It’s been hot and dry for much of the summer. That’s hard on the plants and I know that I’m going to have to move some things that haven’t handled the heat well come fall.

Meanwhile I’ve been replacing some of the things that we lost in last winter’s deep freeze.

Rosemary is something that I regard as hardy around here. It rarely suffers until the temps fall into the teens. Single digits are too cold so I lost three sprawling rosemarys that lived at the back of the herb garden tumbling down the rock wall. I replaced two of them.

trailing rosemary in the herb garden

We also lost all of our cultivars of buddleia. Some of the wildings survived but those have to be pulled out as they are now clasified as invasive weeds. I can’t find anymore of the dark purple one that I liked. sigh.

So in the place of the butterfly bush that used to live in the corner of the bed facing the barn I put a smoke tree. Well actually more of a shrub.

smoke tree (Cotinus coggygria)

There may not have been much rain recently but the sprinklers run every couple of days. This is the result of leaving your Felcos in the bucket next to the bird bath.

almost ruined

The nice thing about Felcos is that you can buy parts. I’ll refurb these over the winter. meanwhile to suppliment my older (thrice refurbed) Felcos I bought a pair of Fiskars pruners.

little fiskar pruners slide nicely into your pocket.

They have an interesting compound cutting action.

they fit well in my hands

They are smaller and more agile that the Felcos. I don’t think they can handle as much of the brute force cutting work but they are sweet to use for deadheading and other more precise tasks.

Not everything is suffering in the heat. The lilies went nuts this year. The last of the Stargazers are just now going over.

stargazer lilies

I got tools from Rio Grande this afternoon.

new tools

Clockwise from the top. Ring mandrel — very pleased with the quality and heft. Parallel pliers — thank you Sarah L. for getting me addicted to those expensive little dears. Raw hide mallet for banging on metal. Ring clamp for holding onto things and not sanding my fingers, and a pair of tiny pointy snips for getting into tight spaces.

But there is no way that I’ll be doing any work at the bench for the next couple of days.

there’s a bench under there somewhere

I have to finish the patio furniture cushions first. (They are gonna be great!)

new cushions in the making

Word clouds are a fun way of finding out what’s really on your (blog’s) mind. The Generator Blog pointed to Wordle this morning and I’ve been having fun making clouds for various blogs I read/write.

Here’s one based on ms. shoes:

I think I spend a little too much time writing about the chickens. Though I do like the idea that beads and danger get about equal play in my life.

A few months ago I moved some things — including the files for this blog — around on the servers. It all seemed to go just fine — until…

I upgraded the wordpress installs. All the older image links broke. Luckily I figured out just how they broke. It’s taken a couple of hours but all the images and links in the older posts and gallery pages should work again.

ColourLovers posted a list of all 120 Crayola crayon colors and their (approximate) hex and RGB codes. The list was complied by Aaron at ColorSchemer.com.

I am now going to waste several hours creating a custom Photoshop palette of these colors.

Sigh.

BTW When did the Crayola site change so much? I remember it as being a much sweeter and less loudly marketing driven place. They do still provide nice images of their products.

I’ve been busy acquiring, setting up, and occasionally cursing a batch of new toys.

The dreaded yellow line scanner has been evicted and in it’s place is a new Microtek i900.

So far it and I are getting along pretty well. Though it’s a right hulking bit of equipment.

Can’t say as much for the software. I have two scanning control programs. The native Microtek software and SilverFast Ai. Everything I read about SilverFast is true. It’s amazingly powerful and a *total* bitch to figure out.

We bought the Microtek specifically to scan in DH’s collection of 35mm slides. After the first hundred or so I think I’ve got the software figured out and I’m getting pretty nice results.

The other new toy is a Wacom Intuos3 table. Very sweet. Painless setup, works as advertised out of the box.
Mostly. Once in a while (after an unplanned reboot — thank you very much Micrsoft) Vista gets a little confused and thinks that it’s a tablet PC rather than a graphic tablet and the express keys stop working. Hardly the fault of the device. Sigh.

edited 25.june.2008 to correct image links

The great photo digitizing project has hit a snag.

I started working on “fixing up” the photos that I had scanned in last week. First up was this picture of Jim’s parents Bill and Betty on their wedding day. (Too cute, no?)

A careful look at the original file (all 1040x768of it) revealed a nasty yellow stripe down the left side.

I worked for while trying to build enough layers and mask enough stuff and what ever to get rid of it. I’m not a graphics tool wizard. I got tired and decided to move on to another photo — something in black and white.

This one didn’t need work. I was goofing around seeing what I could do with it. And then I noticed it — a little *Yellow Stripe* down the left hand side.

A bit of scraping around and looking at some other things that I had scanned recently (like the HoMC panels) and there it was — that annoying little stripe on the left edge of the images (on the right side of the scanner bed.) Damn…

edited 25.june.2008 to correct image links