2006 – Page 3 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Say I’m the only bee in your bonnet

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For the last several months Cynthia has been working on a quilt as a Christmas present for her mother. It was originally going to be a green and white traditional birdhouse style quilt.

Before Cynthia got started on it we went to the Gee’s Bend show and it inspired her to do something a little less conventional.

Cynthia decided to design her own non-traditional pattern and ended with this spectacular original creation:

click image for larger view

The pieces are all machine sewn together, but all of the quilting is meticulously and painstakingly done by hand. All in all it took Cynthia about 4 1/2 months to complete this project.

We shipped it last week and Cynthia’s mother received it on Friday.
She was very excited and says she loves it!

Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Willkommen!

Awhile back I was utilizing a nifty plugin that would translate my blog into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Chinese and Portuguese. Sadly, the plugin stopped working when the creater of the code released his fully functional and quite commercial version called Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro.

This meant that if I wanted to use the plugin I would have to buy it.

After much hemming and hawing I finally broke down and bought the plugin and have now re-installed it.

If you look in the right hand sidebar of baldheretic.com you will see a series of flags. Just click on the flag to see this site in the corresponding language.

The plugin utilizes Google Translate to reformat the blog and it’s pretty slick.

I’m now watching as the search engine spiders re-crawl my web site in order to index it in the various languages.

You can already find references in some search engines to “El Heretic Calvo”….

Apronicity

Cynthia and I met up with Allen “King of the Oldies” Hill and his lovely lady, Andrea, for dinner last night. We dined at BYOB Lebanese restaurant called Cafe Mezza. It was our first time to eat there and it was quite good.

Cynthia wanted to make an apron for Allen and personalize it. Since Allen’s primary marketing trademark is a wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes Cynthia came up with the perfect thing:

It’s called the “Allen Hillpron”

Still singing where the weeping willows wave

Acquired a Tamron 18 – 200mm f/3.5-6.3 XR DI-II LD lens for my Sony.
Extremely versatile lens. It allows me to go from a nice wide angle to a reasonable zoom without changing lenses. This will be the perfect travel lens.

Took it out to Terry Hershey Park over off the Beltway. It was just too nice a day to spend indoors. The hike and bike trail extends all the way to Highway 6 and is very pleasant.
Cynthia and I saw many Warblers, a few Woodpeckers and this Mockingbird:

Click image for full size

Aperture: f/6.3
ISO: 400
Focal length: 200mm

The image stabilization in this camera is very helpful at these extended focal lengths.

Like a true nature’s child

More pics here.

Google push pins explained

William

When Cynthia and I took our European vacation in 2005 we decided to take William the Sheep and take pictures of him in front of various sites we visited.

In fact, he has his own subject tag here at baldheretic.com as well as his own photo gallery.

We have every intention of taking him on our next vacation for more photo opportunities.

As I was vanity searching on the web I found an interesting site. It’s an online Russian real estate magazine. One particular issue happens to jump out at me…

That’s William in the hotel bed in Paris.

I know I am usually pissed off when I see someone hot-linking or stealing one of my images…
But this is kind of cool.

You can see the original at www.sob.ru/issue242.html

Frank was just asking ‘what’s new?’

Back in 1995 or so we decided we wanted to have a fish tank.
We did a little research and settled on a 50 gallon freshwater system and got started.
It was cool stocking it with fish and setting up the plants and rock and stuff.
We had plecostomuses (plecostomusi? plecostomooses?) and other catfish, hatchet fish, neon tetras, you name it. We even had some African Dwarf Frogs in there.

We maintained it, cleaned it, added fish when some would pass away. We even nursed some fish back to health after the developed some kind of scale eating fish rot.

During that time we moved twice, the second time being when we bought our house in 1998. The aquarium moved with us and that my friend is no easy task.

After several years our interest and dedication to the tank waned. Fish that passed on to the great beyond were briefly mourned as they were flushed into the hereafter, but were not replaced.

Eventually all that remained were 5 bottom dwellers. Some catfish and a loach.

We were ready to give up being fish tank owners. The problem was that I simply didn’t have the heart to take 5 perfectly healthy fish and just flush them away, but having a 50 gallon tank seemed like overkill for that small number of fish.

I decided to buy a cheap 10 gallon aquarium and transplant the survivors so that they could live out their lives with minimal upkeep in an out of the way corner of the house.

Before long old age took it’s toll and 3 of the five remaining bottom dwellers passed away, leaving us with the loach and a catfish which both survived up until about a year ago.

Now there is just the loach. We call him “Loachy” and on one of his active days he looks like this:

For the most part, though, he tends to literally lay around the bottom of the aquarium on his side looking very dead:

Sometimes, like in the picture above, he is in among his rocks. Other times he’s just laying around out in the open on the white gravel.

Let me be clear, he’s not sick. He’s lazy. This fish has been sleeping or resting on his side since the day we got him oh so many years ago.

He’s the last fish, and when he’s gone we’re done.

I don’t know how long he’s going to live.
I will tell you he was in the original group of fish we bought when we started.

That means he is 11+ years old if you just count the years we’ve owned him.

For all I know he’ll go another 11 years.