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My original birthday plans were to go down to Disneyland for a few days, always a fun trip. But when it was announced that Kiril Kulish, one of the Tony-winning stars of Billy Elliot, was giving his last performance on October 3rd, and that Haydn Gwynne, the Tony-nominated actress who plays Mrs. Wilkinson, was giving her last performance on October 4th, I started crunching the numbers and realized it wouldn’t cost much more to go toNew York than it would to go to Disneyland. That is a bald-faced lie, of course, but I am sticking to it.

BONUS: Looks like I will also get to see the debut of Alex Ko as Billy on October 6th or, my birthday, October 7th!!!
Continue reading “Uncle Dave’s Second Annual Birthday Billython – Part One”

Damnit! It is 91 degrees out on the patio! That is just so wrong for September, even in California! We need cold and rain and wind, or at least some autumn weather!

Damnit!

Looking forward to New York City in a week or so!

I do not often get excited about something like this, but I gotta tell you, the new version of Picassa is great and it’s People Find feature is amazing.

Basically, People Find uses face recognition technology to find faces in pictures. It isn’t perfect, but pretty good. Then it lets you name those people and then it goes and hunts down every picture you have with that person in it. And it is pretty darned accurate. What an easy way to organize pictures of people.

Probably the biggest problem is that if you have four kids under the age of 6, and three of them are blond girls, and all four are related, it sometimes can not distinguish the baby pictures real well. But those things are easy to fix, as is adding people that People Find doesn’t recognize.

LOL – it even found the person in a picture hanging on the wall behind the people I was taking a picture of!!!

Except for the fact that it does not have an image resizing feature, I really love Picassa!

This morning, as my thoughts turned to my upcoming trip to New York City, I came upon a brilliant idea!

You see, I have a 4GB memory card in my camera. This card will hold about 1100 pictures at the very best settings possible. (I think if I lowered my standards down to 640 x 480 it will hold about 4000 or something.) And I have had the same card in my camera since my trip to London LAST October.

Now, last night a friend of mine posted that he lost years worth of images because his hard drive crashed. But he also mentioned that they were mostly ones that no one wanted to see anymore. His most recent ones were still on his memory card.

Light bulb!!!

Why not just take my almost full memory card and plop it into my safe, and put a new one in my camera. They are only about $15 bucks or less for a 4GB card, which is worth it to me for the safety.

No, I could not find on the net any info on how long the data will remain on the flash card in the safe, but I backup all my pictures to DVD anyway, so I am about as safe as a guy can get.

So I am off to New York soon, and with luck the new card will get me through that trip, plus Thanksgiving, Christmas and then my London trip in May!

So a couple of years ago I signed up at my doctor’s office to be more connected online. This is usually really cool – I can send my doctor messages, get RX refilled, check on my appointments, etc.

However, there is one part that sucks, especially if your health kind of sucks like mine: 24 hour lab results!! That’s right! Within 24 hours of going to the lab to have blood drawn and a nice cup of pee, the results of said contributions are posted online for me to peruse in the comfort of my own home. Yup, my good cholesterol blows – it always has and always will!! Yup, my fasting glucose level is high, but this time it is higher than usual, which pisses me off because I skipped having a cookie the night before and it still sucked!! And my HGBA1C – fuggedaboutit!! Highest of the last 8 tests. Yeah, I can look back and chart out all of my tests for about the last 8 years!

So the areas that I sucked in last time are the ones I suck in now. So why the hell should I go to the doctor next week to have him tell me that, and the ovious – that I am overweight??? Damnit!

Someday I am going to read about my own impending doom on my doctor’s website, so when I go to see him he will say, “How you doing?” and I can say, “Well, according to the online lab results, this will be our last visit in this world.” And then he will say, “Yes, but isn’t technology wonderful?”

Coming soon – October 3rd – 8th, New York City!!!!

Well, they ain’t quite eating out of my hand yet, but I can say that they are becoming more and more accustomed to my presence! I now place the flakes into the water, rather than just sprinkling them on top of the pond. This seems to help, though eventually I would like to see them come to the surface more for their food. The down side to this is that they are probably becoming dependant upon me for food, which means they will be less likely to eat the stuff growing in the pond.

There are, by the way, at least 5 fish, and I suspect all 8 are still there somewhere. A couple of the original koi, Manny and Jack II, are getting quite big. I also think one of them was trying to venture upstream the other day, as I heard an odd splash underfoot just as I was crossing the bridge. Just in case, I blocked off the end of the stream so they will prolly not try this again!

Anyway, I am quite please with the overall result of the back yard restoration, though the lawn is already about half grass and half palm seedlings, and in general I need to work on the water in the garden to help me reduce weeds, which are also about half weed and half palm seedlings. I need some more plants, as well.

BTW, I found the most wonderful thing the other day – bougainvillea that survive down to 20F, which means they should live where I planted them. They are called Barbara Karst bougainvillea. I have just read somewhere else that this plant only handles 30F. Well it doesn’t get that cold here much, but the tag at the nursery said 20F!

Well, they seem to be a bit less timid. They eat what I put out for them, though they never come to the surface to do so. There is one gold fish (not a goldfish, but a koi) that is looking quite plump.

The pond has some algae issues, which I am trying to control without killing all of it.

I can not actually count how many are in there, but as none had floated to the surface, I must assume that I have 8!

This dragonfly stopped by for a visit, and stayed long enough for me to get many, many pictures. Allowed me to get within about 5 or 6 inches! Click the “more” link to see some better ones!

Continue reading “A Visitor To The Garden”