is really quite colorful when photographed with a combination of a flashlight and ring flash.

Stretch is watching something from the table. He’s wide-eyed, and has is nub slightly bushed. What he’s looking at, I can’t tell. There are no other kitties, nothing that I can see; but he looks over the counter and follows something with his eyes, then he look under the counter and then over the counter again. It’s a little creepy, because whatever he sees he won’t turn his back on it. I turned him to show him some food I dished out for him, and he immediately turned back to watch the phantom that I can’t see.

 

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.