mayoral election
There's a new weblog called The Burnt Orange Report and a couple days back it had a pretty good post about the Dallas mayoral election coming up.
I live in North Dallas and I find it surprising the amount of support Laura Miller has here in what I think of as a Republican stronghold. As in the special election last fall, there are a huge number of yard signs for her. As a councilwoman and as a reporter before that she opposed the big business projects previous mayors were known for. As a candidate she campaigned instead on improving the services that average citizens really need. Why can't that strategy work at higher levels of government as well?
one more rose
Here's one more rose that I just had to post. This is another one whose name I do not know. We rustled it from a neighbor's yard after she moved away and left it. (We just took a part of it - not the whole thing). You can't really tell from the picture but the petals have a velvet like texture. And the flower is so big and heavy that unfortunately the weight causes the canes to bend over so that the flowers seem to usually be facing the ground. This rose is very fragrant also. Tricia and I are partial to plants with fragrance.
This was a good year for roses in north Texas. All our established roses have had a lot of blossoms and they are still blooming. Even the ones we planted this winter have bloomed well.
Be sure to click on the thumbnail to see a bigger image.
Brazos de Dios
The woodworking school I attended last week is a part of Homestead Heritage, an agrarian community on the banks of the Brazos River a few miles north of Waco. In addition to offering workshops in a variety of crafts and skills there is a visitors center where you can buy lunch and crafts as well as tour the farm in a horse-drawn hay wagon.
However the farm is not a museum or a tourist attraction but a 500-acre working farm devoted to recapturing the heritage of community life in a land-based culture. Families live on the land and incorporate traditional patterns of homestead living into their lives.
I have always been interested in the utopian communities of the nineteenth century. In Massachusetts I visited the site of one of the Shaker communities which once flourished there. In its prime it also sold crafts and farm produce and was open to visitors. These communities are generally regarded as failures because they did not survive, but really some of them were quite prosperous and lasted many years.
I've known a few people who have tried to achieve some of the same goals on their own and a lot more who day-dream about it. The community aspect is lacking however when you do it on your own and that is probably the glue that holds Brazos de Dios together and makes it succeed.
woodworking
I've just returned from taking another class at the Homestead Heritage school of woodworking. Woodworking is something that I have just recently discovered. Unlike a lot of guys I never took a class in it in junior high school. From my father I learned some basic woodworking skills for home repair projects, mostly with power tools.
Homestead Heritage teaches you to do it all with hand tools. I find that there is something really satisfying about building something strictly with hand tools. It has something to do with the pace of the work and the concentration. It also helps to be away at school in a wonderful setting with no distractions.
The other day at work I was talking to a network guy about why one of our applications was running so slow. He was trying to explain to me that certain applications when they are running a long time start bouncing around the network until they eat up more and more bandwidth doing the same thing. Let me say that I don't know very much about networking. I only bring this up because what he was telling me reminds me of what is happening inside my head a lot of the time.
I don't consider my work to be exceptionally complex, but it is abstract and it takes the combined efforts of many people to see a result. On top of that I have to work on numerous projects at once and they are all bouncing around inside my head.
So it was really great to do something with my hands and be able to immediately see the result. But that does not completely explain why it felt so satisfying to me. While I was using the tools and my hands to fashion the wood, I felt like they were also doing something to my brain, rewiring it in a mirror image of the task I was learning. So I feel refreshed because my brain is running more efficiently now. There is a little less noise bouncing around inside.
earth day
Today is Earth Day, although you would hardly know it from the amount of news coverage it has generated. Environmental issues seem to be less and less important these days. To be fair timing is not good this year. Supporters usually plan events on the closest weekend and this year that would be Easter.
science fiction
Reading this reminded me of a science fiction novel I read many years ago. I think it may have been something by Heinlein. Earth had been invaded by parasitic aliens who attached themselves to you in inconspicuous locations. For security reasons it was necessary for everyone to go about their daily business unclothed. To my 12-year-old mind this seemed like a really good idea anyway.
hiding my head in the sand
Over the weekend I received a couple of emails containing the Transcript of Tim Robbins Speech to the National Press Club, along with a plea to pass it on to everyone in my mail directory.
I have been really avoiding the war ever since it started. I've never really been into watching the so-called news programs on TV. But at least I used to listen to NPR on my morning commute and read the NY Times headlines via the Internet. But over the past few weeks I've mostly given that up too in favor of playing CD's in the car and reading mystery novels.
Generally I don't hear much discussion of the war from friends or relatives either. Not a soul mentioned it at family gatherings over Easter. Nor have I heard much talk of it at the office, although I do see a lot of people checking out CNN and MSNBC as I walk down the rows of cubicles.
I guess I am just inclined to hope that it all fades back to normal soon. Things are not going the way I would have liked. But fighting against it is also not the future I would will for myself. I don't really want to be into politics. I would rather tend my garden.
roses
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The white roses are Iceberg and the pink ones are Rouletii. Both are from the Antique Rose Emporium. The pink is an especially prolific bloomer and has a delicate fragrance. It grows between our driveway and the front door so we pass it many times a day. The blooms are very small. The red rose was in our garden when we moved here, although it was in the shade and did not bloom much. We moved it to a sunny spot and now it blooms a lot more. The flowers are beautiful but they have no fragrance.
no satisfaction
Right now I am really feeling frustrated. I am spending more time working on the templates and the CSS for this weblog than I am writing. I can't get things to work the way that I want. For instance I really wanted to have a floating thumbnail image of Miss Kitty along with a popup image on that post two days back. I got that to work exactly the way I wanted it in Mozilla, which is the browser I normally prefer myself, but I cannot make it work in IE.
I should create a separate site to experiment with but instead I've just been playing with this one. So half the time it looks terrible and then I have to spend time undoing my experiments to make it look presentable. Chances are nobody is looking at it anyway but to acknowledge that would destroy the very notion of writing the weblog anyway, wouldn't it?
On top of the fact that I haven't been able to do any writing, I am also neglecting some of the other things I would like to be doing. I have a couple of other websites I am supposed to keep up for organizations I belong to and I am behind there. I haven't had time to work on my photography as much as I wanted and there is a lot of weeding that needs to be done in my garden. And we've got houseguests arriving tonight for the weekend.
My notion of this was that after a short initial setup phase the technology would become transparent and I could write when and where I chose and it would not just eat up my time. And you know that could be true right now if I would only accept the default templates instead of trying to do somethng else.
irises
Roses and irises are my two favorite flowers. And they are the most prominent ones in our garden right now. We also have a lot of Salvia greggii of various colors, and they are another favorite of mine, although they have really small flowers so you have to be up close to appreciate them.
Miss Kitty
When Tricia and I arrived at the B&B in Mineola last weekend we were greeted by Miss Kitty, who ran into our room as soon as the door was opened and jumped onto our bed.
Later, our hosts Bob and Sherry, explained to us that Miss Kitty thinks that our room is her room. On cold nights they let her in to sleep there. She doesn't come into the main house because they have two scotties that live inside and lots of breakable antiques.
Bob and Sherry have been "dog people' most of their lives until Miss Kitty showed up in their yard this winter and adopted them. She is actually just a kitten. Tricia tells me that she is an "m point". She is partly Siamese, with blue eyes and Siamese colorings but her tail has rings and her face has stripes like a tabby. She is frisky like any kitten but is amazingly relaxed around strangers. We felt privileged to share her room with her.
new site
I started out using Blogger for this journal. I liked it and it did the job okay, but I started to see its limitations. Movable Type does not do everything I would like either, but it has a few more bells and whistles. Mainly I like that it has a fairly large and active user base, a support forum, and on-going development.
It took me 4 to 5 hours to install it and import my previous entries. There were several glitches along the way, all of which could have been avoided by reading the instructions first. I did seek help in the support forum on one issue and got a quick answer.
The next challenge will be to incorporate some graphics into the templates.
we had a great weekend!
Tricia and I are back from a much-needed retreat in Mineola, an easy two-hour drive east of Dallas. We stayed in a wonderful little B&B called Munzesheimer Manor just two blocks off the main shopping district. It's a beautifully restored 1898 Victorian home with wonderful hosts who are great cooks too. There was even a cat to welcome us. We cruised a few antique stores and took in a local quilt show, but mainly just relaxed on the wide shady porches. And the best part of all was we never got back in the car until we were ready to leave and we never turned on a TV or radio the whole time.
best movie ever made
Over at a weblog called forty.something I found this link to Vertigo Then & Now, a site featuring scenes from my favorite movie. It's amazing how little San Francisco has changed in the 45 years between the before and after in these pictures. It would be interesting to see similar photos from other locations. I bet you couldn't find much that was recognizable in most spots here in Dallas.
backyard gardening
We were lucky to be far enough south to miss the hailstorm that got so much of North Dallas over the weekend. It flattened quite a few flowering bushes in addition to doing more serious damage. The combination of cool temperatures and light rain have really filled out our Rouletti and Mutabilis roses with lots of blossoms. I'll try for a picture when the wind dies down. Our iris and bluebonnets are just now opening their buds. Zanthan Gardens has been reporting blooms on theirs for a couple weeks now in Central Texas. This white wisteria has been filling our backyard with fragrance for the last week. The more common purple does not have nearly the fragrance of the white one.
One warm Saturday last month Tricia rented a tiller and tilled our little backyard garden. Now we have tomatoes, jalapeno and serrano peppers, onions, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, and cilantro all coming up back there. Of course all these things cost us more to grow than it does to buy them at Albertsons, but they taste better. Did I mention that this is a 100% organic garden. We have been doing this for about 5 years now and have never used any pesticides or herbicides in the yard. The bed is raised about 12 inches above ground level and filled with Greensense compost.
I see that Samantha has also got her vegetable garden going up in McKinney. She's got more variety than we do.
the Tommies
For several months now there have been reports of a loose dog in the neighborhood attacking and killing cats. That's probably what got Tommy.
Tommy was one of a pair of almost identical-looking plain gray short-haired cats who came to live in our back garden. We referred to them collectively as "the Tommies." Actually if you knew them they were not identical. One Tommy was older and seemed to be a little hard of hearing. He was the first to arrive several years ago. The other arrived about six months later. She is smaller and livelier and we call her Thomasina when we refer to her individually. To say Tricia has a weak spot for stray animals would be an understatement. Naturally she started putting food out. In the winter she even built them a shelter out of cardboard boxes with an electric heating pad to keep them warm. One cold winter we were sheltering both Tommies and an injured raccoon on the back porch - but that's a story for another day.
Both of them were probably pets of someone at one time because they were not wild and were apparently neutered. Tommy never would let us touch him but he rarely left our yard. Thomasina will rub against you when you leave food in her bowl by the back door and will even come into the kitchen and eat from the indoor cats food bowl if she gets a chance. She's more adventurous and roams the neighborhood a little but is always at the back door at breakfast and dinner.
When we came outside they watched us warily but didn't run unless we got too close. Our indoor females tolerated them but Sam seemed to enjoy their company. He especially liked to follow Tommy around. I think Tommy was sort of a role model for him since Sam never seems exactly sure how to act like a cat.
One evening they didn't show up, but we were so busy and the weather was so bad that we didn't look for them that much. It wasn't until Saturday morning that I started searching the backyard and calling to see if I could find them. I gave up and went back in but later from the window I saw him lying in the grass. I guess he heard me and tried to get to the back porch for his meal. But he wasn't strong enough to make it. There were nasty bite marks in his underbelly and neck. We found a shady spot under some trees and buried him and put a paving stone over the spot.
It was a couple more days before Thomasina showed back up. She was not injured in any way, just frightened that her security had been threatened. She's not quite as trusting as before and still doesn't seem to spend as much time in the yard, but she's starting to calm down.
ruler of our household
Sapphire is the alpha cat at our home. She is a "ragdoll" with blue eyes.
She is probably about 8 years old. Becky, our neighbors girlfriend, gave her to us. Becky was working at a vets for the summer and someone left Sapphire at the door of the clinic, so she brought her over. She was really shy. She hid in closets and behind the bookcase and less than a week after she arrived, she escaped from the house by pushing through a screen on a window I had left open.
At that time we had a big overgrown lot across the street - almost a full acre - and Sapphire went to live there apparently. It was almost six months later before we saw her in our yard again and we started to make friends using pieces of chicken and turkey as bribes. Finally after weeks she let us touch her. We noticed then that she was pregnant. We worried that she would have her kittens in the wild lot and we would have a whole litter of feral kittens on our hands.
But just about a week before they arrived she decided to follow us into the house. And then one evening she decided to stay in for the night. I put an old towel in the bottom of a cardboard box, set it in the hall closet, and showed it to Sapphire. That night around midnight something woke me from my sleep and I got up to investigate. I looked in the closet and there was Sapphire with the first of her three little kitties.
You would not believe now that Sapphire was ever a feral cat or how difficult it was to get her to let us touch her. She loves to be carried and sit in laps.
office relocation
Our company announced awhile back that they are going to relocate to Plano. I knew they were going to be looking for a new building when the lease runs out but I figured it would be close at hand. All the time I've lived in Dallas I've never had to drive on a freeway at rush hour. Now I will be looking at a 20-mile commute. At least it will be in the opposite direction from most traffic.
