It’s been a difficult spring for the roses, with early warmth followed by some heavy rain and freezing temperatures just as the buds were forming. Still, some are managing to put on a good show. Here is ‘Intrigue’, one of the most fragrant roses I’ve encounted:

I was checking for eggs today, when, to my surprise, all three girls were jammed into the nest box. (The operating manual says one nest box will serve 5 hens, three at once was a surprise.)

Honda’s new hybrid, the Insight, is getting introduced with this incredible commercial which has a bunch of the cars using their headlights to make pretty pictures.

(Tom has one of the 12,000 original Insights, a 2-seater, which was made until 2006.)

I was playing around with a tilt-shift lens yesterday and came up with this shot of one of our dogs, Milton.

MoveOn.org has a funny thing where you can throw tomatoes at AIG and learn interesting facts:

THE AIG TOMATO TOSS

(If you don’t want to sign up, just make something up. Make sure the email address you put in this format: something-at-something-dot-something)

Enjoy!

Back in January, which was drier and much warmer than usual, we got a lot of work done in the garden. One of my projects, always thwarted by winter weather, was to plant asparagus. I picked up three varieties at local nurseries: Mary Washington, purple, and UC72.  Asparagus crowns are weird-looking things:

Here are the beds where we planted them. At the same time we put in 4 kinds of blueberries, five more fruit trees (the total is now around 40), raspberries, olallieberries, and currants.

For the first two years, we won’t be able to eat the asparagus (it needs the green to build up the root system), but in the meanwhile it should be fun to watch it grow. It was very exciting to see the first alien-looking spears break the surface of the soil.

Beginning what is going to be a multi-day affair, Arthur began his journey from the driveway to the back yard. We had to rip down the fence between the house and garage and move the air conditioner compressor. This left us with a total clearance of about 1” on the left side and 3″ on the right. Needless to say we took it very, very slowly. After about 4 hours we managed to move it twenty feet to the back of the living room, or a little over one-third of the way there. (It’s amazing how steep a 2-3 degree grade can seem when you’re trying to keep 3300 pounds of trailer from racing down it!)

After searching for eight years, Tom finally found his Airstream trailer. It’s a 1963 Globe Trotter. At 19 feet long, it has sleeping space for four, heater, fridge, range and oven, hot water, two sinks, a shower and toilet.  At the moment, nothing beyond the beds is working, but we’ll get to it. Not planning on going caravanning, we’re going to find a way to wiggle it into the backyard to its permanent position next to the pool. It should make a nice cabana/guest house/whatever. It’s most attractive feature, of course, is that legendary mid-century space-age silver bullet aluminum skin. Hopefully we’ll be able to get it back to a mirror-like finish.

Tom bought Arthur from a really nice guy from Berkeley (yea Craigslist), who had bought it from its original owner, a pilot from Arizona named Arthur.

(Click on any photo to see it larger. Also now with PicLens/Cooliris support):

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