Five Acres with a View

I used “The Gimp”:http://gimp.org to make this example of Faux Postage from yesterday’s photo.

I took a walk with my trainer and her dogs yesterday. We saw some small white flowers and I mentioned I had never, to my knowledge, seen an anemone growing wild. Five minutes later, we found this little beauty. This seems to be the prairie anemone, also known as the “pasque flower”:http://www.und.edu/org/soaringeagleprairie/pasqueflower/, also known as the windflower.

The Baconizer is a cool tool that uses data from “amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com to list the connections between two items. The connections are done by looking at “people who bought item A also bought item B.”

On March 23, my youngest nephew, Laurie’s and Marty’s son Finnian, officially became a member of the family.

I’ve known about “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page for some time, but just learned about Wikiquote which is assembling a free online quote repository. In addition to a search feature, it has subject oriented pages for browsing.

My farrier was here to trim the horses, and after I paid her, we stopped and checked my garden beds as I walked out with her. I hadn’t looked at them recently, because March is really too soon to expect much at 7200 feet in Colorado. I had wondered if I should start watering though.

We found lots of signs of life: the rose bushes look like they are alive, the columbines have little crowns growing through the earth and look quite healthy, and most of the herbs are starting to grow. I was most surprised to see that the dianthus (pinks) seem to be coming back. I bought them as annuals, and although some of my friends say their dianthus reappears, I had low expectations since our conditions are so harsh here. Of course, it was a mild winter. I am most excited about the columbines: they are the Colorado state flower, and gorgeous in their own right.

Right now, I am watering the beds, and day-dreaming about annuals. The salvia I planted last year did poorly, but the petunias did quite well. I am not too proud to plant petunias again. I could put them in front of the rose bed, and plant something else where I planted the petunias last year. Updated 2003-03-28 Changed peonies to petunias. What was I thinking?

On one of the discussion lists to which I belong, several people were discussing Art Trading Cards, an art form in which I have dabbled using my carved images. This one, of the hawk, is probably my favorite. I’ve put up a large image of of the others that I have done.

I enjoyed today’s Non Sequitur which reminds me of many a trail ride on Hap. One time the poor horse couldn’t find anything better to spook at than a butterfly. (Link expires in two weeks.)