Feels like it's been spring here for awhile, but officially...

These are pear trees on campus. I took the picture over a week ago; now the petals are drifting on the sidewalks like confetti.

Blog meta

While I'm here, I'll keep this separate from the already-huge photo post, but I've been meaning to mention that I recently figured out a system for keeping up with friends' blogs. It's always been hard for me to remember to check, because I don't hang out on Blogger a lot. I tried using a feed reader, but it just didn't work well on my small computer screen. (My computer is a tiny EeePC laptop, which was affordable and is wonderfully portable, but I don't recommend it as an only computer, since its capabilities in some areas are limited, and the screen on my model is only 7 inches.)

But I do listen to a lot of American public radio and BBC radio podcasts, and I use iGoogle to gather them so I can easily stream the audio. Finally, in a "facepalm" sort of moment, I realized I could just create another tab on iGoogle and use it to gather RSS feeds from all the blogs I want to follow. It's perfect for me, because the interface is uncluttered, works well on my small screen (it only shows the title of each post - the three most recent for each blog - and I can open the posts I want to read in a new Firefox tab) and it's a site I'm already familiar with.

So! This is just to say that I've been reading your blogs regularly for a couple of weeks, mainly lurking because I feel shy commenting, but hello! And if you're reading this and have a blog you'd like for me to follow, just let me know.

Okey doke, back to watching the Westminster dog show (David Duchovny, please stop making me cry with your Pedigree dog adoption commercials!) and grading papers.

Winter and spring

Pictures! These cover January through March, I believe.

I seem to have adopted a new cat. Just before Christmas I went and picked up Trixie from a friend in another state who couldn't keep her. Trixie is going through her difficult "teenager" phase (she's a little under a year old and becoming sexually mature) and loves to terrorize my older cat, though I don't think she really means any harm. She's pretty amusing when she's not destroying things. :)




I think I mentioned the pit bull puppy we had hanging around the farm for awhile - here are a few more pictures of her. She was all dog, and great with kids.





Layla's birthday was in February. She's four! She loves ice cream and pretending to be animals (a kitty is her favorite).






And Allie celebrated her eleventh birthday just this past week. She's still involved in 4H, lots of sports, and has recently started reading for pleasure. She has challenged me to read the Twilight books ("Shayna, if you don't read them, I've failed you as a niece!"), and I agreed if she'll continue reading the Harry Potter books. These are pictures from her little party we had with the family this weekend.






My cousin Jamie and her family came through a couple of times as they move down south. Baby Payton is pretty cute! Andy and I took them up on the mountain in January; it was a beautiful, clear, cool evening.






And here's just some miscellaneous naturey stuff. Our winter here was characterized by occasional ice with 70-degree periods in between, and spring seems to be keeping up that trend. We didn't have any snow this year.

Marmoset, Marmoset

I am so delighted by this, and having been raised on "oldies" music, I just had to share.



One note of accuracy, I believe one of the pictures is of a baby ring-tailed lemur, not a marmoset, but that's not really the point. It's funny! (Edit - I should have watched carefully to the end, the captions confirm the lemur.)

I hope this weekend to have pictures of the nieces' birthdays and I'm sure some spring flowers will sneak in there as well. Happy Friday!