SOUTHWEST LANDSCAPING....I was short of pics tonight so included a few from outside the Borrego Springs Medical Center in Borrego Springs, California which I took last Feb. 24th 2010
Wednesday's late afternoon thunderstorms brought in a cooler weather front overnight & chased all that miserable humidity out of the air....again. What a pleasant relief it was this morning to feel cool air on my skin as I took Max & Checker's for a walk through the pine forest.
Upon returning from our walk I noticed my waterfall pump in the pond had was not pumping water. A recently added second pump was sputtering as well so I quickly pulled the electrical plugs. A closer look told me the pond had lost most of it's water. I immediately assumed a tree root in search of water had finally made it's way underground over to the pond & punctured the plastic liner from beneath. Figured I only had 2 options. Fill in the pond with earth & re-landscape the area or pull the whole pond & flowerbed apart & try to find the leak. Decided on the first option because it was the lesser of the 2 big work & reconstruction evils.
WE WERE HIKING WITH SOCKY JEEPERS THIS DAY (that's him lying on the back pack:)) And, I think somebody was not too happy about carrying around a sock puppet!!
YEP, THERE'S THE LITTLE SOCK BOY NOW:))
I knew there were a lot of poly-wogs & small frogs in the pond so figured I had better get some water back in there to help the guys out. Filled the near empty pond with the hose fully expecting it to be drained again in an hour or so but would deal with that when we came home later.
THE POND WAS NEARLY DRAINED THIS MORNING:((
We Jeeped ourselves over to Mitchell & visited with Uncle Harry for awhile. He's doing well & really likes the new music channels we were able to have set up for him. Glen Miller was playing Moonlight Serenade when we walked into his room & how nice is that:))
BORREGO SPRINGS MEDICAL CENTER
Arriving home a couple hours later I was surprised to find the small frog pond still full of water. Took me another minute or so to finally figure out what the problem was. I have a pump in the pond that pumps water over a small waterfall. Wednesday morning I had added a second, more powerful pump in the middle of the pond & that one had a fountain attachment shooting water up through a plastic fountain nozzle. Sometime in the night the pump had gradually tipped itself over to one side a bit therefore pumping all the pond's water out of the pond into the flowerbed beside it. What a pleasant relief knowing it was not going to be the demise of our little frog pond after all. Plugged the pumps in again & soon water cheerfully gurgled up & out over a bunch of stressed out but relieved tiny green frogs & their wee offspring wogs. There was much rejoicing all around the water's edge as I heard a rousing croak filled cheer rise from the duckweed filled water into the afternoon garden air:)) "Yaaaay AL:))"
JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THOSE MOUNTAINS LIES OCEANSIDE & SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
My work place called today & said they had an early pick up for me in the morning, plus a couple of drivers in Goderich are going to be away for a few weeks so looks like I am going to be a very busy boy filling in for them. I welcome that in more ways than one & look forward to having something constructive & useful to do for the next 3 weeks.
THIS TYPE OF LANDSCAPING IS VERY TYPICAL OF MANY NICE HOMES IN BORREGO
Along with a few other bloggers I decided to remove that word verification security thingy in the comment section a few days ago. I have already been hit 5 times by spammers & if that continues over the next few days I will have to put that annoying tricky word verification back on. Still wish there was some kind of electronic way to send a 'charge' back through the internet lines to the very source of those miserable low life slime ball spammers & 'fry' their computers!!!! What a scammy lot they are.
REAL MEXICAN GARDENERS
And........I successfully downloaded the new Live Writer Beta into our new laptop Win 7 computer this afternoon. The download went off without a hitch so I guess the problem I had before was due to the fact I was trying to install the new LW on the XP platform. I can see another learning curve coming up & I'm sure I will be fine with it after awhile but right off the bat I did not like what I saw. One of the main difficulties I have with all new technology centers around the 'smallness' of everything. Cell phones, I-pods TV remotes, etc are hard for me to see because everything is sooooo small & the same goes for computer programs. With so many options, add ons, plug-ins, wizmo's & gizmos, everything has been miniaturized. And, that's what I saw when I opened the new Live Writer. They have crammed the whole LW work area into a narrow band across the top & all the tools are now smaller, crammed together, & harder for me to see. I was happy with the larger bar down the right side where I could easily read everything. No, I do not need everything the size of kindergarten printing but what is with this big techie fad to compact & diminish everything down to the size befitting the eye of a needle!!
HAD TO POSITION A PALM TREE JUST SO BECAUSE ONE OF THE 'E's WAS MISSING IN THE WORD...'CENTER' :))
GROANER'S CORNER:(( Most folks believe that Ben Franklin discovered electricity with his famous kite experiment. Actually, a women made that discovery possible. The real story was that Ben Franklin was laying in bed with his wife one night, leaned over and whispered something in her ear. She told him to go fly a kite. The rest is history.
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Tourists see the world, travelers experience it.
"UNTIL ONE HAS LOVED AN ANIMAL, PART OF THEIR SOUL REMAINS UN-AWAKENED"
OUR BLOGGER WEBSITE http://thebayfieldbunch.com/
OUR PHOTO ALBUMS http://picasaweb.google.com/stargeezerguy/
AL'S SMUG MUG PHOTO GALLERY http://stargeezer.smugmug.com/ (a work in progress)
The only thing better than right now will someday be the memories of right now...... AL.
I'm glad that LW Beta downloaded without troubles, and hope you can get a stronger pair of glasses. But I know once you get to messin with all that new stuff...........
ReplyDeleteWell Al, I'm glad to see everything is going so good for you today. That pond solution was a big work saver for sure. I've had that same thing happen with our previous pond setup. Glad to see you got the new LW Beta installed too. Whoever said large print is like "Kindergarten" type must be really annoying.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, on your nice new Windows 7 computer, just right-click anywhere on your desktop, click on "screen resolution" and you will see tiny blue print that says "make text and other items larger or smaller", then choose 125% and see if it helps with the appearance.
I enjoyed viewing your pictures of Borrego Springs. I'm always surprised when there's so much color in the desert.
ReplyDeleteI haven't downloaded the new beta version of Live Writer yet. I just don't like change!
It is my opinion that many times programs can be upgraded and improved while still looking the same. But programmers evidently think they have to change everything in order to let folks know they have been working. I get used to seeing a screen a certain way, and clicking on an option in a certain place, and I hate it when they mess me up for no apparent reason than to merely look different.
ReplyDeleteSince I am an all XP family right now I guess I will have to wait till I either buy a Windows 7 machine or the Beta upgrade becomes the defacto standard and will support XP, hate to sound old fashioned but my XP keeps chugging alaong and I am used to it like an old friend.Hope I don't sound like a curmudgeon, Al what do you think. Be safe out there. Sam & Donna.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea about what to do with scammers!!
ReplyDeleteRick's solution sounds good. Bigger type is certainly easier to read, as long as it doesn't all cram together! But if you have to find tiny blue words that suggest you enlarge the type, good luck! Tiny blue words are hard to see! They should make them bigger.
ReplyDeleteSecond comment -- we also removed word verification (haven't posted anything new since then) but right away got one spam message. Why do people have to do that, anyway?
ReplyDeleteSo what kind of spam do they hit you with? Is it something juicy? That might be a good blog post :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info on changing the header picture. I hope to give it a try this afternoon. :)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I like your new header pic, but that red type is driving me nuts. With my latest pair of glasses some color combinations make the print jump out at me like 3-D, and your combination of red type and the sand dune background hit that combination. :) I've never heard of anyone else having this problem. It makes life interesting sometimes. :)