Winter Wonderland

Thanks to Christmas money I finally have a new camera. It has way more functions than I've had in the past, so I'll have to spend some quality time with the manual, but even without intensive study, I can take some beautiful pictures.

And let me say, it has been beautiful here lately!

This is the view out our kitchen window:


And out the living room window:


Chris has begun converting most of our backyard into a Japanese style garden. We stained the existing fence and porch (both had been left unfinished) in a color combination inspired by pictures of Japanese interiors and gardens. I absolutely love how those colors and forms look with the pine trees and the artfully applied layer of snow. Under the snow is a kidney shaped area of colored stones and a few areas of plantings, all bordered by large stones or small bricks. It's already a great place to sit around our raised fire pit, and we'll keep adding to it each summer. I plan to install an arbor or trellis in the flower bed just beyond the porch for a hop vine. The hops will be surrounded by the odd combination of roses and yuccas.


California, eat your heart out!

Obscurity in the age of the internet

Every so often I check out how much the internet knows about me by typing my name into a google search. I haven't done this in years, in fact not since getting married and changing my name. For some reason I woke up this morning with the burning desire to find out what the internet says about me--whether I'm living a public or private life. Apparently, I've kept pretty private under my new name, because I found almost nothing about me. In the first half dozen or so pages, Google images only had one image, the watch cap pattern available on this site, and the only web result was a link to my bio at the college for which I work.

Here are the impostors using my name on the internet:

• a porn actress from Hungary for whom this is most likely a stage name
• a brush fire in Australia
• a series of skateboard designs
• a woman spinning fire (i.e. burning stuff twirling at the ends of chains)
• and a lovely South African flowering heather

I'm not sure whether I'm disappointed or relieved to not have shown up on rate my professors yet.