The Hunt Is On!

The Haggis Hunt, that is. More specifically: Farquhar's Revenge. Plenty more haggi where that came from!

Rainy Days in the Greenhouse

This is what the inside of the greenhouse looked like today. Atmospheric, I grant you, but rather dreary otherwise. At least it's warm enough to turn off the festive Christmas light decor I've got going on in there.

Since we couldn't do any outdoors gardening, well, not without getting excessively muddy in the bargain, FDPG and I decided to take photographs of the little plants in the little greenhouse.










Tomatoes. I keep waiting for them to POP and start growing wildly, but I think it's still a bit on the cold side.

At least, I hope it's still a bit on the cold side. If they are measly wimpy destined-to-be-miserable plants I might cry a bit.






Like my high-tech labels?


Lee Valley - eat your heart out.







Baby spiders are hatching. If you look really closely that blur should turn into a clump of spiders. I can't guarantee anything, so look really hard before emailing me in despair.

We are trailing around the house and yard with little floating spiders all over us today. For some of us it's the charming side effect of having a greenhouse; for others it's a horrible, scary, creepy, and really yucky experience.

Yes, we're all about the heroics. Braving Baby Spiders - that's us. Look at those SCARY little suckers and quake in your boots.
Marigolds (Moonlight Marigold)


Hollyhocks (Peaches 'N' Dreams and Black Knight).







Vague panoramic shot. You're looking at the Butterfly Garden portion of the greenhouse: phacelia, marigolds, calendula, nettles, hollyhocks, liatrus, alyssum, collinsia, sunflowers, leadplant, poppies, clary sage, goldenrod.


The other side are the Vegetable Garden plants: corn salad, purple sprouting broccoli, kale, tomatoes, peppers, pepperoncini, basil, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, gourds, pumpkins, zucchini.

And yes, we do have it cordoned off. Some of us are highly competitive about our plants. And some of us are very irritable when they don't do well.

Photocopies & Fingerprints

Last week my poor beleaguered printer started faltering, which should have come as no surprise given its age (9 years), but I was still horrified when I shone a bright light into its innards: there seemed to be a lot of messy inky areas where there had once been clear plastic walls. I couldn't tell if this was because of me and my ink-refilling methods or just the fact that it is a very old printer, so I did what any Jane Austen Heroine would do: said a silent prayer, girded my emotional loins, and steadied myself for the worst. The next day the colour ink cartridge stopped eating refused refilling.

A couple of nights later Richard and I were in the Super Duper New Walmart near us (which is so industrial-looking we all hate to go there now) looking for another ink cartridge for me to ruin and we noticed that a new printer was only slightly more expensive than a new colour ink cartridge. So we did what any sensible, momentarily child-free couple experiencing the unusual sensation of being child-free would do: we bought the printer instead of the ink cartridge. It was a giddy sensation.

Then we brought it home, where our spendthrift ways created absolute chaos. Max was simultaneously shocked and thrilled that we'd actually BOUGHT something (we are apparently boringly cheap); Dominic was delighted that we bought something NEW; and Katie was thrilled that I'd come home to rescue her from the tedium of her materialistic brothers.

Tragically, when I took to Amazon to check reviews on our new purchase, they weren't very good. They were okay, but not great enough to make me want to keep it. The next night, we returned it. "Is there something wrong with it?" asked the girl at Walmart. "I don't know - you tell me," replied my sometimes-challenged-about-returning-things-to-stores mate, whereupon I kicked him under the table and said "No, nothing, we just want one that doesn't use so much ink." "Oh," said she, "this is the second one I've had returned today."

Great.

Eventually, after scouring Amazon for reviews, then scouring the stores around me for those very printers, I found one I liked, at a price I liked, and with reviews I liked. Even more exciting, it photocopies, scans, and looks very cool. What's not to like? Wait, I lie: it does have one fault: It's very shiny and very black, which means that it is a perfect fingerprint magnet. And given that I am close to the bottom of the list when it comes to World's Most Amazing Housekeepers, this creates havoc in my life in terms of its Reposing Glossily On The Shelf potential.

Other than that I love it.

New Horizons

One of us here has entered a new world. With his own money, too. One day it was Thomas trains and Chupa Chups; now it's building complicated LEGO sets and making movies with them.

How times change.

Thou errant hedge-born joithead!

Sorry if anyone is getting multiple copies of yesterday's Poetry Friday post, but for some reason the embedded YouTube video caused an enormous amount of confusion with the blog's appearance. I wish I knew why, but I don't. All I know is that it looked perfectly normal when viewed using Safari, and horribly distressingly odd when viewed using Firefox.

Oh for a computer literate brain!

(But if you want an amusing Shakespearean Insulter like the one I used in my title, click here)

The Computer and Me

Well, it looks (knock on wood) that my computer woes have been temporarily resolved. Apparently my computer had a problem with its directory, whatever that means. I am not terribly computer-savvy, so this means next to nothing to me. There was also a lot of dust around the computer, enough to elicit gasps of horror from the computer tekkie who fixed it (well, horror and extreme irritation, but the possibility of having to endure abject public humiliation is enough to prevent me from going into that too deeply). Let's just say that a few dozen chocolate chip cookies might, just might, go a long way in mollifying his anguish at the state of my computer. Take heed, Gentle Reader, and wield thy vacuum judiciously.

Poor computer. It has endured a lot of moving, many little fingers whacking its keys, and me with my squirrel-like mania for building up unwieldy iTunes and iPhoto catalogues, not to mention my delight in filing every single narration, clever bit of writing, or poetry recitation my kids have ever done into a groaning folder marked Homeschool. I guess a nervous breakdown was inevitable. We're an intense family for a machine.

The desperation of having almost lost all that crap does force me to consider the thorny question of "what to do" with all those iPhoto pictures I have stored. My iPhoto gets arthritic when it gets close to 4000 pictures, and right now it's almost at a standstill, labouring breathlessly whenever I open it for yet more downloading. Ironically, of the at least 6000 photos I've taken with this camera, I have yet to print out anywhere near 100 of them. And no, I am NOT talking about FDPG's weird Cheezie photo collection. I'm talking about summer holidays, when butterflies landed on Max's hand and sat there while he walked all the way down the street. Winter sled rides, captured most blurrily, when we still lived on the mainland. Pictures of giant icicles from the drains. Trips in my father's row boat, the kids disappearing into their life jackets. Picture of snails, when Dominic was in his Snail Phase (and let me tell you, I take an awesome snail picture). Way too many pictures of the kids asleep, clutching blankies. Okay, maybe I am talking about FDPG's Cheezie collection, but my point it this: None of them are essential, per se, at least, not in the same way you keep track of birthdays and first tooth-losings and first two-wheeler outings and Christmas dinners and old relatives with newborns sort of events. This whole dilemma typifies why I still cling to my Luddite raft when the ocean is teeming with new technology. All this tekkie stuff is fun and exciting, but it also means so many more onerous complications to deal with, none of them as tangible as I would like.

What to do? Do I do a Scarlet and wait for another day, or do I spring for an external backup drive, despite the fact that this old eMac is, well, old?