Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Heidi needs a new home!

Heidi needs a new home!  Jamulian Steve K. wrote to tell me about Heidi, a female shepherd mix dog who belongs to a relative who can no longer care for her.  Heidi is shy, but very sweet – and desperately needs a new loving home.  She's currently located in Hemet.  If you're interested in adopting Heidi, or know someone who might be, please give Steve a call at 619-669-1967. 

Another busy day for us...

Another busy day for us...  Yesterday, that is.  We spent the morning at a local paint store, where their color expert helped us select paint colors for our new home.  If it were up to me, I'd just pick some nice off-white color and paint the whole house with it :)  Debbie had other ideas – and we ended up with a total of ten different colors, and I have to admit that I like both the selections and the variety.  Most of them are shades of browns and blue-greens, mostly quite light.  A couple of rooms will be a fairly bright creamy yellow color.  The door casings, baseboards, and crown moldings will be bright white. 

The process of choosing the colors was entirely new to me.  We visited the store late last week, and they told us to come back with samples of our flooring and pictures of rooms we like the looks of (gleaned from the web).  Yesterday we did that, and looked dozens of paint sample chips against both the flooring samples and the photos we'd collected.  The fluorescent store lighting threw off my perception of the colors; I had to keep taking them to a sunlit doorway to see what they really looked like (often quite different than under fluorescent lighting, which there will be none of in our home, as I absolutely detest it).  To my surprise, Debbie and I converged on each color choice fairly quickly.

We had a lovely evening, going out to dinner with the couple who were our realtors for our new home purchase, and who are becoming good friends.  They live just a few miles south of us, outside the town of Avon.  Last night they took us to a restaurant we'd never been to before: the Copper Mill, in downtown Logan.  Debbie had grilled salmon and asparagus, which she pronounced as excellent (hard for her to say about someone else's grilled salmon, as it's one of her specialties).  I had a concoction they call “Burbank”: chicken breast, ham, smoked bacon, tomato, avocado, and mozzarella drizzled with hollandaise sauce – it will make your brains fall out.  Both of us had mango lemonade to drink, served with lemon quarters floating in it – delicious!  A meal like that, with the good company of our friends, was a real treat.

Today we have two contractors coming out.  One will be doing some plumbing work: fixing a drainage issue in the basement, and installing a new water softener.  The other will be fixing some major problems with our spring development (our home's water comes from a spring).  It's been neglected for many years, is falling apart, and is seriously ugly with a “concentration camp” style barbed-wire topped fence surrounding it (more a problem for our neighbor than for us, but we're embarrassed by it).  We're having it fixed up and made into something we hope better disappears into the background.

Parody posters appearing in Los Angeles...

Parody posters appearing in Los Angeles...  It's a spoof of the iconic “Saving Private Ryan” poster, showing Obama in silhouette, walking into the sunset between a pair of teleprompters.  The photos I found aren't very good, but here's what the poster says:
a steven spielberg play
saving barack obama
the mission is a fraud
I don't know who's behind the posters, but clearly they're not happy with That One...

Why do we yawn?

Why do we yawn?  To cool our brains.  Some need more cooling than others :)

The birth of a shipping container...

The birth of a shipping container...  A very nicely done video showing the process by which a standard steel shipping container is manufactured...

A sea of cherry blossoms...

A sea of cherry blossoms...  Taken in Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan (at the northern end of Honshu Island).  Click to embiggen...

Our very active local star, aka “The Sun”...

Our very active local star, aka “The Sun”...  Seen here in a false-color image.  It's actually a monochromatic photo taken in the light of the hydrogen alpha line (656.28 nm wavelength).  Click to embiggen.  Via APOD, of course...

A very happy ending...




A very happy ending...

White death...

White death...  There's are many reasons why the Finns have a fearsome reputation for defending their homeland.  Simo Häyhä was one of those reasons...