Spring is here!

Asparagus is up, spinach that overwintered is ready to pick, the hens are laying again and just hours after April Fools day, (when Melissa and I both got fooled by Ashley) we have a new baby. We both headed to the barn after work and school to see the new baby, only we were about 12 hours early. Ashley was proud of herself for fooling us.

He isn't a very pretty baby at this point, hopefully he will get prettier, but he had just barely stood up in this photo. It seems like no matter how stressed you are about how you're going to feed all the mouths you have, birth is still exciting and wonderful.

I joined the Flickr group " One Object 365 Days Project" to post a daily picture of him for a year, so I'll link to it when I have more to show.

We had a cold spell over the weekend, but only a couple redbuds were bloomed. I wonder if that was Redbud Winter or is it still to come?

Knitting Obsession

Members of my knitting group just watched this video.
Here's their response:



"She reminds me of Jackie for so many reasons - obsessive knitting, knitting wherever she is, she's literally on the edge, she's determined (read stubborn)and I've even seen Jackie's hair look like hers!"

I haven't decided yet if this is good or bad.

Just When I Think Life Couldn't Get Any Crazier

Laugh of the day.

I carpool to work most days which gives me the luxury of knitting while Beth drives. This morning I got in the car like normal and about 1/4 mile down the road picked up the socks that are almost finished, but something felt wrong. Why was the yarn heading out the car door?

Sure enough the socks were in the car, but the baggie with yarn in it was somewhere out in the road.

Thank goodness I was almost finished with the socks and not just beginning. Otherwise I would have had a trail of yarn going all the way back home. Hopefully this is not an omen.

50 MPG

This weekend I had to drive to Danville, so I decided to just play around and experiment with how I drive. I filled up the car before I left, drove to Danville, watched a concert (KMEA District Honors Band, but more on that later) and drove home.

When I got back into town I filled up again. There was 75 miles on the odometer and it took 1.5 gallons to refill. 50 MPG in my old Camry with 265,000 miles on it. YES!

It has a manual transmission and all I did was clutch and coast the hills and anywhere else I could possibly coast. At 45-50mph I let off the clutch and gave it gas, but at times going down hills my speed drifted up to 60.

Now to try it on normal town and country driving to see how good I can get. Not as many hills, but I think that just by watching how I drive more carefully I can greatly increase my MPG.

Since I am totally unmechanical I don't know what kind of effect this driving style would have on my car, specifically my clutch. If anyone does know, please let me know.

I took this film clip of Tori's Christmas band concert. The eighth grade band at Clark-Moores playing "Hark the Herald Trumpets Swing."

Political Campaigns in Lincoln's Time

The history department arranged for the Kentucky Historical Society's History-Mobile to be on campus this week. Local elementary and middle schools were invited to bring their students to visit the History-Mobile and the archives was asked to create an exhibit that would be on display for the same days.

In conjunction with this we decided to create an electronic display that would add information to what was available in the display case. Even though I've drooled over some great online exhibits (my favorite being Not For Ourselves Alone), I hadn't tried to do one myself.

I've been out of the web site creation field for several years now (maintaining a created page doesn't count), so I had a big learning curve to make this page do what I wanted it to do. Fortunately Dreamweaver made it fairly easy to do a cascading style sheet even though I had very limited experience with them. It took several uninterrupted hours of trial and error trying different properties to see what each one would do and how it worked, but overall Dreamweaver made it easy.

The image below shows the physical exhibit and clicking on it will link to the online version which includes more information about each document, including biographical sketches on key individuals of the era, information about the political climate and events and external links to other information. We also scanned some speeches in our collections to OCR to add as links.

Baby Chicks and Hunters

Baby chicks came in last week and they are so cute. We got Araucanas/Americanas (they lay colored eggs) and brown leghorns for eggs and a few Buff Orpington roosters to fill out the order. Yes, it's late in the season, but the idea was to let them grow over the winter and then they would be ready to start laying in the spring. Now to build a chicken coop.

The girls went deer hunting this weekend. The fact that they didn't get anything didn't keep them from having fun. Ashley wouldn't clown with them, so the picture is one girl short.