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 11/23/2006 Thanksgiving day. I'm not feeling that well, otherwise I would be helping with the cooking or be down in the basement working on some wood. I've been spending a lot of time making bonsai stands and I've been spending some a lot of time doing photo research. It seems that fall is the busiest time of the year for photo research so I have a lot to do at the moment. It's been almost two months since my last entry, and I have been doing all kinds of other things as well. Dory ran a half marathon last month and finished quickly enough that I showed up at the finish line after she had passed it.Brian moved out of our house so yesterday I bought an old metal desk and brought it into the house to finally set up an office for Dory and I in his old room. We had the floors in the livingroom and the office refinished last week. The fumes were so bad that we left for the weekend and went up to stay at my mom's house. That wasn't fantastic either though because we had to confine ourselves to my dad's old room because of the number of cats in the house. Bryce has been plugging along at school and with speech therapy. He is really doing much better with speech since the implant was activated. He copies us quite well sometimes and has finally started making "D" sounds so that he now says down instead of "ou - n." I am still ah-hee though. Besides making bonsai stands I have been spending some time making bonsai. Fall is a time when a lot of work happens on bonsai trees, I spent 6 hours wiring one of my pine trees. I also styled a ponderosa for the first time. The ponderosa was collected in Oregon but is also native to California. I have been trying to get more California native plants in my collection because I feel a certain sense of pride in the trees and plants that are here. But it is hard because the teachers in bonsai typically enforce that Japanese species are better for bonsai than native species. This is true in some ways, but I think that it is only a matter of time before the techniques are learned that will make species from around the word just as refined as species from Japan. 9/1/2006 7/20/2006 5/30/2006 5/20/2006 4/25/2006 3/22/2006 2/22/2006 1/25/2006 12/20/2005 11/17/2005 10/27/2005 10/8/2005 9/11/2005 8/26/2005 8/9/2005 8/1/2005 7/20/2005 7/5/2005 6/17/2005 5/27/2005 5/1/2005 4/15/2005 4/5/2005 3/24/2005 3/13/2005 2/5/2005 12/28/2004 11/29/2004 11/3/2004 10/2/2004 9/10/2004 8/23/2004 8/8/2004 7/21/2004 7/2/2004 6/8/2004 5/4/2004 4/20/2004 3/28/2004 3/10/2004 2/10/2004 1/15/2004 To reach entries prior to January 2004 click on one of the older entries on this list and scroll down to the bottom of that entry. e-mail Eric |