Colors!
Such a neat variation in color you see in this
picture. I know Beth doesn’t really like these
flowers, but they photograph nicely (and I like
them). 🙂

Happy Independence Day, everyone! By the time most will read this, it will no longer be July 4, so I hope your holiday went well.

I don’t always like leaving the title of the picture as the title of the post, but today I’m making an exception. Not due to subject material (because I’m not talking about flowers), but due to the holiday. I think the plural word ‘colors’ works well to describe in many different ways what the Independence Day holiday is about. For real. Aside from what it’s come to mean to many (fireworks and a day off).

Given the very nature of our country’s development and foundation, the vast differences in culture and race, and the flag itself, I think the word ‘colors’ can easily be tied into the true [real] meaning of Independence Day for pretty much anyone who really thinks about it.

I spent the day working on several different things, but still taking it pretty easy. The late morning brought on a quest to capture some video from VHS. I captured some stuff for Beth and then worked on all of our wedding material on VHS. This will be converted to DVD for better and longer preservation at some time. It was kinda fun (as it always is) to watch that stuff, especially seeing as how it was our fifth anniversary not that long ago. Even though it’s only been five years, it’s amazing to see how different (and how similar) some of the people in the videos look. Crazy. 🙂

Once I completed that capturing (in the early afternoon), I went outside and spent some time with the dogs. Seeing as how it was hot and a bit humid, I didn’t really do much with them, but I ended up using the undercoat rake to make them a little less scruffy looking (and more comfortable for the summer). It looks like I killed a few chickens in the front yard now, but the dogs (especially Koshka) look much better now.

I’m casually looking at doing an overhaul of the MZ Online root site and also my personal site to shift away from the TWiki format and back into something more standard (like PHP). The TWiki business will stay for the Python Repository and for One-Act materials (due to various reasons), but it’s time to freshen things up in the other departments. Amongst other things (especially since the MZ Online sites don’t use PHP form processors, whereas the other sites I maintain do use PHP form processors), it’s one of my side projects I’d like to complete sometime before the end of this year. Who knows when or how long it will take…

I enjoyed the last of this year’s fresh asparagus picking tonight. What I had left over in the fridge from my last picking now about three weeks ago had reached the end of its shelf life. So what I didn’t cook up went into the garbage. So I’m a little sad because of that (I love asparagus), but on the same note the lack of asparagus throughout the remainder of the year makes me look forward to next year. A lot like sweet corn does.

I crossed the 1,700 picture mark tonight (1,712 to be exact) after uploading all the flower and animal pictures I took today (along with the Kirstin pictures). I also did a lot of searching around on Flickr to get ideas of how I can do a few other things (namely with tags) to make organization and searching easier as the collection grows larger. I’ve fortunately got a pretty good organization scheme already (with the sets), but I should really do some tagging work to round it out for the future. This is the sort of thing that can be done over time, though.

So anyway, with all of that said, I sign off…until next time…

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
– Tom Clancy

–MZ