Searching for Facebook Privacy

I love Facebook. I think it's an amazingly effective way of being present with long-distance or rarely seen friends. Still, figuring out the right balance of privacy and openness is not at all simple. But I've done some research into the various possible options and thought I had adjusted my settings to a comfortable degree.

The other day, however, I happened to land on the Public Listing that Facebook creates for me by default, and I wasn't that pleased. It listed a number of my friends as well as the

Color matching on Epson printer

I'm making some bookmarks and business cards for the Ashfield Farmers Market and noticed that the raspberry was coming out much more purple than red. I called Epson tech support with, honestly, little hope that they'd be able to help.

Boy was I wrong. I started asking the tech support person what sort of CMYK profile I should be using and if that could be the problem. She said that I shouldn't be using CMYK at all, but rather RGB. I admit I didn't believe her at first. Why would a printer with CMYK inks require that documents be in RGB to print correctly?

But it turns out that Epson's drivers do the RGB to CMYK conversion for you, and if you send it a CMYK file, it converts that to RGB and then back again, and in my case, makes it all purple. Send it a file in RGB, and it prints quite nicely.

Thank you, Epson!

Planting Egg Gourds

Back in November, I showed you some of the egg gourds that I bought and cleaned and painted and made into ornaments. I've been patiently waiting for spring so that I could plant my own, but it was a bit heart-wrenching cutting a few gourds open to get at their seeds. I love their shapes. They're so perfect. And of course I picked the most perfect of them to open so that their offspring would be equally well-shaped.

I wasn't even completely sure what I'd find. When I shook

One little lamb is no longer

But it's not what you think.

It's not what I thought. This is the sort of thing you dread in the country with a fox in the backyard. You come upon a big mess of fur or feathers, like this:



and you think, oh rats! And then, what was it? And then rats

Robin's Egg Blue

So, the other day some kids frightened a bird out of a small tree. I looked and noticed a nest, maybe 5 feet off the ground. I pulled out my camera with its lovely articulated viewfinder and found, wait, Easter Eggs?


Of course, they're American Robin eggs. Aren't they gorgeous!?

The Fox and her Kits

This morning I went out to feed the sheep (who were bahing up a storm) and noticed that the chickens were making funny noises. It's strange, because it's not *that* different, but somehow I decided I should go check on them. Sure enough, there was a raccoon inside the barn, in the upper part of the coop (which thankfully only houses drying gourds right now and is separated from the chickens with chicken wire). The raccoon ran off, actually up the grain chute to the hay loft and

The Revolution is under hoof

I don't know, but there seems to be a lot of inter-species conferring going on:

Laika meets the fox

This morning we were startled to see that Laika was out in the field talking to the fox.



Perhaps we should backtrack just a moment and I could tell you that Laika is terrified of our cats, especially Sky. Sky doesn't much like Laika, but instead of sulking off in another direction, she routinely takes Laika on, hissing at her and even hurling herself at her if Laika hasn't already retreated. This generally eggs on the otherwise more easygoing Skittles and Night and all three of them jump on Laika at once. Laika mostly just cowers quietly as everyone screams, water bottles are produced, and the cats go away. Laika goes back in a

TimeMachine doesn't back up iPhoto (if iPhoto is open)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my travails with backing up my obscenely huge iPhoto library. It turns out that although Apple promises to "[take] care of everything else. Automatically. In the background." the truth is that Time Machine won't always back up an iPhoto library if it's open. In fact, it won't back up my iPhoto library ever if it's open. Is it backing up yours? I don't know. You should check.

I promised to get back to you when Apple got back to me. They did finally call me last week, and said, well, to solve the