utenzi

You gotta love politicians. Here in North Carolina the state isn't allowed to run deficits. So, at the end of the year the budget has to balance. If it doesn't balance then immediate cutbacks have to be made. This year one of the ways that this was done was every state worker had their salary cut 0.5% for the year. Sounds minor but this 0.5% is being implemented in one month so it turns out to be a salary cut of 6% for the month. And you know what makes it worse? Even though I'm paid by a federal grant they're peeling back my salary too! According to the state HR, they want to treat everyone the same despite the fact that the budget is only helped by cutting costs on state paid workers. But enough of my whining. This has nothing to do with my post... I am just venting. There's an article in today's Durham Herald-Sun about a state funded position with NC State. It seems that for the past 4 years Mary Easley has run a speaker series for NC State. She oversees a b...

That's me down there. Not much detail and there's a reason for that, but first... I've not been feeling very well this week and most days I've fallen asleep soon after getting home from work. Which meant that I wasn't able to sleep very much late at night when I should have been sleeping. What does this have to do with the picture? Nothing really. I just wanted to complain. Well, okay there is a little overlap here. I went to bed early last night at 1am and that had me waking up at 5:30am which is VERY early for me. More like time to go to bed than time to wake up. So to keep awake I cleaned out my fridge and freezer of really old stuff. And went to the landfill before work with two bags of garbage. Since I was being so good about errands, after work I got around to doing a few others. For quite some time I'd intended on getting my hair cut and today I did it. Finally. And that is the reason for that picture. I tried 5 times to get a good picture of my haircut a...

I'm officially a car owner again. I received the title to my Elantra in the mail yesterday. As of tomorrow I'll have owned it for 2 years and 10 months. Since I usually keep cars for 6 years that means 3 years and 2 months before I have to deal with car payments again. I'm quite happy with the car and if it holds up well, I might keep it past the 6 year point. Hell, given the weakness of the economy---I might HAVE to keep it longer than 6 years. In other news, my heels are finally healing over. Only one of the blisters I got last week while hiking is still weeping. And that's only a little bit over the course of a full day at work. Soon I'll be able to go hiking again! Now if it'd just cool off a little bit. Hiking in 90+ weather is not a lot of fun.

This post is about me playing with my new toy. It's a lot of fun. This is the back of my house. Last weekend Julie and I trimmed those shrubs back a bit. Okay, more than a bit. I'd not trimmed them in 3 years and they were very overgrown. We trimmed off around 60% of the trees. Don't worry about those trees though. The last time I trimmed them, I pretty much cut them right down to the ground. You can't kill those trees. I sure did try---but they bounced right back so I gave up and left them there. So now I have two piles of limbs from the trees, which explains the timing of my chipper / shredder purchase. The goal is to grind down all that nasty shrubbery rubbish. In the picture below you can see me with my new toy, clearing a clog, in the midst of grinding down the first pile of limbs. You can see the other pile in the background. Below you can see what the limbs look like after being ground up. The chipper is supposed to be able to take limbs up to 1.5" in diam...

I bought a new toy on Amazon a few weeks ago. This is what it looks like. Pretty, eh? I have a lot of shrubs around my house and a bunch of small trees that need trimming. Up to now I've just trimmed them every so often and left the trimmed branches in a pile around my shed. Not very pretty and a rodent attractant so I finally decided to spend the money to remedy the situation. One of the reasons that I'd delayed is that I thought that the inexpensive electric shredders could only do leaves. They mostly use nylon fish line to do their work and that wouldn't do anything to branches. But I recently discovered that there's an inexpensive ($160 - 300) alternative to gas powered chipper / shredders ($600 and up)---and so I ordered one pronto! At $207 delivered, this beauty is well worth the money---assuming it works. The reviews on Amazon are fairly positive so I'm hoping for the best. This is what the sweet little thing looked like all splayed out on my living room floo...

For my first demonstration, now you see the pretty flower... ...and now you don't. I'm a magic bunny. And I don't need no flamin' top hat either! Now watch me do it sideways, folks. It's all in the paws. Quicker than the eye, y'know? Don't try this at home.

Let's start this post off on the right foot, well, actually the left foot as it turns out... It might not be pretty, but that is my left foot up there. What's left of it, anyway. I received some blisters during a hike on Wednesday evening at Occoneechee Park. My own fault, of course. I broke several of the cardinal rules of hiking that day. I wore shoes that I'd never had on before, they were also not for walking trails, and they didn't fit very well. Given all that, it's not surprising that I got blisters. This is taken from the observation post on top of a cliff overlooking the quarry at Occoneechee. Pretty view. Much nicer looking than my disfigured foot. Several of the other members of my hiking group are seen here descending a steep hill with the sun shining behind them. Being back lit like that can be very dramatic! Here we are descending yet another hill. This place is full of them. They might not be very high but there's just so many short climbs... And ...