Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Grimm Finale

Well, I didn't see that coming.  The entire Zombie Apocalypse was orchestrated to give Renard's brother the opportunity to steal and control the newly zombified Nick.  Smooth.

On the plus side, Renard has lost his Grimm but he has all the members of the Nick Admiration Society to help him.

And PLEASE for heaven's sake, let Nick's mom come back to the show and kick some booty getting her boy back.  It would be a very different and possibly humor laden storyline for all those folks to work with a more typical snarly Grimm than they have experienced with smooshy loveable Nick.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Today in the Garden

It has been raining heavily but thank heavens not destructively for several days.  Everything is LUSH. It is a JUNGLE.   Here are some photos of the jungle:



Strawberry in Strawberry Pot!



Seedlings hardening off in a mini-greenhouse.  I keep finding adorable tree-frog things in the top row each morning.  I try putting them elsewhere in my veggie garden daily.




Purchased annuals and herbs airing out for the day.  They go in the greenhouse at night and the seedlings go in the garage since temps are in the low 50s!!!! at nite this week. Grrr.



One of my new daffodils (Prototype is the name). Adorable!


A poor shot of another new daffodil.  I'm moving everything out of this heavily defended (but the beagles still break in) garden this spring.


It looks better in person!  Those are daylily leaves nearby.


Perennials overwintered in the raised veggie bed. They'll go on the east side soon.


Some herbs, hens and chicks for the Fairy Garden and a new mini-greenhouse this year. It was only 24.88 but the plastic is very thin and rain had the roof sagging with water, yikes.



Last year's end of season windmill.  How I do love it.



Longview of the veggie garden.


A shiny RED garden tractor plant holder though it looks bizzaro yellow/orange here.


Spider Plant enjoying the great outdoors.



 
An "Umbrella tree" I think that suffered terribly indoors this winter.


Tsk. These are pink and white. Maybe Salome....



Nectarine in a pot.  I pull it into the garage in winter.  It has been potted for at least three years.  Might put it in ground this season and try protecting with burlap.


Bozos ready to assist.


My strawberry patch. Winter survivors.  A mix of everbearing and Pretty in Pink.  I ruthlessly snip runners so they don't go everywhere.   Cocoa bean mulch is great in the veggie garden though I had trouble finding any last year and I'm seeing none at all this year.




Foggy picture of my Peas :)


The east side greening up like mad. Moving everything from outside the fence in here this year and grassing/sodding in the front and side yards.  Secret garden indeed.


Poor little miniature evergreens and everything else in this bed.  I'll dig it all out properly and add plants from elsewhere.  It will look lovely. Stay tuned.



Pretty trees and hostas, nasty grass, woodland phlox and  dire anenome from Hades.





I need my whole garden to look like this and my veggie garden.  That's the goal.


One of my favorite plants in the world, white Bleeding Heart.


There is something gorgeous about a hosta unfurling.


A rain drenched peony emerging.  After a long bleak winter, this is why I garden.


A hardy geranium.  Green leaves that appear lightly dusted with silver.



Ignore that tag. This is Jacob's Ladder "Stairway to Heaven".



A beautiful white pine we planted from a three inch tall seedling when we moved in.


Hi Ho, a Fairy Garden has to start somewhere.

Tons of work to do, but this rain is getting everything off to a tremendous start.  My garden and I will be in great shape by the end of the season, right?

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Pin This!

I took a class on beginning embroidery and am now able to work on lovely and charming little figures.

 I purchased a book recently called Little Stitches: 100+ Sweet Embroidery Designs 12 Projects by Aneela Hoey.






Aneela has a wonderful site that is mostly sewing and quilting but she has done some embroidery design as well. Visit Comfortstitching to see her lovely work.




Inside the book among other things was a picture of some adorable sewing pins with large colorful heads.  If your grew up in my household with my sewing mom, you knew that little silver sewing pins could be ANYWHERE and you should beware where you walked or sat.  If the pins were like the ones below, you could be assured you would see them before they got you.

Flower Head Pins



Button Head Pins

The only place I could track them down with my Ace Librarian Tracking Skills was a site called Nancy's Notions.


Don't get stuck without them!  Hahahahahaha.

Happy Mother's Day!

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Google Redirect

Somehow I picked up a piece of adware/malware that my Anti-virus didn't have the ability to detect or remove which is likely Google Redirect.

Anything you search in Google redirects you once you click on a results link to an ad site or that goofy site with a big green arrow that pulses "Click Here".   I could not see in my research any sort of viable way of getting rid of it.  Even help forums for malware and anti-virus companies had no real solutions that did not look worse than the problem. 

One interesting thing I did read while researching that would not have occurred to me was that sometimes blogs will have someone asking a question about something like this in the comments and then the blogger "addresses" the issue and in fact the blogger and commenter are one and the same and are either trying to drive traffic to their site or are going to link you to malware/adware galore.  Nice.

You can just use another search engine to avoid the problem or type in the specific site address.

I was going to use Yahoo as my new search engine but I didn't like the results of searches. 

Dogpile searches three different Search Engines for you at once but the search results also did not have alot of relevance to what I wanted to see.

Having read articles on CNET and elsewhere I went with their number one recommendation, Duck Duck Go.   Supposedly not all about data mining as Google is (nosy buggers), but uses the same spare interface and the relevancy of the search results was, dare I say, Google-esque.