My trainer took this photo a few days ago of Havoc, her 24 year old Thoroughbred. I can still remember how thrilled I was the first time she asked me if I wanted to ride him, twelve years ago. I leased him briefly before I bought Hap, and he is probably the best trained horse I have ever ridden. I still go back to him occasionally as a schoolmaster, because if you can’t get Havoc to do something, it is definitely operator error.
Saturday, a friend and I walked out to look for prairie anenomes, also known as windflowers or pasque flowers, and found a hillside filled with them.
Updated links to galleries so they should work now.
I’ve created two new galleries of gnofract4 fractals, Gallery 3 and Gallery 4 in addition to the ones, Gallery 1 and Gallery 2, that I put up about a year ago.
If you want to see more, the developer of gnofract4d now has a blog called Chaos Engine showing his fractals.
I’ve been running Ubuntu as my desktop Linux distribution for several months. About my only disappointment with Ubuntu was that it didn’t include gnofract4d in the universe or multiverse repositories. gnofract4d is a fractal exploration program that I like to use.
Last week, I decided to see if I could figure out the dependencies the gnofract4d needs to run on Ubuntu. I downloaded the gnofract4d tar file from SourceForge, and started trying to install it. An hour later, after I used Synaptic to install g++-3.4, gtk2-engines-dev, and python2.4-dev and their dependencies, gnofract4d was running on my system. I had already installed gcc (the compiler gnofract4d uses) previous to this.
gnofract4d is under continuous development. There were a lot of improvments since the last time I had used it under Fedora Core six months ago. It also seems a lot more stable. I used to crash it on a fairly regular basis, but don’t seem to be able to do that any more.
My trainer took this photo of me riding Hap yesterday, on a beautiful spring day. There were still a lot of soggy places in the arena, but the footing wasn’t at all slick.
I had heard about Freecycle some time ago, but there didn’t seem to be an active local group. A few days ago, I checked again, and found that the Freecycle yahoogroup for our area had grown to 800 members.
Freecycle started as a way to exchange goods that were no longer wanted and keep them out of landfills. In our abundant society, people frequently discard things that are still useful, or would be to someone else. I take a lot of our discards to Goodwill, but I didn’t think Goodwill would welcome a short cord of firewood.
Since we hadn’t used our wood stove for several years, and finally sold it last summer, we didn’t need the firewood. Worse still, the firewood was stacked along our dog run fence, and two of the local dogs had discovered that it made a perfect ramp allowing them to jump in and join our dogs, which also gave them access through a dog door to the mudroom. (This was especially annoying since these dogs were chewers, and we didn’t have the mud room policed for dogs that chew. I try to keep the chemicals in the mud room secure, but don’t normally have to worry about the rest of the room.) We put up some mesh to keep the dogs off the wood, which worked but made the area even more of an eyesore. I had thought about putting a sign offering the firewood out on our road, but hadn’t gotten around to it.
Freecycle asks that your first post to the list be an offer, so I offered the firewood on Wednesday afternoon. I had over ten responses in twenty minutes. After a little correspondence with the first responder, I had arranged for her to come and pick up the firewood on Thursday afternoon. She and her two children arrived promptly at the arranged time, and it took us less than an hour to load the wood into her cargo van. I had no idea you could fit so much into one of those big vans.
Freecycle accepts posts about almost any legal item except for firearms, alcohol and tobacco. You are also allowed to post an occasional “wanted” item, and the one that amused me most was someone requesting a size 10 blue evening gown. The request was fulfilled the same day.
I don’t recall how I stumbled across the Cooking for Engineers weblog, but love the idea. Doesn’t the Roasted Asparagus Spears recipe look good?
I was stopped by a train while leaving our valley yesterday, so I had the chance to take this photo which is typical of Colorado in the spring. Click on the photo to see it at a much higher resolution.
Although we still have some large drifts and most of the ground is still covered with snow, everything looks distinctly soggy. The road by our house was plowed at 11:00 am yesterday. Once again I was happy that not only did we find a place on a school bus route, but it is a school bus route that seems to be early on the schedule of places to plow.
I did have to dig the Suburu out of the garage. (We have a huge drift that forms right outside our garage door when we have storms with lots of wind.) Every few years we will have a big storm and I resolve to park the cars at the end of the driveway when a big storm is forecast. Then we get a few overhyped storms and I decide it’s not worth doing so, and leave the cars in the garage so they get snowed in.
I had heard about the satellite imagery that had been added to Google Maps but didn’t play with it until this morning, when I found this aerial map of our place, the L-shaped house inside the curve of the road. I called Jack in to look at it, and he said “What does that tell you?” “That there is no privacy?”
We spent some time looking at the map, and decided, based on the available clues, that the photos were taken last fall.
I am amazed that I can identify our round pen, stock trailer and propane tank. I was also amused to see that our driveway is in the wrong place according to their algorithm.
This is the mud room door which I used when I was feeding the horses during the storm. Good thing it opens inward. The stockade fence to the side of the photo is five feet high. The dog door is buried beneath the drift beside the door. Lody, our Smooth Collie, always uses the dog door, and it took me a while to convince her that there was no way she was going to be able to burrow her way out and that she had to use the regular door. She is one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known, but not necessarily the brightest.
I dug around the barn enough to let Lily and Rags out of their stalls. Smoke was already out of the barn, since one of this little eccentricities is that he cannot be shut in a stall. He will batter his way out in what is apparently a panic attack. He doesn’t mind being in a small area like the hay aisle where he spent the storm, as long as he has a way out. Fortunately, the winds were blowing from the north and west, so the hay aisle door which faces east was sheltered.
I had to open Rags’ stall first, and Lily became sufficiently frantic to get out that I decided it would be safest to lead her out through the hay aisle since it took me about thirty minutes to clear the outside gate to her stall. Both horses celebrated by galloping around and then rolling in the fresh snow before settling to eat some hay.