My chives are blooming.
Author: Elaine
Columbine
Yesterday, I planted this yellow columbine. The three that I planted last year have not yet completely bloomed, but two of them look close to doing so. I love columbines.
Meadowlarks and Irises
My friend and I took Havoc and Lily out on a short trail ride today in the mid-afternoon. I had spent some time training Lily to get in my trainer’s trailer and we both needed a break. Although Lily loads fine into a slant load, she doesn’t like the looks of my trainer’s straight load two horse trailer. She also loads well into my stock trailer as long as there aren’t any horses in it. Nor does she permit any other horses to be loaded behind her. Since my stock trailer has no dividers, this means that a three horse trailer can only hold one horse.
Last year when I took Lily out on trail rides, she rarely wanted to stop and graze. She has relaxed a lot since then, or grown up a bit, because she now is quite eager to graze. Since I’ve done a lot of clicker training with her, I just click to her when I wish her to eat. She seems to really like trail rides now, and all the juicy grass, which is usually hard to come by in Colorado.
While we were out on the trail, we listened to the meadowlarks, and looked at the profusion of wildflowers. We ride on a ranch (slated for development, unfortunately) and most of it is open grasslands and rolling hills, overlooked by Pikes Peak. Our prize find among the wildflowers was a single, perfect wild iris. We didn’t see any pronghorns like we did on our last ride. It is still not unusual to see them west of I-25, despite the encroachment of suburbs.
Spinach
I learned something very interesting today. If you put enough balsamic vinegar on it, even spinach becomes edible. I wonder if it would work for kale and collard greens.
Dudley
The first time I found Dudley in the bathtub I had walked into the bathroom without any lights and there was this large black thing in the tub. It was a bad moment. Dudley does large black thing better than any other dog we have ever had.
Time to find his wading pool.
Silly
So this is just plain silly 🙂
Tranquil
More on my move from MovableType to WordPress
My old Movable Type syndication feed is now working again, with the help of people from the IRC freenode #wordpress channel. Comments seem to be working as well, since Ralph of Makes me Ralph commented on my photo of oregano that I posted a few days ago.
It has been interesting watching the reactions to the new Movable Type (MT) licensing scheme. My decision to change weblog software was triggered by my web host deciding to no longer allow Movable Type. I like the stability and longetivity of my provider, and worried that changing providers would result in a much slower system. I also hated the idea that my new host might dissallow Movable Type at some point. However, I probably would have found a new provider, if I hadn’t read the MT 3.0 license (in its first incarnation) and decided that it was time to go with a GPL solution. When I first started using MT back in August 2003, I donated to the company and had a ball setting up a weblog for myself, my husband, and loading my site into MT and using it as a content management system.
I loved Movable Type, but I must be fickle: I love WordPress too. I like the fact that I no longer have to wait for long rebuilds of my database. I like the fact that I can change the underlying code legally. I like the user interface. I like how easy it was to install. I like the support on the forum and on IRC. Certainly, it has a few rough edges, and I would not recommend it for non-techies, but then I always thought that non-technies were better off with TypePad than Movable Type. I still feel that way.
Bleeding Heart
Today, I went to the annual Horticultural sale down by Colorado College. I only bought two phlox there, but admired this bleeding heart plant while I was looking around.
WordPress
It is almost looking like home again. WordPress has one nice feature, which I didn’t realize until I watched Jack pull up my site in his browser on his PC. If WordPress detects that you are a user with update capability for the particular weblog, it displays an “Edit this” link. I had a small edit link for my Movable Type weblog posts, but it desplayed to everyone.