Sunday, April 22, 2007

frogs, tarantulas, drama, honour roll, hockey, and a boat load of images

Long time no see! I have not been running. I see a doctor tomorrow to determine the trouble with the inside ball of my left foot. I expect I have a stress fracture or something similar from the run across the ice in March. I have no regrets at all. It's only another hurdle to cross in this adventure. I also have a nasty looking toe nail that I expect I'll lose sometime in the not so distant future. I've got excellent fitting shoes for the sport, but I guess the repeated compression can create issues regardless of the fit.

Work is booming. I have an abundance of jobs pending which is good for cash flow, but not so good for writing. I've written a few short stories, but like most of my stuff they are more akin to scenes and remain without the context of a plot.

I managed to cut and fit a fine French clock with a wheel that I cut from scratch in March. I took a pile of time to work on a gear cutter which is one of those long standing unfinished projects. I got the wheel done, but the project remains open. The crossing out is lame, but at that point I hadn't proven whether it was going to work and there was this little matter of a deadline.

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I've been driving back and forth to the city way too often. Last week I was in on Monday to help host an evening with Stan Schultz. Stan wrote the popular "Tarantula Keeper's Guide". I met him on line and he contacted me recently wondering if some local enthusiasts might like to get together and talk tarantulas. I made some wonderful bread and Carlos and Isabel made some tasty cannelloni and some kind of sausage dish. Lots of onions and garlic. How can you go wrong there? My bread had a bulb of garlic in the two loaves, lots of parsley and plenty of sharp cheddar. It sold well.

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I'm still really enjoying the learning curve on the tarantulas. This little guy molted last week and looks so handsome in his new coat. One of the younger scorpions molted too, which looked really cool. It's wild how they do all their growing in one giant step. The colour of this guy's carapice was like bright copper. The same type of copper that you have taking emory paper to copper pipe. Do you think I could capture that on the camera? No... :(

Grammostola rosea - Chilean rose copper

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Wednesday night was the local MHS meeting and again Carlos was up and presented a short primer on photography for those that would hope to emulate his skills. I'd like to emulate my way into a better camera!

There are still snow banks in the shade away from the sun's strong rays, but spring is bursting forth as it does at this time of year. The rush to life is remarkable the farther north one goes. It's dry though and although the well is nicely topped up, we are all wondering if there will be enough to drink come August.

I'm baby sitting a few frogs for a friend and I've bought an expensive corn snake. Now the fun with genetics can begin in earnest. These are red eyed tree frogs. Not the greatest shots, but time was limited and what about that new camera? It's time to do some shopping!

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Here's my little banded rubber frog. I would so love to put him in the retf vivarium. I still have some homework to do on that one though.

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The computer is rebuilt and I'm running Suse Enterprise 10 (desktop). So far it's been OK, but without being able to do my updates, it's tough to say how much of what's left in questions are really flies in the ointment and how much is just waiting for an update. It's been a bit painful, but the hardware is all where I want it to be and I have a working installation of XP. I've been without windoz for a couple of years so it will be interesting to play there a bit once again. I do need to go and clean up some of the backup issues I missed on this install. Once that's done I can move onto Debian. FC6 won't behave with a serial modem. Unreal! Disappointed!

The girls have been up to no good. Boo and Manon won first in their respective categories for entries they made for remembrance day. Bonnie for a black and white drawing/poster and Manon for poetry.

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They also both made the honour roll. I don't think Boo has ever not made it, but it was a first for Manon and she was all over the prize. All the kids that made the roll got taken to the finals for the world women's hockey tournament in Winnipeg. They got to see the silver and gold medal rounds. It was a pretty high day to say the least.

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The drama production of Pride and Prejudice went off well enough. Boo had some fun and Manon's Kevin was suitably uncomfortable playing across from Boo.

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