21 March 2004 ... Photo Entry

I've decided that if I ever write a book, it'll have sketches of things on all the pages, and photos, and colourful doodles. 'Course, I'm not writing a book and don't want to, but I am writing here...

The grey stray cat who introduced himself at the beginning of February, is still around. He gets two solid meals a day and I am happy to provide.

SO named the cat Nosey, because the cat is always looking into our apartment to see what's going on. And then SO decided to rename him Snowboots because of his white paws. But you can't just change somebody's name, and so the cat goes by Nosey-Snowboots now.

You can see the side of my outdoor plant pot in the Nosey photo above... It started out as a place for my hummingbird seeds, but only three lonely penstemon sticks emerged. And then a birdseed plant started growing. And then three little weeds started growing.

You know me, I'm not going to kill anything, especially not going to pull some pretty little weeds. And so, thus, the jungle on the porch.

The milo plant approached 6 feet tall, and I have lost count of the seed heads it has made! One of the little weeds has made these beautiful little pink flowers. The green sticks of penstemon are still in there... They are still tiny, probably only five or six inches long and still only have three or four sticks to a plant. poor things.

Life and Death and Life of the Track Ball

It's important to have a keyboard that you like. And an artist needs a wacom tablet. But my most important pointing device is my track ball.

The track ball is so much more personal than a mouse... a mouse is just a mouse, you can find the same 10$ mouse on a million PCs. But a track ball adds personality to your system. After so many years of use, my track ball is a completely natural extension of my fingertips.

Which is why I about cried when I discovered my trackball quit working last weekend. It was an accident: The cord was dragging on the floor, and Tegan chewed on it. The yellow wire had a 4mm section missing, and the orange wire wasn't looking too happy either.

I unplugged the useless track ball and laid it on the kitchen counter, hoping some brownies would come by in the night and fix it. I used my wacom tablet and mouse for a week. Much frustration, banging the mouse when it didn't go to where I wanted it, picking it up when it went off the wacom "screen", and the pain of carpal tunnel was not that enjoyable either.

I decided I could not afford a new track ball, and didn't want to get used to a new track ball anyway. So I spliced. And taped. And plugged back in. And, YAY, the track ball is back!

Yep, there it is, in all it's re-wired glory. I had to fold the cord in order to get the yellow wire to connect to itself. And boy, that's delicate work... there are 7 different colours of wires in that cable. Tiny, tiny.

So, yeah, it works, but I do have my eye on the next track ball... top-of-the-line Logitech, of course.

It's cordless.

Here's Tegan and Tessera munching on some guinea pig granola. And Tess shows her horrible table manners! But at least she knows enough to not chew on cables that happen to be lying around.