I changed my blog theme to match the season and installed a few new widgets. Most widgets are rather transparent, but I now have a plugin that automatically pings Twitter whenever I post (which then gets forwarded on to Facebook), a plugin that lets me include an avatar, if I can figure out how to select the image I want, and a plugin that suggests related posts below the post text. As an added bonus, here’s a featured photo for you, from the party I went to last night.

Current Mood: Cool

Popularity: 44% [?]

This weekend was Pirate Adventure Weekend at MDRF. Wet was the condition of the weekend. Bullets to follow…

* We arrived at the KOA on Friday in enough time to set up the tent in dry and sunlit conditions
* The pot-luck dinner was great. The chickens turned out very good and everything else was fantastic to boot.
* The rain that followed was not so fantastic. We discovered that our tent needs to be re-waterproofed, so there was lots of Chinese Water Torture courtesy of Mother Nature
* Saturday morning, we re-pitched the common fly, which had collapsed after the wet ground lost its grip on the stakes
* Saturday at MDRF was lots of rain, lots of mud, and lots of fun! So much fun, in fact, that I’ll have to come back and fill in how much fun it was once I remember
* Saturday, after faire, we came back and I threw all the bedding into the dryers.
* Dinner was KFC (nomme, nomme), and then there was lots of reminiscing about previous Encampments. We (sort of) concluded that we need to keep a Crew memory book, just to remember the funny things that are said and done at these events.
* Sunday was more rain and more mud. There was a huge turnout at MDRF despite the rain and the mud. A few people engaged in mud-bathing, including two pre-school age girls who were covered head-to-toe in mud, and having a great time, to boot!
* Sunday night was a quiet campers-only evening, with everyone sitting around the campfire (there was no rain!) making smores and drinking ciders.
* We managed to kill a pie iron by leaving it in the fire a bit too long (it was aluminum, and all that’s left are two very sad headless metal sticks)
* We got home on Monday to a basement full of water. It seems that the sump pump stopped working, and the water alarm never alerted ADT.
* A bright spot at the end of a damp weekend was that Ms. Athena (the puppy) got straight “A”s on her Kennel Report Card - apparently she had a great time while she was there!

I have posted all of the pictures I took to my Flickr Photostream

Current Mood: Surprised

Popularity: 29% [?]

Wine distributor Fair Wind Wines ensures the “Green” quality of wine by shipping it via sailship.

From their website:

Fair Wind Wine Ltd, sustainable transport sails exclusive French Wines on traditional wine routes from Languedoc to Ireland.

Visit the photo gallery and the CTMV homepage.

via Maritime Monday 124

Popularity: 30% [?]

The publishing software for this blog has been upgraded to the current stable release.

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1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog

1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16.The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery…(the French version)
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas… reading this right now
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down - Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Popularity: 27% [?]

One of my lilies has finally opened. I think she’s a tiger lily, except that the dark markings on the inside are not spotty, so I’m not sure on that one. She’s pretty, though. Click the photo to see more images.

Popularity: 43% [?]

“This is your birthday song! It isn’t very long…”

Happy Birthday, Paris

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See this post at the Lifehacker Blog for details:

Exclusive Sneak Preview: Gmail Gets 13 Experimental New Features Tonight

Multiple stars and flags, a “take a break” reminder, tweak or randomize your signature, play the “Snake” game, customize keyboard shortcuts, and more…

Popularity: 50% [?]

The below linked story is just one example of the unseen dangers of confined spaces.

Gas leak kills 3 workers at Port Everglades - 05/21/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

It is possible that the folks at Dirty Jobs do test for such hazards, and just don’t include the testing in the aired shows, but it would make me worry less if they showed the testing (or at least let us know that they did).

And for Pete’s sake Mike, wear safety glasses more often!

Popularity: 58% [?]

Weed E

Originally uploaded by Cordelya

Since I didn’t live on site at my house last year, my garden went to the dogs weeds. I started cleaning it up today, but I was wondering about the identity of many of the uninvited residents. So, I went around and took a whole bunch of pictures of the various plants, and posted them to Flickr.

If you’ve been fighting the war against weeds for a while (or not) and you know the names of common mid-atlantic weeds, would you kindly take a look at the photos and see if you can identify any of my weeds?

Weeds in My Garden!

Popularity: 48% [?]