Five Acres with a View

The Astronomy Picture of the Day illustrates the spring equinox.

At first, I thought The Radioactive Boy Scout sounded like satire when I heard a discussion on NPR this morning. However, evidently a boy scout set out to build a homemade nuclear reactor in a backyard shed.

In Photointegrity, Tim Bray discusses his philosophical approach to enhancing and altering his digital photos before publication. I’ve thought about some of the same issues, and, like Tim, rarely go beyond cropping and color correction because I want my photo to approach what I thought I saw.

All cats should have their own jungle.

This time of year we usually feed the horses after sunset. Although we have electricity in the barn, there are no lights between the house and the barn. I know the way so well that it is usually no problem, even on moonless nights, to walk out to the barn and turn the lights on. I actually enjoy the walk, because I can look at the stars.
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Yesterday, I worked out how to make mandalas from photographs using “The Gimp”:http://www.gimp.org/. I started with the instructions for making mandalas using Photoshop at “Earth Mandalas”:http://www.earthmandalas.com/how/. This mandala of six spokes is based on a “photo of my shamrocks”:http://www.stardel.com/fiveacres/archives/002566.html that I took in February, unlike the “mandalas I made last year”:http://www.stardel.com/dmnindex.htm which had five spokes.

Saturday I became bored with my desktop wallpaper (which was one of my own photographs) and went surfing for something new. I found the site “Visual Paradox”:http://visualparadox.com/gallery.htm via “Google”:http://www.google.com. This site has a variety of images for wallpaper in various sizes, including a nice selection of alien landscapes. I saved several for future use, and my desktop now looks like the following:

After Hap finished playing in the water on Saturday, he walked over to the fence line to see why people were laughing at him.

On warmish days, Hap likes to play in water. Since it was a nice day, I put him in the horse trailer and took him to my trainer’s today so I could ride him briefly in the arena. She has a visitor’s paddock out front near her arena. Hap must have emptied twenty gallons from the stock tank in ten minutes. On a really hot day, he can empty a stock tank: using his head as a shovel to scoop water on his chest and front legs. I’ve even seen him totally submerge his head and part of his neck in the water.
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