Reflections in the Dragon's Eye: A Journal

"You could take some pictures of your garden and post them!" I looked at him dubiously. "It's doing so nicely!" he enthused.

This is my garden. It's about seven feet long and two feet wide. The planters contain flowers. Or at least, they contain flower seedlings. Behold the awful clay-ridden dirt with which I am forced to work.

These are tomato plants. There are supposed to be three of them, but one is half-dead, so I didn't bother including it in the picture. But these two are doing quite nicely. The fluffy stuff toward the bottom of the picture is carrots, which are growing in an uneven border all the way around the bed.

My cucmber seedlings. Of the nine seeds I planted, seven came up. I only actually want two cucumber vines, so I'm going to have to weed out most of these.

Squash seedlings. These are growing very enthusiastically. Like the cucumbers, I only want two vines. Since this is actually four plants (hard to see in the picture, I know) I'm going to have to pick one plant from each cluster to weed out.

Okay, it's not very exciting to look at. It'll be more exciting later in the summer when there are actually vegetables. Here - you can look at my rocks instead:

They're supposed to look like castle wall bricks or something, I think. Whatever; I liked the way they looked, so I lined the porch mulchbed with a double row. I'm working on the other mulch bed, but it's much bigger. Not only do they look nice, but they should help keep mulch in and grass out of the beds.

We had a good weekend. I stayed up late and slept in late, lounged around the house doing nothing more sophisticated than playing around in Photoshop to doctor pictures for my Role-playing Characters webpage. (If you're not interested in the Meade Hall don't bother looking. I'm hoping to eventually get pages up for characters in the actual games I play, but the 'Hall characters have been living large in my brain lately.

The pictures I think capture the character best are Tarri's - most of them required only the tiniest modifications from their originals. But I'm proudest of the non-photo picture of Kevil, since it involved taking the head from one picture and splicing it onto the body of another. Yes, if you look closely, you can tell. But given the differences between the original pictures I think I did a fantastic job.

(Don't sneer at the original pictures, darnit. Karen's idea of looking for a suitable picture for Kev on the covers of "bodice-ripper" romances worked pretty well!)

Ack. I just realized I uploaded the wrong version of some of these pictures. And saw some coding errors. Oh, well, the site is a work in progress. If that sort of thing interests you, feel free to check back occasionally.

Sunday evening Matt and I went over to my parents' house to have dinner with them for Mother's Day. Don't look at me like that. I asked Mom what she wanted for Mother's Day, and what she wanted was to have Matt and I over for dinner.

So we had ham, fresh tomatoes, fresh green beans, and fresh corn-on-the-cob. I brought the cheese biscuits left over from the office pot-luck. We had ice cream and strawberries with Girl Scout thin mint cookies for dessert.

I had one slice of ham, three ears of corn, most of a whole tomato, and two big helpings of green beans. Summer is my least favorite season, but fresh vegetables is one of the few things I do love about it.

We went to see The Mummy Returns Friday night. I understand why I've been seeing such mixed reviews for it. It had plot holes big enough to drive a double-decker bus through. It introduced hints and clues that later turned out to be mostly irrelevant. It involved silly deus ex machina devices and superhuman skills in characters who had no good reason to have those skills. It leaned heavily on the exact same CGI effects they'd used in the first movie. And not only did Rick and Evie not look enough older to have produced an eight-year-old child, but the child looked entirely unlike both of them.

But if you didn't think about it too hard - if you went in with the certain knowledge that it wasn't going to be an intellectual movie, but a fast-paced summer blockbuster movie... It was fun. The kid may not have looked like his parents, but he managed to be intelligent without being precocious or the precise center of the movie. (I hate precocious kid movies.) The re-used CGI was obvious, but still pretty nifty. The eye-candy was nice all around (and that's all I'm going to say about my latest screen crush), and it managed to keep going fast enough that I didn't notice that the movie was nearly two and a half hours long - which is about the best thing you can say for a movie, right?

All in all, I thought it was well worth the price of admission, but if plot holes in action/adventure movies give you hives, stay well away.

Word of the Day:
sacrilegious - a violation of something consecrated to a god; gross irreverence toward a hallowed person, place, or thing

Currently Reading:
- nothing

Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan
- garden