gettysburg ghost tour

Brooks and I just got back from Halloween at Gettysburg. We did a ghost tour and they pointed out the haunted places and Brooks mostly took pictures of them. Later we went back to see if we could see any, but I saw all of these orbs when I enlarged them on my computer. View these as large as possible, I think these are the best examples. Esp. the second building picture, below is a close up of the window and the circled area looks like a face to me. This brick building was a military hospital.

NEW turtle!!!

My neighbor found three baby box turtles before mowing the lawn. He gave them to his two kids and had this other guy left over. He knows how much I love turtles so he gave him to me. He's so cute, about the size of a walnut. The coin in the picture is a quarter. He's adorable and pretty tiny, probably a month or two old (still has his egg tooth). I haven't named him/he

r yet.

More Tony Baloney

Come play with me!
Feed me! Feed me!

The disapproving face
Sun tanning

stained glass cookies

I love almond extract flavoring so I made the cookie recipe that comes on the back of the box and decorated them with a clear glaze. They look like stained glass to me. I also made three cakes with the recipe on allrecipes.com's recipe of the day. It was a lemon cake, but it only called for lemon extract so I made three with three different extracts: orange, lemon and almond and covered them all with a colored basic glaze(<- I actually added a squeeze of corn syrup, a little almond flavoring and more milk). I had to substitute regular flour for cake flour and powdered sugar for regular because we were pretty much out. Still, I was happy with the results and of course the lemon was my favorite. With the glaze the orange cake tasted like those orange pillsbury rolls.

Tony Baloney pics

Watching cutewithchris together
Turtle friends
Sleeping

flowers

saving seeds from the zinnia with pink edges

zinnias

the big space in the middle of the line is from where i accidently killed the zinnia when i was spraying a brown recluse

marigolds

Plants

My pumpkin plant has a 6" pumpkin on it but the vine isn't doing well. First the leaves turned yellow, then got brown spots, now have grey spots and it's traveling back along the vine. I'd like to grow it to full size, but I don't think it's going to make it. Unlike my ornamental squashes which I didn't even care about, they're doing great, almost too well. They took over the hose, the whole side of the house, and are now making their way over the holly bush. I didn't prune back that branch because I want to see what happens when the two baby squashes grow while it's suspened in the bush.

Rose cuttings

These are pics of me starting rose cuttings. I've heard that it can be hard but all I did was water them. I started with 3 and one rooted. I grew it in a soda bottle green house, and the last picture is all the new growth I've gotten from the cutting. The plant that I took them from came from a florist, we planted it not knowing if it would make it through the winter. Not only is it hardy, but it also blooms once a month with about 15 to 20 roses and has a ton of leaf damage and keeps on growing.

Tony Baloney Pics

Some more pics of my Carolina diamond back terrapin that just walked into my life, as a little baby all caked with mud, into the hallway in front of my door. He's more friendly than the sliders were, and instead of hiding when people come by, he gets all excited. I'm not exactly sure if he's a boy actually, an educated guess. I won't be sure until he's bigger, in which case I'll change it to Toni if it's a girl.

Turtles new toy

I put the rubber ducky in with the red eared sliders to see how they would react. They pretty much bite everything, so I think their reaction was typical. I still haven't decided one names, the boy is definitely Jose Ole, but I haven't found a good name for the girl. The carolina terrapin is named Tony Baloney, in honor of a lil bush cartoon where president Bush calls Tony Blair 'Tony Balogna'. This is him down here, he's a little bit bigger than a quarter now. For now he's in a seperate tank. Perhaps when he's bigger I'll move him over, but for now he's about a third the slider's size, so he'll be living solo.

St. Mary's College sunset

Illustrations

so i recently got corel painter and have loved using it. i really like the watercolors setting, it has animations of the water absorbing into the paper and the color spreading. here are some things i've made with it