Buzz

Tarda tulips finally popped today in my garden

Now that we are finally getting some nice weather & colors & such in the garden I seem to be shooting more. I am also forging ahead with social media at work & as such am 'the voice' of The Landscape Artist Inc on Facebook / Twitter which is inspiring me to shoot more too. Check me out over there, but I am also loading most of the photos I shoot for that at Zenfolio too, in my landscaping section. It is not very well organized yet but it's coming along.

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Bright Side

Shot from a surveying day... in a yard where this was really the only bright spot.


How many things do I need to shed, cancel, defer, drop, shank, or shit-can with extreme prejudice in order to singlemindedly focus on this one thing that I love? source

I found this & felt like sharing... kinda the opposite of how things are going lately. The mountains, they call.

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Scraps of Spring

In my garden this weekend, oaffus-doaffus dog & weather battered, but still a welcome splash of color


First a howling blizzard woke us,
Then the rain came down to soak us,
And now before the eye can focus -
Crocus.
- Lilja Rogers

Went to the Calgary Horticulture Society’s annual trade show yesterday & I actually learned a lot. I also got to meet up with quite a few nursery & landscape types who otherwise scatter to scurry around with their respective heads bent to their work the remainder of the season.

Quote of the day came when Ken Wright of Bow Point Nursery Ltd was asked in a seminar on native plants to comment on deer proof plants: “Deer are going to eat whatever plant is your favorite.” I thought that was pretty much the perfect answer.

I was going to go looking for prairie crocus today but decided to focus on a few other tasks like a landscape plan with a really screaming deadline & my hip deep office mess of just about everything that I’ve dropped in the past month.

As Eric had his Easter school break this past week I took a mid-week “powder day”. Since I finally have some backup in the office net productivity was unaffected as that day easily represented the time I would spend in an average past week doing stuff other than my job. Well, maybe one day wasn’t enough actually. Reaching that point of the year where the work outstrips even the most ‘productive’ week so hack & slash … onward I toil. Have a good week, & hopefully spring is coming to your neck of the woods too.

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Spring 2010 roundup

First of all… have you noticed its spring?? Or what passes for spring in this part of the world. Shhhh… don’t jinx it.
Tessa has been enjoying the warm weather.


Work is almost full bore, the final nudge of the throttle to full comes when the crews start & that will be another ten days or so (depending on the weather). Will likely get a few days skiing in over the school break now that basketball is done.

So you got left hanging with basketball… Eric’s team came second at Zones which gave them a berth into Provincials. The basketball played at Zones was intense; the team that came first in the Zone went on to a second place finish at Provincials.

The first game of Provincials was a loss in a tight game & it bumped the team to the “C” pool so at best an eighth place finish. The coach talked to the kids about playing the second game using the whole bench, get everybody on the board, (& if it was close try & win). It was a 20 point loss, certainly a team they could have beaten, but it finished the tournament on a real happy note & I felt it was the right move. In many of the games leading up to that point some of the rookies had seen little or no action… now they can say they played at Provincials. I never checked the score-sheet but I think everyone recorded at least one basket.

For Eric the last game of his High School career came on the following week as he & team-mate Brandon were selected to represent NDC in the 1A/2A South Central Zone All-Star game. The participants were split East & West & they made a game of it; the final score 93-91. It was smiles all around with many of the kids saying that was the best game they had ever played in. Eric said “I was actually getting passes on my fast breaks”. A great way to finish the season for me too watching Eric among his peers whom he had played against throughout the past three seasons (or longer).

On the weekend I jammed 1512 Basketball shots into Lightroom and spat out 258 keepers into my Zenfolio site for sharing with the athletes, family & friends. I had been considering Zenfolio for quite a while having initially been introduced to it by an scrambling partner Wietse. That was more than a year ago but with the revamp on the company website I needed a new place for what formerly was my Designers Corner segment… the first segment on the build is my tree portfolio which has saved me a lot of time describing the trees I propose for landscape clients in the past…. So the time had come for Zenfolio. I hope it will help me to stay a bit better organized when it comes to my photos and as Wietse pointed out, it acts as an online backup. Such that anything in the ‘clouds’ is secure; it’s another place to keep ‘stuff’.

So if you want you can wander over to Zenfolio for basketball, skiing, or the start of the landscape portfolio. Just mind the pylons, barricades, & open man-holes… heavily under construction.

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