Boolie’s Blog

I don’t normally do much blog linking - what I call blinking - but here are a couple I’ve come across recently that I’ve enjoyed.

First up is No Cats Allowed, a blog about the cats of Alaskan writer Grahamn Kracker. This is more than just a blog about his cats (and his cats that look very much like dogs), the pictures are intertwined with stories of cats he meets in his travels and stories about his family. Apparently some people don’t just post pictures of their cats to their blogs as a thinly veiled excuse for making bad puns. He just started writing in May so I’d recommend setting aside a few minutes and starting from the beginning.

Next up is the Boston’s Globe The Big Picture, which is attracting attention from photographers worldwide for the large images they post, going against the grain of nearly all other news sites which use small images. Each story has a small amount of explanatory text and then a number of images to go along with it. Subjects run the gamut from sports to science to current events, but not cats or wildlife, so you’ll see I do actually have interest in things that aren’t furry or feathered.

Don’t miss these Chilean volcano pictures, especially the ones with lightning. Or these photos of the Boston Celtics winning the NBA championship, the post where I first discovered the blog and got hooked.

So far the plants I moved a few weeks ago are all doing fine. I’m glad I got them established as we’re in the midst of a record heat wave.

I had moved about about a dozen strawberry plants that were growing too close to the fence, and not only did they survive but every one of them is blooming! Even the littlest one has a nice white flower that came up during the week.

We’ve got a couple dozen plants now, all propagated from the few sickly survivors I rescued while clearing the forest of weeds when we bought the house. They responded well to getting more sun when the grapes were pulled up and last year produced a number of offshoots. The berries from the original plants are quite tasty and I have high hopes for the new ones, providing the slugs save a few for me.

The blueberry bush I moved has also survived and this week started to put out a few flowers. It isn’t the sunniest spot in the yard but better than before. If it does well I might move the other two next year into more sun near the raspberries, but I’ve avoided doing anything near the house since we’re getting a new roof in a few weeks and I figure there will be some plant casualties as they work.

If these transplants prove to be a success I’ll try something more challenging, like kidneys or livers.

This picture is from my visit to Ridgefield a couple of weeks ago. The savannah sparrows were out singing in force and I came away with a couple of nice pictures.

I haven’t seen them much the past couple of weeks, but I’ve spent most of my time next to a marsh where you’ll see song sparrows and marsh wrens but not savannah sparrows. As their name implies, they hang out in the meadows, singing from any vantage point they can find, even if it’s only a blackberry vine that’s a few inches off the ground.

This bird was singing from much higher up in some tall grasses at the border between a meadow and a lake. It really threw its had back at the end of the song, but I like this shot where you can still see its eyes.

After ribbing Japan on Monday for not having visited my web site the past few weeks, wouldn’t you know it that when I checked my web stats the next morning, someone from Japan visited sometime that very day. So now all the countries I’ve been to in real life have visited at least once in the last few weeks.

It’s possible that the timing was coincidence, but I think my psychic powers have grown to the point that I can manipulate minds in Tokyo. I did not seem to have a similar effect on the druids, not too surprising given how they resisted the Jedi. Much to learn have I.

It’d be cool if Google could hook up their map of places that have visited to Google Earth so I could see what some of these places look like. Also if they could provide some fun facts about the location, like if you clicked on Ridgefield, Washington and it mentioned that it is the birthplace of U-Haul and the high school team is named the Spudders.

There are also some grade schools that link in, which is mostly good, but I had a pang of conscience at some of my picture descriptions. If you’re a teacher and a student says that bufflehead “primarily eat small creatures like snails, mussels, and Star Wars figurines”, look, I have no idea where they could have gotten such an idea. None.

Nevertheless, perhaps now is a good time to teach them that not everything they read on the Internet is true.

In looking at referalls, I see that my site referred itself a few times. This is clearly impossible and a sure sign that I have opened a portal into a parallel universe. Star Trek fans, you know the drill: don’t trust anyone in a goatee until I get this sorted out.

Some more quick thoughts on my web traffic since my last update:

• I was mistaken earlier when I said that I had been visited by 49 states with West Virginia the lone holdout. It turns out West Virginia hadn’t visited, that part was true, but neither had Delaware or Rhode Island. West Virginia did visit this week, followed by Delaware, and then finally Rhode Island, so all 50 states have now stopped by. Drinks are on me!
• I am unpopular with the druids. Exactly zero visits from the towns around Stonehenge. Zero! This may hurt my chances at becoming Archdruid.
• I am also unpopular in Japan (Finland and China have since clocked in, so Japan is the lone holdout of countries I’ve visited). Perhaps the druids have taken over Japan. I need to look into this.
• Each country has a two letter identifier at the end of their Internet address, except for the US, which is only fair since Al Gore did invent the Internet. Much like two letter identifiers for the states of the US, however, some of them are not for the countries I expected. For example, did you know that Switzerland is ch, so China is not ch but cn, and Canada is not cn but eh?
• Canada has visited but at a much lower rate than I expected compared to the US. I had planned to run a targeted campaign by blogging about hockey sticks and Pocky sticks (attracting both Canadians and the druid-Japanese), but I no longer believe it will be enough to attract my friends to the north. What we need is an invasion. Fifty-Four Forty or Fight! Who’s with me? Hello? Anyone? Hello?