Planetary Verbosity

Work = lack of blog posts. It’s a simple equation, really…and so true in my case. Now that I’ve gone back to work after using my vacation days (end of the fiscal year), my blogging has hit another slump.

This week at work was actually an eventful one. On Thursday and Friday, I ended up subbing for a co-worker who was using up her own vacation days. It was pretty hectic, although I don’t think it would be bad at all once the person got into a routine. Also on Friday, I dodged a restructuring bullet. I can’t say too much, as my employer (like most) has an electronic communication policy. I’ll just say that our department started out with five people – myself included – and as of March 1, it will be down to three. I got lucky in that I was the first hired for that particular department, and they were eliminating people based on time in position. The two unlucky folks aren’t fired; they’re both being moved to other departments with no pay cuts. Still, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the remaining three of us after the changes take place. We’re usually busy enough as it is now.

In other news, we haven’t been up to the homestead much either. Dave was on an overnight shift, which thankfully ended yesterday, so he didn’t feel like going anywhere, even on his days off. We did go up last Sunday to finish filling the Dumpster in prep for pickup.

In other news, I’m going to switch our photo gallery back to Gallery, as Coppermine is pretty irritating. It’s kind of ugly, and the interface is completely counter-intuitive. Gallery seemed to work much better for me back when I used it before. The only dilemma now is whether to wait for Gallery 3 to be released (supposedly tomorrow – no idea how stable it will be) or install the resource-hogging Gallery 2.3, which is bloated but stable. Since it’s only a day, I may just hold out to see what people think about the first G3 release. I don’t need to install it today.

That said, I did update the gallery while I was on vacation. (Link is in the upper right corner.) I still have quite a few pictures to add, particularly in the homestead nature album, but I think I’ll wait until I install Gallery. I’m going to have lots of homestead nature photos, and I’d like to sort them into various sub-albums like birds, mammals, insects, and flowers. This is an exercise in frustration in Coppermine, so it will be nice to go back to Gallery.

Also, Snoopy (our dog) and Dreyfus (our “goddog”) finally got to meet each other on Thursday. Snoopy is a Bichon Frise and Dreyfus is a standard poodle, so the size difference alone made for an interesting experience. We weren’t sure how the two would react to each other, but they actually got along pretty well. Once Dreyfus had explored our house thoroughly and chewed on a few of Snoopy’s toys, he settled in for a nap, and Snoo got to visit with everyone else – he loves having visitors!

Oh, and finally…remember that tree I was asking about with the cream-colored blossoms and red berries? That’s ok, I didn’t expect you to anyway. Here’s a link to the entry with photos. I still didn’t know what it was until very recently, when I accidentally stumbled upon the galleries of Bob Moul, a nature photographer from Adams County, PA (where I grew up). I immediately noticed the photo for his wild flowers gallery, which he also used as the highlight photo for his white flowers gallery. That, too, was a flower I hadn’t been able to identify, so I excitedly started checking through the gallery…and found it…the blossom from the tree!

Turns out it is an autumn olive tree (Eleaganus umbellata), and the berries are edible! I’ve found recipes for jam, fruit leather, and sauce. There is some debate about this, but I’ve seen information on several sites that say these have quite a bit more lycopene than tomatoes. In any case, it’s an exciting discovery, and we’re going to try the berries later this year. For the record, this tree is considered an invasive species in most states. Considering we have one lone tree which is nearly in the middle of a drainage ditch on our homestead, I’m not too worried about it. There’s not a whole lot we can do with that part of the yard anyway, so we might as well enjoy the berries (and the scent of the blossoms).

By the way, the other flower ID that I found in Bob’s galleries – the highlight photo for his wild flower and white flower galleries – is called Flower-of-an-Hour (Hibiscus trionum). I’d seen some of these in the upper part of the yard and thought they were beautiful, but they didn’t last very long…now I know why. Turns out that each flower only blooms for one day, and it stays open for just a few hours. Here are a couple of my pics:

Bob’s galleries are great, and I’ve bookmarked the page for future reference. Since he lives in a neighboring county, we’ll probably see a lot of the same wildlife, and I’ll be able to use his galleries for identification purposes.