I haven’t posted any knitting reports in a couple of months, I guess. I was busy making a sweater for a baby present. The mother and grandmother have been known to look at this blog, and I didn’t want to spill the beans. By now (actually by ten days ago) the baby has been born, …
Author Archives: deanb
Pine and Palm
On my lunchtime walk today I saw both pine and palm warblers, and two whitethroated sparrows in excellent plumage. The pine was in a deciduous tree about 20 feet off the ground on what I consider the outbound part of the path (the side nearest the Charles) near where the path turns right to return, …
First snake of year
Saturday, April 19, Arlene and I went for a walk once around Cold Spring park. On a trail off the main loop, I heard a rustling in the leaves that for some reason sounded more like a snake slithering away than like a chipmunk jumping away. I looked carefully, and, sure enough, there was a …
Early turtle
Just for the record, there was a turtle near Cutler Pond on Wednesday April 2. While I was walking, I saw a woman with a camera intently looking at the swamp just past the end of the pond. I asked her if she had seen anything interesting, and she said, “yes, two turtles.” They weren’t …
Wildflower seedlings
Last fall I collected some jack-in-the-pulpit seeds out in the woods behind where I work. The directions that I found (on the internet, naturally) for propagating them said to clean the pulp from them and store in a ziplock bag with damp vermiculite in a refrigerator for a few months before planting. The cold storage …
A little woodworking
The bigger woodworking project I did over the weekend was to finish plywood shelves for the baker’s rack and adjust them to fit. In addition, now that I have a light over the little workbench with the lathe and bandsaw on it, I did these: My second bandsaw project. The first was a whale cutout …
Home and Garden Show
We went to the Home and Garden show at Southern Maine University today. It was a nice Maine scale event, a fraction (maybe as much as a quarter, maybe more like a tenth) as big as the Boston Home Show. Just exploring another town past Portland was interesting. We’ve tried to get to Casco from …
NSFW
Somehow, probably from an announcement or an ad in Rubberstampmadness magazine, I saw that Meer Image stamp company was doing a project “Stamp Naked” on nudes. We’ve met Steve Van der Meer, the Meer of Meer Image, at stamp conventions; in fact, he’s the person who gave us the name of the place we buy …
Pic with Dozer
Here’s a picture of me with Anne and Matt’s dog Dozer. Matt took the picture on the 16th, must have been; I’m walking back from the mailbox with the Sunday paper. Dozer likes to go outdoors any chance he gets. The driveway is long enough that by the time I’m back with the paper I’ve …
New meaning to “spyware”
The F-secure blog had a very interesting piece today about targeted malware attacks against pro-Tibet groups. F-Secure is a security software vendor from Finland, in the same business as Symantec and MacAfee. I hadn’t heard of them until I ran across a link to their blog several months ago, because they don’t seem to have …