Above: The squirrels ate most of the bulbs planted around this one crocus in our front garden, but at least this little guy survived, yay!

This is our first spring living in a residential neighbourhood, and I love it: seeing gardens filling with colour, buds appearing on trees, kids playing out on the street...it's quite the contrast to living in the downtown core where the only way to tell that spring has arrived is the increase in tourist traffic and Spring Sale signs in the stores.

I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having our own garden. I walk around the house every morning and almost always find something new: a green shoot that wasn't there before, more buds on our trees. I've also noticed a new type of bird on my Squirrelbuster birdfeeder I haven't seen before. It looks like a sparrow, but with a reddish tinge to its head and upper chest. From my research, it looks like it might be a Purple Finch or Cassin's Finch. (Thanks to Phil for pointing out that the bird I saw is more likely a House FInch).

Speaking of squirrels, remember I mentioned that I thought squirrels were digging their way into our house? And I heard them running around in our ductwork? Well, I borrowed a Mouse Mover from my dad-in-law and stuck it in my office...since then, the amount of animal noises have decreased radically; I hear the occasional scratching, as if something's giving a half-hearted attempt, but then it goes away. Apparently the Mouse Mover (tm) uses ultrasonic waves to repel mice, rats, squirrels and other rodents. I was highly skeptical at first, but it seems to be working.

Above: Michelle Dockrey and Allison Durno. Another Corel Painter 9.5 experiment. This time I made the Autoclone strokes larger but then manually worked on the faces with smaller Impressionist cloner brush strokes as well as Soft Clone. So far I don't think I'll be using the Autocloning feature much in the future...it's fun to play around with, but looks too computer-generated for my tastes.

Thanks to Comixpedia for the plug about Will Write For Chocolate this week.

Google Ego-Surfing Update

As of this morning...

poetry faq: I'm #1

office painting: I'm #3

long plane flights: I'm #1

squirrelbuster: I'm #1

snail crunch: I'm #2

demon squirrels: I'm #1

filking: I'm #1

food movies: I'm #1

queen street bead store: I'm #1

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