The header art in this new effort is a cropped section of the original acrylic painting Herod in Blue by Gaylord Soli. It is one of the few original paintings that Laurie and I own.

Soli is not a super well known artist, but something about his use of color and texture appeals to me. Thus my choice for header art. Enjoy!

As you may have noticed, I figured out how to import all the old blogger posts and comments into this reincarnation. All 585 posts and 2500+ comments.

(The process was a bit memory intensive due to the way that the data is parsed in. Not something one would want to run on a server without sufficient memory. PHP on large files and odd parsing scan be resource intensive, but i am just glad that most of the effort was already done by the fine people working on WordPress.)

That takes one more item off the bucket list to get this beast whipped into shape.

This the follow-on blog/website/technical journal to my original blogging site, “The Art of Panic”. I grew tired of the limitations of the pure blog format of blogspot.com and so pulled everything back to my own servers. Once I get the theme here adjusted a bit and other such issues settled, I’ll see if I can import the old posts so the record will be more complete.

And now back to getting everything to work and look like I want…

Long live the dead bull!

After being tied up and too darn lazy to post for a while, I’m back. (Not that you cared, but …)

After weeks of winds up to 60 mph and higher than normal temperatures, it seems to have settled down to go directly into summer without bothering with spring. It is the warmest this early in the year in my memory. Goes along with the fact that the start of the year has been the warmest in recorded history, especially the month of March. Hard to believe there are still some clueless people who don’t believe the climate is changing. So now it is time to turn on the water to the sprinkler systems, etc. Really early, but the upside is that we might have a long enough growing season to grow some longer growth period melons.

In other news, the Easter Bunny made it through another season without getting shot, unlike these cousins in New Zealand. (I wonder how the New Zealand residents take the fact that Google marks their country as a misspelling?)

And I thought the local denizens were odd!

Well, time to get back to real work. More later.

Including apologies to Monty Python. Of course it isn’t true. It is really more of the same.

I still have not received the mysterious envelope of the last posting. Maybe the anti-terrorists at the USPS have decided to keep it for their hall of shame. Maybe they just cannot find me now that I am on the lam. {*grin*} (That is what they get for calling and warning me.)

Then there is the weather. After a dry and warm January with many days in the 50s, February has been cold and snowy with many a snow storm and all sorts of cold. But at least today it started a fast melt. This is the view on the back patio as the snow begins to melt and re-freeze.

Shoveling the snow from last nights flurries sounded like I was working in a waterfall as the snow started melting off the roof.  It was kind of neat.

That brings us to Valentine’s Day tomorrow. L and I have never been real big celebrants of the holiday. Usually just a card with the occasional meal out or flowers or … Given that this will be the 40th Valentine’s Day we have celebrated as a couple, we’ll undoubtedly do the same old things.

One of the reasons we don’t get too excited about February 14th is that my birthday is on the 17th and L’s is 5 days later. So we tend to get excited later in the month.