Five Acres with a View

Madeline recognised me instantly from past visits: “She who takes small Australian Shepherds for walks.”

I saw this eight foot high hollyhock in Encino during my trip.

My mother and her cat, Smokie, are staying with us while we wait for their furniture to be delivered from Southern California. Smokie came through the trip on the airplane like a trooper: the first cat that I ever knew who headed for the food bowl as soon as she got out of the crate after a trip. Most seem to want to hide under the bed.

All the airline staff were cooing over her, and then grunting when they had to pick up the crate.

I am writing this from a converted chicken coop near beautiful downtown Encino. I am briefly in Southern California to help with my mother’s move to Colorado Springs. Yesterday, my sister, her son and daughter, and I packed the items that will be moving. Today I will run some errands, and tomorrow we will do some last minute packing before the movers come on Wednesday.

My sister has converted an old chicken coop behind her house to an office which is where I am sleeping. She graciously granted me the password to her computer and I promised not to change anything on it. She says that techies always want to change her computer. I only have to suppress the urge to download and install Mozilla about once every two or three minutes. I find Internet Explorer so limited. I did find some problems with my weblog design under IE, but will wait until I get back home to try and address them.

Originally, the dog run extended all the way to the horse field. However, sharing a common fence line allowed the horses (primarily Smoke) and the dogs to spend far too much time entertaining themselves by fence fighting. In an effort to save our ear drums, and those of our neighbors, Jack put up the chain link panels creating what we call the “buffer zone.” Occasionally, we let the horses into the buffer zone to eat down the grass, and a good time is had by all.

Cheryl Rae describes an interesting design process tool called Polar Adjectives at Sundancers, Wild Women and DreamWeavers.

Why do people have to use cute capitalization when they name their tools? I have yet to spell BloGTK without having to correct it.

I am using the Movable Type blogging system option in the Account and Settings section. In my first post, I had something that made the BloGTK parser choke, but it seems to be working now. BlogGTK is an offline editor written in Python which works under Linux.

My chives are blooming.

Yesterday, I planted this yellow columbine. The three that I planted last year have not yet completely bloomed, but two of them look close to doing so. I love columbines.