The Hothouse

A few years ago I got a portable greenhouse for Christmas. It's been sitting in my garage until now because I don't start very many plants. Also, I live in a pretty temperate zone. I've been considering it as my emergency tent in case there's ever a natural disaster that makes my home unlivable.

But April is Camp NaNoWriMo, so I decided to set it up so I could get the true camping experience without actually leaving my property and its associated modern plumbing and wifi. After I mowed the weeds of the back lawn down to manageable size,

(I kept the flowering weeds because they're pretty.)

I started wrestling with the greenhouse. There's a picture of a smiling woman who's probably in her seventies strolling along with the greenhouse carrying case looped over her shoulder. I'm pretty sure she's only smiling because she's been watching some other poor sap try to put the thing together.

First off the directions are in English, but they've clearly been translated. Infinitives are their friends. "To put the pole in the canvas tab." I kept struggling on a section and only after I'd worked it out would I realize what the instructions were talking about. That's not actually a very helpful order of operations. But I persevered and eventually got it all together.

I'll give it one thing -- it holds the heat. I had to find and open the doors before I could figure out the poles because it was too hot to stand in otherwise.

The worst part is that there's no floor. That, in itself, is not a problem. But nature consists of 1 part dirt to 99 parts bugs, so the first thing that happened is that all the bugs in the grass that could fly immediately took off and got stuck inside on the roof of this thing. I could literally close my eyes and listen to the tick tick tick of little insect bodies smacking into the roof.

So I put down a bunch of cardboard to keep the rest of the insects down and then put up a string of solar lights. I'm not sure the solar lights work since I couldn't get them to turn on yesterday afternoon, but it was still light out and I might not have covered the sensor. I'll try again when it's dark. Hopefully all the inside bugs will have died or escaped by then.

And even if it doesn't work as a writing tent I can always use it to burn away a 6x6' section of weeds on my lawn.

The Great Escape

* Cue the Mission Impossible music * (It's here if you can't remember it.)

This is Ripley. Isn't he handsome? Look at those bedroom eyes... or, I guess he was just sort of sleepy since I woke him up for this photo.

Ripley likes to chew on inanimate objects. He's not like Crow, who used to loudly chew on things right before mealtimes because she knew it drove me crazy and I would feed her earlier. No, Ripley will hop down from eating his breakfast and go to town on something like this box.

He's a big fan of plastic, cardboard, and fleece. I consider it a sign of my amazing abilities as a pet owner that Ripley has made it through fifteen years without needing surgery to remove something from his intestines.

Here is another one of his projects.

For many years that was a very small tear in the screen, but then Ripley decided to chew on the edges and now it's not so small. Ripley will be right by the door every time I come home, but it's not so he can rush outside -- he wants to greet me and the dogs. So Ripley made this hole in the screen, but did nothing with it...

This is Guido-You-Bastard. Six months of steroids to treat his lymphoma have made him a bit... portly. I may change his name from Guido to Gordo if this keeps up. He has a history of successful escape attempts, but his increased bulk plus my latest attempt at putting a cover over the cat patio have stymied him since last summer.

Guido waited until Ripley had made the hole big enough and then took advantage of it.

This is Mackie. She's a conure. She has a scream that can be heard three houses away even with all my windows closed. (The only saving grace is that my birds are quiet when it's dark.)

Mackie has strong views about whether cats are supposed to be in the back yard, so she started screaming and didn't stop even when I called back to her.

The problem with using Mackie as an alarm is that she screams quite a lot. It's kind of what conures do. Cats in the yard. People in the yard. Birds in the yard. Clouds in the sky. You get the picture -- she screams and I mostly ignore it because otherwise it would drive me crazy. So I wasn't really paying attention until she'd been screaming for a minute or so.

What really got me going to look, though, was Ripley coming to find me with his worried "hall monitor kitty" meow. That's what he does when he sees something that he's pretty sure I would want to know about. Ripley's the double-agent in this story. He enabled the escape and then immediately blabbed.

Anyhow, the great escape was foiled before Guido got more than two feet away from the house, and he let me pick him up and bring him inside without any fuss. I think he really just wanted to go outside and meet the neighborhood cats who hang out in my yard when the dogs aren't patrolling.

Sorry about getting the Mission Impossible theme stuck in your head.

Just an Excuse

This is just an excuse to put some dog pictures here. These are from the southern edge of town taken over the weekend.

I love how all my pictures of the big dog have the ratty-looking leash in them. I guess I could get him a new leash, but I think it's a good representation of my brand...

Supernova

It started out as a picture of gravel and then ended up like this. Overall, I'd say GIMP was both a fun and useful subject for Thingadailies. I got a lot of fun pictures out of it and I've gotten a lot more comfortable editing photos. The only thing I didn't really mess with was text, but that can wait until I need it...

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I'm making one image a day for Thingadailies.

Leaf Imprint

I really do enjoy the liquid metal effect of the wave tool. I didn't quite get the gradient I was going for on the imprint itself, but maybe next time...

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I'm making one image a day for Thingadailies.

Moss

We had some moss growing on these posts at work. I liked the colors and the textures. The filter takes away from the textures a bit, but I still like the way it turned out.

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I'm making one image a day for Thingadailies.

Odd Bark

It started out as a picture of bark. Then I started playing with color mapping and blur. If you don't have a headache before looking at this, you probably will after a few minutes.

It actually looks like a blurry slide of some sort of tissue under a microscope. All I can say is that if this is what your biopsy looks like, it's time to find an exorcist.

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I'm making one image a day for Thingadailies.