New Toy

I just learned about Shuttercal, which is a photo sharing site where you load one photo per day into a calendar. It's an intriguing idea. I still send most of my pictures to Flickr, but as far as I know they don't have a calendar format like this. Here is the lastest picture from the Shuttercal sharing tool.

landscape timbers and wood products marketing

We have been working on this project to mark the edge of our driveway
with landscapte timbers. Just another course or two to go.

I went to Lowe's to get more timbers and found out they were on sale
at just under two dollars for pressure treated, eight foot timbers.
How can they even make any money selling at these prices? Is it meant
to be a loss leader? Or, is the goal to entice people into the store
and buy other things. Probably, they just have a lot of them to get
rid of. I just don't understand marketing.

These pictures were sent with Picasa, from Google.
Try it out here: http://picasa.google.com/

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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BBC News - Woolly mammoth extinction 'not linked to humans'

BBC News - Woolly mammoth extinction 'not linked to humans'

I am of course familiar with the story that the mammoths were destroyed by ice-age hunters, who hunted them to extinction. It turns out that the warmup after the ice ages helped the spread of forests, which reduced the grazing for mammoths.

When you think about the old story, there are questions. Native Americans never hunted out the buffaloes or any other game animal they hunted. Why should their ancestors have done that?

As a forester, I always think of any increase in forest area as something to be desired. But it doesn't seem to be if you are a woolly mammoth!

heirloom tomatoes

This summer we planted some new variety of tomatoes, that we didn't

know much about. One was cherokee red, pictured here.

When ripe, they are dusky red. At first I wasn't sure they were ripe, but they definitely were, They are very tasty tomatoes that I would definitely grow again.

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Willows

I usually walk in Norlo Park every day, sometimes twice, with the dog. These willows get only minimal trimming. I think they just trim the low-hanging branches. Yet, they always look like they are sculpted. These trees are doing great near by the edge of the stream.

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Photo Friday Challenge: Crooked

These are redwoods in the Arcata Community Forest Park in California. Old redwood forests tend to have a lot of leaning and fallen trees.

Northanger Abbey

I just finished reading Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. I found it lighter in tone than her other novels. It seemed like she really had a lot of fun with the characters and the plot. I enjoyed the parts, early in the story, where Catherine discusses the value of novels and novel-reading with some of the other characters. She is surprised that men can like novels, just like women, as Henry Tilney does.

I really enjoyed how Catherine works herself up to a frightful state by imaging things in the bedroom where she is staying in Northanger Abbey. Out of thin air she builds up a suspicion that General Tilney murdered his wife, even though nothing like that happened. But in the end, Catharine shows her good sense and sense of humor.

It was shameful how the General sent her away when he realized that Catherine wasn't a rich heiress. The story made me really feel the injustice of having to return home in a public carriage.

There's really a lot of satire in the novel. Mrs. Allen is just an empty airhead, concerned only with fashion. John Thorpe, in addition to being a boring, self-absorbed braggart, was also the source of the General's misunderstanding. He richly deserved to never find a wife!

All in all, this is a great story. I would like to read the text this time. Although audio version was full text, I bet it would be better still to read it.

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