Mary's niece, Clara Jane, turns one today. We started a sort of tradition last year (when she was barely one week old), taking a picture with Mary's brother, Jimmy's easter bunny stuffed animal (he's 38 now, so he doesn't sleep with it anymore, and I guess that makes it okay for her to love it). Yesterday, we took another one right before her one-year birthday. What a change!

Last year, one-week old (click for larger image)

This year, one-year old (click for larger)

Wow! This photo essay of a motorcycle ride through the chernobyl area is pretty intense. Crazy to think about it, especially since I had, for the most part, forgotten that it had really happened. I remember living in Seattle as a kid, wondering if the doomsayers were correct that the radiation cloud would get picked up in the upper atmosphere and drift to the west coast of the US. [via many people, including Rory and Mike Pope]

I was browsing over to 9x9 Lightly Greased Pan, looking for other websites and blogs, then ended up following a link in a Neil Gaiman blog entry to these awesome pictures of lightning. This guy has some  great  ones. “Thor” definitely would be one of my favs, too.

A while ago, RoryB set up a great RSS feed that grabbed daily pieces of art from the louvre's website and put them in an RSS feed. I've been subscribed since the beginning and consider it my daily non-geeky thing to see in Sharpreader. :) For some reason, today's piece of art really hit the spot!

 

Hippopotamus
c. 2000-1900 BC (early Middle Kingdom)
Egyptian faience (glazed silicious pottery)
H 12,7 cm; W 20,5 cm, D 8,1 cm
E 5886

 

To find out more information, go to Rory's Site and click on RSS - The Louvre button.

My dad sent me a picture that it snowed in Seattle. I remember the whole city shutting down when this much snow happened. HAHA! In Cleveland, we laugh at this much. Just a sprinkling.

I realize this is a bit late, what with thanksgiving happening next week, but I thought I'd finally put pictures up of my halloween pumpkin. Many thanks to Rob Cockerham of cockeyed.com for the inspiration.

In any case, I wanted this halloween to be special, so, after being inspired by one of Rob Cockerham's amazing creations, I set out to make myself a great pumpkin (no, not the one that Linus believes in). I wanted to get my revenge on all the people who made fun of me at prom. Oh, wait, I didn't go to prom. Well, in honor Sissey Spacek, here it is, the Carrie Pumpkin!

It is a glorious example of modern engineering. The two holes in the top of the head are continuously pumping blood-red fluid down the front of the face. Absolutely frightening!

Here's how I did it.

I was going to make it the night before, but I was lazy, so I ended up running out and trying to find stuff at around 5 in the evening on October 31st. Well, to get started, here is the pumpkin we got:

On the surface, not so impressive. Well, just wait and see! I was all ready to get going. Mary was not so involved in it, though. She wanted to see if I could actually pull this off!

I didn't have much time, so I got started right away. Last year, we bought a great little pumpkin carving saw that made short order of the pumpkin. After some ultra-fun cleaning of the pulp, here is what I had:

With the pumpking cleaned out, I had to get my insides all put together. I had originally gone to Pat Kattan's, our local craft store, looking for a pump, but they had stopped selling them. So, I ended up at Home Depot, which was okay, because they had some copper fittings to split the tube.

This was the original plan, to have three streams of blood, but the pump was having trouble getting the water evenly to all three tubes, so I settled on two streams. After drilling two holes in the head of the pumpkin, I inserted the pump and tubing:

After whipping up some cherry kool-aid, I turned on the pump and had a glorious Carrie Pumpkin! You made fun of me at my prom. Now you will die!!!!

I wonder what happened to the cat from my last entry? Matt has trouble with the cats around the neighborhood, but does this look like a killer cat to you? Besides, I always have to go rescue him from the other cats, since he backs himself into a corner and just sort of howls. Wimp!

Okay, maybe in this picture he does has a bit of an evil look to him:

And he does spend a lot of time staring into the garden. The dead cat was found in the cosmos on the left.

If you recognize this cat, please let me know, and I'll return him. He was found in my garden.

If I don't hear from you by Wednesday morning, then you'll have to reclaim him at the city dump!