Excuses! Excuses! Excuses!

     I had a fine selection of comments on my last post. I posted about painting my fence and suggested that you could volunteer to help. Now the excuses really came on thick and heavy. The end of it was that I was not going to get any help. Most excuses were highly creative.  Now Bob and Bob my neighbors only do oral comments and I will hear from them when I see them.

     I referred to Mark Twain's story Tom Sawyer and the Fence. Now as it turns out Tom Sawyer was a master a making excuses. Tom Sawyer was painting the fence because of an excuse.

      One day Aunt Polly was missing some of he jam. She picked on Tom as a likely suspect but Tom wriggled out of it and sneaked away. Aunt Polly was more worried that Tom would skip school. (Which he did.) So this excuse worked for Tom. 

     Tom went downtown and got into a terrible fight and his clothes were ripped and dirty. This really caught Aunt Polly's attention so Tom was assigned to paint the fence on a  Saturday morning when he really wanted to be downtown. So by getting people to paint the fence, the job was done quickly and Tom was able to go down town after all.

     So you see Tom was a master at making excuses. Some excuses worked and some didn't.

     Now I know all of you can make excuses. What are some excuses that worked? What excuses failed? What excuses backfired? What excuse worked over and over again. What excuses never worked?

Red and the Fence.

     I'm painting a fence. Where is Tom Sawyer when I need him?

     One of my favorite stories is Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and the Fence. In this story Aunt Polly assigns Tom to white wash the fence. The first person to come along wanted to paint as Tom had made the job look very interesting. Tom said, "No, it would be too hard to do." Well some money was exchanged and the guy painted for a while. Somebody else came by and the same action took place. In the end the fence was painted three times and Tom Sawyer was a wealthy kid.

    Well, you know what I'm after here. I'm looking for a little help. Now most of you will say that you live too far away. But my two neighbors, Bob and Bob, who read this blog, are probably  heading for the hills. They are the only ones close enough to help me!

   Now every other summer there is a fence around my place that needs painting. Preparing the fence for painting is a lot of work and then the painting starts. Yesterday was 30 C (90 F). That's too hot to work.

    So slowly slowly the fence will get painted and then on to the next maintenance job.

Tough Gardening

       I watch with envy as gardeners further south  show plants that are well developed and I'm still shovelling snow. I'm posting about shoveling snow while others are looking forward to salads from the garden.

      I know that there are plant zones based different characteristics. I'm in a zone that has an average of 114 frost free days a year. The average day for the last frost is May 23. Plants must be hardy enough to with stand a winter temperature of minus 46 C (minus 45 F). However, for this post I'm not worried about that as I'm dealing with a vegetable garden with annual plants.

      I seed my garden about May 21. The soil temperature has risen high enough for germination to take place. Plant development is very slow until mid to late June. Then with long hours of  sunlight , the plants develop as if by magic. All of a sudden pea pods are ready to form. Lettuce and radishes have been eaten for a while. So we have long days at this time of year and that makes plants develop rapidly.

     We also receive most of our yearly precipitation from late May to early July. We receive annual precipitation of 12 inches per year. That's right...12 in per year! Since it comes at the right time we produce huge amounts of grain.

Corn is difficult to grow. This variety will get about twice as tall. 

Potatoes are starting to spread out.

Beans are not too far from forming pods, but the carrots haven't got started yet.

And I've got tomatoes on my plants!

       Do I enjoy gardening? You bet I do! I enjoy watching the progress of the plants and eating fresh produce from the garden. I hate the produce you buy in the store.

An Ipad Mini

      I recently came to possess a sleek, shiny new ipad mini!

      Now I've been here before. I got an ipod a couple of years ago. It took a long time before I conquered that little ipod.  I thought I might have to get a kid to help me, but no way I figured things out  by myself.

      Now the ipad mini does an amazing number of things. It does more than my old tower computer and a lot faster. I'm looking forward to doing all (well some of them) the cool things an ipad can do.

    Now this time I'm not going to play the hero and set up everything on my own. No sir! I've got a very good self help book form the library. You know the ones that have dummies in the title.

Side by side!

    I'm also going to do something quite brilliant.. Well, brilliant may not be the best word. Our library has a special staff member to help people with computer issues. Yes, I'm going to make an appointment and have this ipad set up so that it will do everything except wash the dishes.

I think I'm going to do a post on the ipad!

My Canada Day

      Yesterday was Canada Day and a day for all kinds of public events and interesting activities. These events were all in the name of celebrating our country's 147 birthday. We live in  beautiful land and wonderful country. There's lots to celebrate. I have been with this country for over half of it's life!

     Now , I'm not big on public celebrations. I'm happier to go off by myself and wander through an area that still has the native habitat. So yesterday, the Micro manager and a friend went to the local celebrations and I went off for a walk through the local nature sanctuary. Don't get me wrong. I like my country and think I'm most fortunate to have had my family make the choice to live here.

     I took my camera and knew what I was looking for but thought I was too late as the flower I was looking for bloomed about mid June. I thought I might as well look. I did find Lady's slippers. The first find was of very brown and long past due bloom. A little while later I found a lady slipper in full bloom. It made my day. I took many more photos of flowers , but I dumped most of them as they were not in focus.

The faded lady slipper

The lady slipper in full bloom

I'll leave this one for you to identify!

Common Wild Rose

The trail I spent my time on.

A really healthy wetland. Well maybe not. It's choked with reed canary grass.

Blogger Glitch

     Last week there was a glitch on blogger. Some people used more colorful language to describe it. The people who use Word Press or others knew nothing about this problem.

    When a blogger posts you are notified with a small part of the blog topic covered. This usually lets you see up to 20 blogs or more depending on how you set it. If you're more than 20 blog behind in your reading you click "view more" and you see older blogs.

    Well last week blogger decided to show only one post at a time. So what ends up happening you miss 10 or 20 blogs because only one is shown at a time.

   Now when a glitch like this happens  , at first I don't notice it. When I do notice it I click on view more. Nothing happens so I click a few more times and I still have only one blog listed. So then I decide to go away for a while and think that when I come back the issue will have disappeared. Well it didn't disappear. I'll wait until tomorrow. The next day the issue is still there.  Meanwhile I'm missing reading blogs that are important to me. Okay, I'll go to my reading list and click  blogs one at a time and read them.. If some one has posted I'll read it. Now this is a lot of work because  most people don't post everyday.

   Finally, I go to the blogger help. Click on trouble shoot issues. Keep narrowing down the issues until you get to your issue. A form comes up and you leave blogger a description of the problem. They direct you to a forum and if that doesn't work some one will email you. At once I could see that the problem was not only mine. It looked as if it was a blogger problem. Many people had gone to blogger help.

    A couple of days later blogger had fixed the problem. 

   It's just that I go into panic mode and start beating myself up for the problem. It's nice when the problem is  solved. Did anybody else experience this problem? What did you do?. 
    

Surprise Video

      The other day, driving through the mountains, my wife must have become completely bored or awed by the scenery. My wife decided that to take some photos while we were driving would be a good idea.

     Now let's back up a bit. My wife doesn't do anything digital. She's used the camera a couple of times with my directions. Each time she uses the camera, it's how do I turn this thing on? And what do I press to take a picture?

   As I was driving , I couldn't offer her much assistance. She got the camera turned on. Then , "I can only see a picture!" How do I gt it to take a picture. I realized the camera was on playback images so had to tell her to slide the bar to the left to get to take pictures. She couldn't find take pictures.

    Finally I realized she was on video. So that's alright just slide the bar  a little further left. "Oh now I've got it!" she says. She then took a few photos as we were driving in the car.

   Well, two or three photos and that was enough for her.

   When I got home and downloaded the photos, I noticed a video. Yes she did press take a photo. So I have a very surprising and poor video. There's the back end of a semi stuck in front of me , but the trees are really zooming along at the side of the road and there's a good view of the dash of the car. 

    Now I've never loaded a video on my blog. I'm not sure I did the right thing. so feel free to give me some advice.