My niece Anna’s birthday was September 11. Of course I was late to get her present to her. But I think it was worth the wait. I had gone to Target looking for something “Hello Kitty”, upon Beth’s recommendation. I found a little section that had some Hello Kitty stuff. I settled on a picture scrapbook. It had some gelpens and some stickers. I thought Anna could maybe use it as a sketchbook. On my way out, I passed electronics… then I saw it: A Hello Kitty digital camera! And it was on clearance! It’s nothing fancy, mind you, but it takes some okay-sized pictures.
Brent sent me a link to her pictures so far. You can see them HERE. I think she’s doing a pretty good job of picture taking!
Here’s a self portrait:
Why was there no picture? As part of the updating process, WordPress suggests backing-up all your data. There’s a handy program that helps you do that. It takes a while. I apparently have backed up my data and it’s being stored on the same disk as my regular content. I have now exceeded my storage limits. I’m guessing I need to remove the back up data and save it to the hard drive of my computer? I won’t be able to take care of that this morning. Hopefully I can fix that tonight some time.
Postscript: Thanks for helping me fix it, Lloyd.
I was out in my garden a little yesterday. I wanted to harvest a green pepper for dinner. While I was out there, I noticed a sleeping bee. I remembered them from last year, so I had to get my camera for some pictures. In fact, I saw three separate sleeping bees. They were bumblebees that were just hanging on to flowers and getting ready for the evening. I got some nice pictures for my book – “Sleeping Bees”. I think it’ll be a hit.
Walking past my spiderflowers was the “yikes” part. They are covered with beetles. One of the flower spikes has completely died from the infestation. The others don’t look very happy. After looking them up, I have identified them as harlequin bugs. Normally when I have pests, I leave them to the predators or pick them off by hand. This infestation calls for poison. To the death store! …I mean, Home Depot!
The sleeping bee:
The harlequin bugs:
My pond outside is shallow and lined with rocks. That makes the water evaporate pretty quickly. To refill it, I just let the hose run for an hour or so. Besides filling the pond, the water overflows into my carniverous plant bog. As the water runs, I also scoop water out with a bucket and water all my potted plants outside. The pond water is nutritious, and I don’t have to unroll the hose all the way to my front steps where the potted plants are.
Last night after I had finished scooping water, there was something stuck to the bottom of the bucket. It was a worm of some kind. I have seen worms in the pond before, but they’re tiny little flatworms. This one was big and fat and freaked me out a little. Even more freaky was the fact that one end seemed to be sticking to the bucket while the other end poked around. It looked like a leech! I walk around in that pond, dang it! I have to go in there to clean the filter and to pull out algae. Now what am I going to do? Wear plastic bags on my feet?
My only consolation is the fact that it looked kind of dimply instead of segmented. I don’t know if that means it was a juvenile or if that means it was a different kind of worm. And even if it was a leech, the books say few leeches actually attach to people… most eat decaying matter or small organisms. Hopefully this was not a blood-sucker. I guess I’ll find out the next time I wade into the pond.
I like to read before I go to sleep. In the summertime, I read novels. During the school year, I only get about three pages read and then I fall asleep, so I read catalogs or gardening encyclopedias, or collections of short stories.
I am currently reading The Arabian Nights. I have an abridged version of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation. (The unabridged version fills several volumes and would be an excellent Christmas present for me.) It’s a little hard to read because it’s was translated in the late 1800′s. The language is very formal. It reminds me of the King James version of the Bible. But the stories are very interesting. Not at all like the Disney movies. In fact, the movie “Aladdin” contains almost nothing from the original story of Aladdin, except the main character’s name and the fact that there’s a genie in a lamp.
It’s a good night-time book because it’s fragmented into small stories that I can read in their entirety before I fall asleep. I don’t read much other than bedtime. There’s too much TV that needs watching.
I think my pencil sharpener experiment is over. A $40 sharpener is not tough enough to withstand middle schoolers. The sharpener comes with some sensor that decides if your pencil is already sharp enough. If it says “yes”, the cutting blades retract and stop sharpening. It appears to be malfunctioning and not letting you sharpen at all. The kids have been complaining about it quite a bit, so I tried it on a new, unsharpened pencil. It only took the edges off the flat head. I jammed it in harder and was able to almost get a point.
I’m kind of disappointed. I thought it would last longer than one month.
I will have to try a more expensive model next. Will it be the crazy expensive ones Lloyd suggested? He suggested this one and this one. Maybe I’ll just go back to buying a manual wall-mounted crank model…
