Must be shred

Seen on a bin at a library. A local University library.

How proud this makes me of my diploma.

Tour of trees

At one of the homes we toured last weekend, my friend S. and I enjoyed the sight of the huge trees as much as the home and all the decorations.

How I could have neglected to note exactly what type of trees these were, I'm not sure... I guess I was afraid that the shuttle would leave us. Looks kind of like an oak though, I think. You can click to see it better. (I blurred my friend's face so she wouldn't kill me.)



Another nice one on the other side of the house. Wish I had trees this nice and spreading. (If you're local, you might recognize this as Mitchell Farm.)



On the walk back to the car, we passed a couple of trees with last-gasp color. (That smaller farm manager's house is really more my speed.)



The trees near the Ruby Radish were bare of leaves. The better to see the good bone structure, though.



This is the view from Mitchell Farm - it gives you an idea of the winter forest look in my limestone valley. Almost everything green is a cedar; there are few pines.

Tour of Homes

A friend and I went on the Blount County Tour of Homes. Ticket sales help fund grants and special projects for local schools.

This year, I guess they had a hard time finding people to open their houses. Out of the five "homes", one was a church, and another was a tea room.



It was fun anyway, and the refreshments at The Ruby Radish were so good that I doubt people would mind them being on the tour every year.



The photos here are all from the same house - the smallest one on the tour. (I haven't processed the other photos yet.)



I'll never live in a house this fancy, but I enjoy seeing other people's homes... their doodads, their decorations, their dishes, and so forth.



She had a large collection of nutcrackers near the fireplace.



"Nutcrackers are scary," says my husband.



Shiny festive mantel.



An abundance of matching candles.

-----

The schools need help because Blount Countians tend to spend their money in Jefferson county, where most of them work, rather than in their home county, where their kids go to school. It's a problem.

All that lovely new paving on Hwy 75 is thanks to stimulus money, by the way, not local tax money.

Search terms

Further down, there are fifteen other variations on the yellow fuzzy caterpillar theme, and even more versions with misspellings of caterpillar or yellow.

This topic came up the other night at the Blount County Blogger dinner... what is the top search term for your blog? Mine tends to vary seasonally, but year in and year out, the overall winner is always... yellow fuzzy caterpillar.

Blue snake usually comes in second.

I used to look at my stats compulsively, but these days I tend to forget for weeks at a time. So if anyone's sent me a rash of traffic, I apologize for not thanking you properly. The stats roll over after about a day, since I'm cheap and don't pay for the extended version.

We also talked about answering comments, and I admitted that I'd been kind of slack in that regard, especially lately. If I've ignored your comment, it wasn't on purpose. I just tend to put things off, or get started doing something else, and then forget. I wish there were a pill for that.

-----

Who else was at the dinner?
countrypeapie
Edifice Rex
The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
and a friend who I'm trying to convince to blog.

The Country Experience couldn't make it this time, but we hope to see her next week, as well as mountainmelody and WhoKnowsWhat.

Annie's

The Blount county bloggers met at Annie's over the weekend! Her job may be a pain, but it has made Annie Linda-Hamilton-buff.

I'm so jealous. I'd do anything to look like Annie. (Except eat well and get a lot of exercise.) If I'm found dead next week, it'll be due to Annie killing me for showing this. But the light was so nice, I couldn't resist.

Also present were CPP and TCE. We should have taken a pic of all our feet together or something, but of course I had that idea on the way home. Maybe next time, when I hope that MM can join us too.

These photos were all taken on our "weed walk" at Annie's place.



Pink phlox. I can't provide scientific names for most plants blooming after April, since they all seem to have 50 look-alikes that vary only in the slightest details.



Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele) on Blanket Flower.



Whorled loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia).



Collection of colored glass from Arkansas.



Sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis).



Mexican Hat. This and the Blanket flower aren't natives here, but are good plants for butterflies and quail. Update: I think I was wrong about them not being natives.



One of the skullcaps, possibly Hairy skullcap (Scutellaria elliptica).



A daylily I can't remember the name of.



Possibly a summer bluet? I'm not familiar with this plant and can't find a picture that matches well.



A fern I couldn't identify.



The lovely Lika.



The lovely Grendel.

Thanks for having us over, Annie! It was great to meet you, TCE and CPP!

Creative Outsourcing

Hmm, there's something different about the office this morning...



I think they've brought in some outside contractors.



"Umm, your drawings may be a little late...



... we kind of had an incident."



I guess he heard there would be no bonus this Christmas.

-----

This happened at an office in Birmingham today. Raccoons really did pee on the drawings and poop all over the desks. Animal control wouldn't come, since the racoons were indoors. Did you know that private critter control starts at about $450 per hour?!

(I didn't take these photos - Hubby's co-workers sent them to him.)

Covered Bridge Festival

I was a lot more impressed with this costume before I learned that they sell them at pet stores. (I'd thought that the impatient lady at the other end of the leash had made it herself.) Still, it was cute, if you like clothes on dogs. He didn't seem to mind much.



The "Covered Bridge Festival" is held in Oneonta (Blount county) every October. I'm only two months late in posting these pictures. On the bright side, if you're sorry you missed it and are eager to attend the next one, well, now it's only ten months away.

That's the main shopping street in downtown Oneonta. Annie's old store was just there on the other side of Regions bank, just beyond that inflatable green turret. It's Fred's store now - the Eureka shop. (Eureka as in "aha", not vacuums.) I think it's the best shop on the street, but of course Fred sells my handmade soap there, so I might be a little biased.



The next street over, there's an antique car show. People in Alabama seem to hold antique car shows at the drop of a hat. I suspect that antique car people just like to socialize with each other.



You can see a video of one of the bridges, and a bit of the festival, and a cute kid, here. Not my video - it's from Thicket magazine, a very good new(ish) magazine about Alabama.

Another article about the festival is here. It includes photos of all the remaining Blount county covered bridges, as well as my friend Barbara (whose name people always spell incorrectly).

There were previously four covered bridges here, but one burned down. I should say, one was burned down. That's the scuttlebutt anyway: Ne'er-do-wells partying near the bridge were reported and forced to leave. The bridge suspiciously burned down shortly thereafter.

I'm not sure why the article refers to an "accident" that closed a bridge temporarily last year. According to the newspaper, there were deliberate, heavy-duty, meant-to-destroy acts of vandalism on two of the bridges. I'm not sure if rural areas have more than their share of misbegotten miscreants, or if the teenagers here are just really, really bored.

War of Wealth

Geez, y'all stop collapsing the world financial system, would you?

This is a poster from a 1895 play. I'm not sure if today's equivalent would be War of Wealth, War on Wealth, or War for Wealth.

Wikipedia has a handy reference of Economic disasters in the US that includes 16 incidents labeled "Panics". I guess since the last one was in 1911, somebody thought it was high time for a good old-fashioned panic. Many panics seem to start when the Joe Moneybags of the world try to grow even filthier rich, by means of dodgy schemes designed to swindle everybody else.

-----

Here are a couple of money-saving tips that I learned by accident.

#1: Discounts.
Hubby had a few medical tests a while back (he's fine). The bill was substantial, about $1000. I always feel a little cheesy doing it, but since we have one of those BigNameGasStation credit cards that rebates 1%, well, why not use it. I've learned to tolerate a little cheese.

"Can I pay over the phone with a credit card?"
"Yes. How much would you like to pay?"
"All of it."
"I can offer you a 20% discount for paying the entire amount."
"What!"

I'm sure if I'd written a check, they'd have happily cashed the whole thing.

#2: Look closer.
Counterfeit $10 bills have been passed in Oneonta recently. Who's risking a felony charge for $10?! ("Teenagers" comes to mind.)

This is another thing I love about small-town living. The bank teller not only told me about it, she showed me the bill in question. I would never in a million years have caught this bill as a fake. It just looked and felt like one of the new tens that had already seen a lot of wear.

She told me there were two ways to spot it as a fake: look for the plastic security strip by holding it up to the light, or check that the glossy "10" (in the lower right) changes color when the bill is tilted. But who does that kind of thing for $10 bills? I check the strip on $50s and $100s at craft shows, though it always makes me feel so rude. Hubby's been saying that I need one of those currency-checking pens instead, but the teller told me that counterfeiters now use paper that the pen doesn't detect.

Bottom line, if someone hands you one of the newer bills that seems like it's seen a lot of wear... take a closer look.

Seven things

While I was gone, Twinks asked me to do a meme. I'm supposed to list seven random things, but since I'm contrary, I'm going to list seven things that happened during my lost four months. It's longer than my normal posts, but since I'll be out of town for a few days, feel free to read in shifts!

1. I joined The Gym.
Really, that's what the gym in Oneonta is called: The Gym. I joined with a friend, and wheedled my way into a good deal via a long-term, prepaid, early-hours contract. I can't say I've lost any weight, but I feel in better shape. I'm getting to know my friend a lot better too, since we gab for about four hours a week more than we used to.

2. I thought I'd found a diamond.
People with a five-carat diamonds don't shop at Wal-Mart, I suppose, but I was momentarily dazed by the karmic thrill of it all. My mother lost her engagement ring stone over 40 years ago, and I imagined it had returned, with interest! Turned out to be only a cubic zirconia though, drat. Here is how you tell the difference. I couldn't read a newspaper through the CZ, and was already dreamily wondering how long the police would have to hold it before it was deemed unclaimed. The dot test worked like a charm, though. Like a big, balloon-bursting charm.



3. The garden refused to bend to my will. Again.
I had fun with the Zinnia experiment though. I got a late start, and Powdery Mildew crept in when we left town for a week. The grass got way out of control, as usual. Somehow I still managed to grow a few flowers to donate to Hospice. Maybe next year I will finally have my act together enough to get them there throughout the blooming season.

4. I won a major award.
Because I could remember the Alabama state bird, mammal, fossil, etc., when an emergency preparedness expert spoke to our wildflower group. OK, the award wasn't really all that major, but I basked in the egghead trivia glow anyway. Then a guy even more pointy-headed than me whined that my answer of "some kind of whale" to "What is the state dinosaur?" wasn't up to par. "The Basilosaurus cetoides is the state fossil, not dinosaur!" he moaned. I hugged my MRE and ran out of the meeting room.

5. We let Anatoli go. He'd developed a lump that we decided may have been from improper nutrition or insufficient sunlight. Since he was wild-born, we figured he'd fare better on his own. We saw an unusually high number of anoles this fall, but I was never sure if any of them were Anatoli.

6. I had to wait in line to vote!
There were all of four people in front of us when we arrived at our polling place. An elderly couple let us cut in front of them though, since the man was still searching his wallet for ID. There were a few local issues on the ballot so turnout was very high. The tallies from my precinct, not exactly what you'd call a democratic stronghold, included:
Obama 45, McCain 450
Figures 52, Sessions 442 (US Senate race)
Tag fee increase: Yes 59, No 392
Wet/Dry referendum: Yes (Wet): 226, No: 270
The ratios for the whole county were similar. I still haven't figured out how Vivian Figures, a State Senator from Mobile, received more votes than Obama. Most people in north Alabama weren't even familiar with her. I read that her budget was $22,000; the incumbent Sessions spent multi-millions. (I have loved her ever since I read that she was able to get the outdated, misogynistic Alabama State Senate dress code changed... the one that said women couldn't wear pant suits or slacks on the Senate floor!)
We needed the tag fee increase ($15), which would have gone strictly towards road maintenance. I had a feeling it wouldn't pass, but I was surprised at the resounding defeat.
I'm glad we stayed a dry county. I wouldn't mind alcohol sales in stores or restaurants, but didn't want a bar across the street from us. Rural counties don't have a lot of regulations, so it could have been a real possibility.

7. Alabama football, woohoo!
I had to say that before we play Auburn and Georgia Florida, just in case.

Rush hour in Blount county

Cute little guy, but he wouldn't let us anywhere near him. A little girl was making friends by throwing something edible at him, so we left them to it.

That is a belt around his neck, which I did think was a little strange.

-----

Updated: After a few emails, I can see that it is not obvious for people with those nifty little lightweight, but tiny-screened, laptops. That is a GOAT in the road!

By the way, you can always click on any of the pictures to make them larger.

Re-emergence

I almost spoke too soon... after another marathon DSL fix-it session (two guys for 6 hours this time, and they didn't show up until Thursday), we thought all was well. Oh, the relief! The zippy page loading!

But that comfy, fluffy feeling was missing again the next morning, along with the DSL.

Yesterday it only took two fix-it hours (times two guys) to restore sanity. And so far, so good. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Update

Young whippersnapper: It's your router that's the problem.

Me: No, it isn't.

(He argues. I prove that it's not the router.)

Young whippersnapper: It's your computer that's the problem.

Me: No, it isn't.

(I contend that it is statistically impossible for all three computers to fail in the exact same manner at the same time.)

Young whippersnapper: I don't know how to fix this, so I will call in someone smarter, on the pretext that he has a laptop and I don't. And since you have argued with me, I will erase the dial-up program from your computer.

He didn't really say either of those last two sentences, but that's what he did.

Various Otelco DSL repair guys were here for five hours yesterday. It's only partially fixed. What that means is, if we want high-speed internet, we have to go sit in the junk room and hook directly into their cable. Guy #2 said our router was fried, but then he couldn't get the new router (that he was trying to sell us) to work either.

He said they'll be back "probably Tuesday or Wednesday".

Acoustic Cafe

Some friends and I were treated to a tour of the Acoustic Cafe Amphitheater, which is situated on an rocky mountain near Hayden.


You know Steve Masterson must be a nice guy, when you learn that he puts on a music festival that's located, more or less, in his yard. I haven't been to the festival yet, but it sounds like good music and a lot of fun. (Check it out at the link above - it's string music that draws people from across the country on Memorial Day weekend.)


Buster, who loves to walk.


Wild Four-O-Clocks, Mirabilis nyctaginea.


I kept thinking that some of the rocks looked like bald heads covered with green toupées. This one even had a nose and ears.


Indian Pink, Spigelia marilandica.


Skull tree.


Alabama Larkspur, (Delphinium alabamicum), and a cat whose name should probably be Groucho.


The other very beautiful, but very shy, dog.


Left, Purple Cliff-brake, (Pellaea atropurpurea).
Right, Yellow Passionflower, (Passiflora lutea).


Recycling!


Ragwort, aka Butterweed, (Packera sp., aka Senecio).


Four-leaved Milkweed, (Asclepias quadrifolia).


Solomon's Seal, (Polygonatum commutatum).


Heavy metal cricket.


Carolina Spiny-pod, Matelea carolinensis. Aka Carolina Anglepod or Carolina Milkvine.


More good rocks.


Nettleleaf Sage, Salvia urticifolia.


Whiteflower leafcup, Polymnia canadensis. Grows right on top of the rocks.