Dancing Cats?

While clicking my way through clikr.co I found this photo. How can you look at this and not laugh? Those cats are getting down!

Round And Round And Round We Go...

So here we go again, changing from one platform to another as yet another blogging site potentially discontinues its services. This time it's Multiply, which in my opinion has by far the best toolset, best features, best privacy controls and best/easiest customization options of any similar site. However they have begun reducing their focus on the social networking and media sharing aspects of the site choosing instead to focus on e-commerce.

There's a new CEO now, and their corporate HQ is moving out of the US to Indonesia. I don't have much faith that things there will stay as they are for long so it's time to go out and test the waters. Multiply will be a hard act to follow, I don't expect to find another site which offers everything they do.

Attack Of The Mantid

Today was very traumatic. I was working in the garden when I was suddenly attacked by a vicious praying mantis. The thing was downright brutal! I saw it coming but couldn't do a thing to stop the ensuing carnage. I'm now mentally scarred for life, at the very least I'm sure to develop an acute case of mantiphobia. I'm grateful it was a baby, an inch long at best, had it been a full grown adult mantis I may not have survived! Fortunately my camera was within reach so I was able to document the attack. Now I can show you the evil monster.

There it is, plotting its brutal attack, moments before it threw me to the ground.

Surveying the carnage and its nearly unconscious victim.

A Robin's Nest

A pair of robins decided to build a nest in the climbing rose just outside my kitchen door. They are industrious little buggers, it took them all of 2 days to build the nest, flying back and forth all day long getting little twigs and pieces of plants.  It amazes me that they can build something so solid, which will last for a couple years, using nothing more than a beak.

It's been a couple weeks since they finished so I decided to have a look inside the nest to see what, if anything, was in there. Fortunately for me the nest is low enough that I can stand on a stool, reach up and fish the camera through the rose ending up in just the right position to photograph the nest and its content. I can't see what I'm photographing but after 5 or 6 shots I finally got a decent one. As you can see there are 4 pretty blue eggs waiting to hatch. I'm hoping the parents haven't been scared away by all the activity happening so close to their nest since they are just a few feet from my kitchen door. They probably aren't real fond of seeing Zeus laying in the window watching them either, lol.

I'll keep an eye on them to see if the eggs hatch and if the babies get fed. If they survive, they better learn how to say "Cheeeeeeese".

A Way To Kill Time If You're Bored

If you're bored and have time to kill you really should head over to clikr.co and start clicking. It's just image after image, clicking one randomly leads to another. There are images of all kinds, from nature photography to self portraits to Photoshopped masterpieces (or messterpieces) to cartoons, you name it. Not all are safe for children due mostly to language with a little bit of adult subject matter occasionally thrown in

I'll leave you with a couple gems to start you off on a cute overload. The first image is the one you'll see if you click the link above

The Smell Of Spring

Tonight I was reminded of one of several sure signs of Spring, the smell of Elaeagnus umbellata, or as it is often known either Autumn Olive or Silverberry. Both of those common names are misleading, it's not an olive and usually fruits in late summer, and the fruit aren't silver. Yay for proper botanical names, at least with those you always know which plant you're talking about.

I don't think much of the plant itself, personally I consider it a noxious weed or a trash plant. It's highly invasive, practically indestructible, and it can and does grow just about anywhere and everywhere. Here in Pennsylvania it grows rampant in roadside areas of all types, from full sun to fairly deep shade. It's not much to look at, a scraggly looking mess with no real shape or form ranging in size from a large shrub to a small tree with a lot of very large thorns. Its leaves have a distinctive silver color on the bottom, often giving the entire plant a silvery appearance.

Then there's the fragrance, drive past a few of these in the evening or throughout the night and it's like you're driving through olfactory heaven. They cover themselves with small creamy white to yellowish flowers that are ridiculously fragrant, sweet but not cloyingly so and with a somewhat spicy smell as well. It's one of my most favorite things to smell. If its essential oils were distilled into a perfume base then any woman wearing it within 50 feet of me would need running shoes and a cattle prod. Yes, it's that good!

The fruit are quite good, however much like a persimmon you better wait until they're fully ripened before eating them. Let's see, how to describe the effects of an unripe persimmon or Elaeagnus fruit, hmmmm..... Have you ever seen the old episode of the Tom and Jerry cartoon where the mouse feeds the cat a spoonful of alum, and it shrivels the cat's head down to about 1/4 size? Well, that's about what an unripe persimmon will do to you, and unripe Elaeagnus isn't far behind. It kind of feels like it's turning your mouth inside out, leaving you with an hours long case of dry mouth. They fruit rather prolifically, large clusters of small red berries resembling semi-translucent holly berries. They are supposedly very nutritious, so eat up!

In bloom, in its full scraggly and shapeless glory. Image found at livingafield.com	Here you can see the silvery underside of the leaves. Image found at discoverlife.org
Last but not least, the fruit. Image found at davesgarden.com

How To Solve The Federal Deficit Problem

I saw this on facebook today and found the thought amusing enough to share. It's elegant in its simplicity but will unfortunately never happen because of that very quality (simplicity), and because it might actually work and that is strictly against Congressional policy. It would also hold Congress accountable for its own incompetence, something those self-serving assholes will never ever do. Ever.

"Pass a law mandating that should the deficit ever exceed 3% of the GDP then all sitting members of Congress would become permanently ineligible for re-election."

Problem solved. Of course there'd have to be an exception written in there for times of war but that should only apply to war to defend the US or answer direct threats, it should not apply to wars on abstract concepts, wars on sovereign countries who pose no threat to us and made no threats against us, nor wars waged to meddle in the affairs of other countries.