Johnny Paul's Birthday Magazine

Johnny Paul's Birthday Magazine
Originally uploaded by juniper45743

This weekend we celebrated my grandson's birthday with a pool party in our backyard. A fun time was had by all, but the water was really cold! If you want to see the rest of the party pictures follow the link. This magazine cover was made using one of the flikr toys on a blog we were referred to in our directions. If you haven't checked this out, you should. There are lots of interesting and fun things to try and do.

High-Tech Gardening

While in search of technology to blog about I came upon information about a new tool called the Cobra Head Weeder. You can follow the link to get more information about it. It has a uniquie shape which appears to be easy to get at some of the weeds. Kind of like a large finger/fingernail to dig out those weeds! It is a hand-held tool and they have recently added a long handled one, so you don't have to stoop over to dig the weeds. Be sure to check it out. Also, while searching for new gardening technology I came upon another blog called High-Tech Gardening. If you are interested in this sort of thing, you might want to check it out.

Phalaenopsis Orchid

Phalaenopsis Orchid
Originally uploaded by All Flowers

Since one of our assignments for this week is to blog about a photo on Flikr, I decided to look for orchids. There were over 170,000 pictures of orchids in Flikr, and no! I did not try to look at all of them! I chose this one because it is about the color of one I have at home and is also the same type of orchid. I recently became attracted to orchids while browsing through the plants at Lowe's back in March. The pricetag on them kind of turned me off, but they had one marked down to $5 that wasn't blooming, so I decided to "rescue" it. It took about six weeks for it to start blooming again, and is now beautiful. In the meantime, I purchased another one in April that was blooming already because I couldn't wait. Another thing I like about Orchids is that the blooms last a long time. This one still has some of the blooms that were on it in April, plus there are new ones coming on. This type of orchid is fairly easy to grow. The do not require direct sunlight, so my kitchen window is perfect for it. They also require a lot of humidity which is accomplished by placing a small tray of pebbles under the pot and adding water to it periodically.

Lifelong Learning Habits

I have always been in favor of lifelong learning. It is always exciting to learn a new skill or craft. My previous learning experience was to learn how to paint. I have taken a few classes, and the paintings turned out better than I anticipated. This project has been put on hold for the summer because of other activities which limit my time for this, but I do plan to go back to it in the fall. Of the 7 1/2 learning habits, I think right now that # 1 is the hardest for me. This is the one for setting goals for your learning experience. With this project, I am not quite sure where I want to go with it yet, or how involved I want to be in it so it is difficult to set any specific goals. As for the easiest, I feel that the #4 challenge one is for me since I usally feel pretty confident about applying new information. The # 7 1/2 (Play) is an easy one too!.

First Blog Posting

Well, here it is! A couple of weeks ago I would not have thought that I would be attempting to create a blog. We will see how it goes. The blog is named Along The River because that is where I live, on the bank of the Ohio river. This is really going to be a challenge for me to write down my thoughts, etc.