Last year, I was supposed to be unpacking from our big move to our new house, and instead I took a day off to take pictures of each type of flower currently blooming in our yard. You can see the 1st Annual Tour here. This year, I’m not really supposed to be unpacking (except we really still aren’t done with that a whole year later), but I am learning how to use my new SLR camera. So I headed out to the yard again, where there are flowers galore. And of all the things I’m likely to take pictures of (the cats, Preston, birds) flowers are the most patient and willing to just sit calmly looking lovely while I figure out what the heck is the difference between a picture taken at f-5.6 at 1/600 and one taken at f-6 at 1/800.

But after I got inside and uploaded the pictures I noticed something interesting. There are a LOT more flowers in our lawn this year than last year. Partly that’s because it’s three weeks later this year than it was last year when I did the photo tour. But also I like to think it has a lot to do with our having lived here for a year. We’ve been selectively mowing the lawn, going around the big stands of clover and other interesting flowers. There are some volunteer bleeding hearts and columbines coming up along the edges of the house (sorry, flowers are already past, so I didn’t catch them electronically). One of the most common flowers in our yard is some sort of weed, but I like it a lot and I’ve even weeded around it in the flowerbed to make it look like I planted it there on purpose. And of course, we’ve planted a few flowers as well. I’ve also included flowers on plants in the vegetable garden, because I figure they count as far is increasing food sources for bees and other insects. And also because a flower is a flower dude.

There were too many to put them in a blog post, so I uploaded them to a flickr set, which you can enjoy by going here. If there is no note below the picture saying what the flower is, that’s because I don’t know, and you should leave me a comment (either on the picture or here on the blog) if you know what it is.

And if you want to appreciate the fabulousness of detail that my new camera allows, you can click on the button that says “All Sizes” and that will give you a bigger version. Of course, the camera takes a much bigger picture, but it would take a long time to upload the full versions, so I just left them as large as seemed reasonable. I have definitely noticed what most reviewers have already said about the Canon XTi, which is that the stock lens isn’t great. I really feel like there should be a better level of detail in the larger versions than there is. But I’m confident that a fancy new lens will fix that

That someone offered to pay me to drive around the country for 9 months and experience what different parts of the country are like, no strings attached. The organization had already bought me a VW Bug to drive around in, so the catch was that I could only take with me what I could fit in the car. I cried and cried because I was so happy.

That someone gave me and/or Preston a couple big plastic sacks full of frozen fish. We didn’t know what to do with it. I thought we should can it, and I fired up the computer this morning thinking for a minute that I should look up the canning times for fish, thinking that we really had sacks of thawing fish stinking up the kitchen. It was big flakes of beautiful pink salmon and huge rainbow trout with the skin still on.