Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
Part of taking possession of a house, for me, is figuring out where and what everything is. That includes identifying all the plants and trees, and learning how to best care for them.
I was channeling middle school biology class looking at pictures of leaves and determining whether they were ovate or pinnate. Everything is so much easier when you have a flower to look at, but it wasn’t going to be that easy for me.
The first challenge were the two thin, vase-like ornamental trees in front. I thought, “they’re like crepe myrtle but there are no flowers; all the other crepe myrtle in town are blooming.” Two or three weeks later, they bloomed, and my suspicions were confirmed. Though, why they took their time is still a mystery.
The next was the flowerless, leather-leafed bush in back. It was especially difficult to track down but eventually I figured it might be a camellia. I would have to wait until it bloomed to tell for sure, and last week, it did just that.
Camellia, also known as the rose of winter, is an evergreen shrub native to China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. It flowers in late fall, when so many other shrubs and perennials have gone dormant, even in Florida.
If you’ve never lived in Philadelphia then you, like me, have never heard of the Mummers Parade – perhaps the oldest folk festival in the U.S. The Mummers Parade happens on New Years Day, and is based on the Mummers Play tradition from the U.K. and Ireland, which is one of several begging traditions from around Christmas and New Years.
Though the Mummers Parade has been broadcast locally since 1993 and digitally streamed since 2011, it seems to have had far less fan fair than the West coast’s Rose Parade. I hate to think this is because of football.
There are people who end up sitting in front of a computer with nothing worthwhile to do, or nothing worthwhile they want to do. Inspirograph, though maybe not made specifically for those people, can bring beauty and a little fun creativity to them.
Chapter Ten, the final chapter, of Penelope Sea and Ocean End posted yesterday on The LeEMS Bean. If you were avoiding reading it because you don’t like waiting a week for conflict resolution (why I can’t stand most TV shows), then you are in luck because all of the story is posted!
Have you seen NASA’s new pics of the world at night? If not, then leave here right now! and go to: Earth at Night 2012 : Feature Articles.
2014 was a pretty slim year for non-comic artistic output by me, but there were still a few pieces worth looking back at.
Another that I hadn’t posted here due to its NSFW-ness:
Chapter Nine of Penelope Sea and Ocean End has posted on The LeEMS Bean. What will happen to Penelope? How will her journey end? Next week’s posting of the final chapter, chapter ten, will answer all your burning questions.
I have one of those jobs that naturally winds down towards the winter holidays and new year. For some time now, I have taken advantage of this time at work to sort through files and clean out anything that probably should have been recycled before making it in a drawer.
Part of this clean-out includes sorting, organizing, and backing up the countless digital files on my computer. Sure, we have an IT department that maintains a storage drive for our personal files, but that won’t help me if it fails one day and I am one of hundreds of employees begging to have some data restored.
This tradition is starting to bleed into my personal life as well. I create a lot of digital files and store them in a lot of places, from web site hosts, and social networks, to document hosting sites. I’ve also had a recent experience with cleaning and tying up someone else’s digital life. The information you put out there is important, it might not be clear how now, but you, or someone you love, will probably need it sometime later. If I safeguard myself at work from being one of hundreds should something go wrong, why wouldn’t I safeguard myself at home from being one of millions that a distant and faceless ‘IT’ may or may not be willing to deal with should something go wrong?
How would you do this? Never thought to ask? Well, Hotmail, if you have Microsoft Office on your computer, can be connected to Outlook and archived from there. Google offers a select data to download option under ‘Data Tools’ in your account profile. In Facebook, you can download a copy of your Facebook data under ‘General Settings.’ Tech Streak has a post about how to back up your Tumblr, though I have not tried it yet. And, of course, you can download a full copy of any website you own with an ftp transfer client. I like FileZilla.
And once you’ve got copies of everything, what do you do with it? While storage drives are popular back-ups for home computing, what about something like LibraryBox? Though created for more lofty purposes than home storage, LibraryBox would be a great way to get your data back-up off the grid, though still allow you to link into it via WiFi with any of your devices.
I’m not even going to mention privacy issues, but this is also the time of year when I close out customer and social networking accounts of places that I just don’t maintain anymore. While I’m at it, I think I should spend some time removing my personal data from places all over the web because I want to consciously control what’s sold to me.
I was scoping out an online pallet generator and generally stewing over all the design recommends on picking colors for your whole house, so I made this. My house has actually, and accidentally come together pretty well in my opinion. Part inherited furniture (from family), part inherited room color (from the previous owner and/or original owner), and partially my natural leaning to red, green, and dark wood tones.
The only room not represented here is the music room; I don’t think it brings in too many more colors; it just has all of them in unbalanced abundance.