Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

I posted pictures back in 2004 of the Passion Flower on our fence. For some unknown reason, it just didn’t come back this year. I thought it did quite well last year. We didn’t have a particularly cold winter, so I’m not sure what happened. I’m not happy about it, though. I really liked the plant. I’ll have to get another one and just keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t die too. The now-dead plant had been in the ground there for five years.

There is one sucker from the original plant that seems to be growing, but even half of that one is dead.

As I was loading Georgia in the car the other day, a woman, mid twenties, bent down and picked one of our tulips growing along side the sidewalk. I figured it must have been bent over or broken, or something. She walked down the sidewalk a little further and picked one of our daffodils. That was just too much.

Me: “Do you always pick people’s flowers?”
Her: “No, just today.”
Me: “That is pretty darn rude.”
Her: “Oh, sorry”

And she left with a smile. I wasn’t smiling.

There are a group of internet sites that exist for the sole purpose of generating advertisement hits. I see a lot of examples in the spam that gets filtered out of my blog.

While speaking with friends the other day, we came up with a term to describe these sites. They often contain no real content, and just referrals to other sites. Thus the term “Vacuous Destination” (along with its abbreviation “VD”, which has a whole different connotation, but I think appropriate as well) was hatched.

I hesitate to give examples of this stuff, as I don’t want to generate ANY revenue for them. If you have misspelled web addresses before and ended up at some odd search site, you might have seen one flavor of them. Another more obnoxious variety is the type that “hires” writers to provide “articles” so they have “content”. The articles are usually just a bunch of fluff, surrounded by advertisements. The best way to eliminate this sort of content from the internet is to not visit it AT ALL. Don’t certainly don’t click on any of the advertisement links on the sites.

Only you can prevent the spread of internet VD.

It seems that our yard has been turned into a prison for gnomes. It made my day!

Lisa, Georgia and I ate at the India Grill last night. Neither Lisa nor I was feeling up to cooking (we both have some virus thing dragging us down), and Lisa was craving Indian food. Unfortunately, we won’t be going there again.

The food was decent, but there were several strikes against it: there were ants crawling around on the table, flies buzzing around our heads, and the food seemed expensive relative to other Indian places we have eaten. Georgia was a well behaved, which made things more pleasant, but Lisa was not at all happy about the critters on the table and wondered to herself (and out loud to me later) what the kitchen was like if there were ants running around the dining room.

I’m a little forgiving, the restaurant is in an older Portland home that has been converted, so I would expect a few idiosyncrasies. We had a nice selection of food, with three dishes, and an appetizer, a beer for me, and a mango lassie for Lisa all came to ~$50, which seemed a bit steep. Maybe I’m just getting old.