Excellent timing

Excellent timing indeed. I was about to start my second, words-only 'photo-less' posting this week, when Shivangi chimed in with a supportive comment on my previous 'pic-free' post (where I was grouching about spammers), lamenting the lack of pix on that one. (Maybe I should have taken a pic of a can of Spam for that one?)

Anyway, I dashed outside slowly (I'll explain all in a moment) and banged off a quick bunch of snaps to decorate this posting, which was going to be about excellent timing of a completely different sort.

What sort? Well, if your dodgy back is going to throw a wobbly and go into a spasm, it might as well be on a rainy day when you can't do much gardening. And so what I've been doing, apart from being very careful with my dodgy sore back, is sitting down at my blog and trying to improve it. And that's why I dashed outside very slowly to take some photos.

All the improvements to the blog navigation will, I hope, make it easier to browse the 'back-catalogue' of earlier postings. But before I get onto the dreariness of that topic, some pix for everyone, but especially you, Shivangi!

Top quality rain we're getting right now. A good soggy soaking, but no damage done. This well-watered French tarragon is singing in the rain.

As promised a couple of posts ago, the native orchids are out, putting on the prettiest little show in Tinyville.

This alien space monster is, in fact, an oak-leaf lettuce which I am allowing to go to seed, just so I can see what the flowers are like. I know that they'll be some kind of daisies, but it will be another week or so before I find out what size and colour daisies they will be (small and yellow is the best bet). I like letting the occasional vegie live out its full life-cycle, flowering and setting seed, rather than being cruelly cut down in its youth by greedy farmers (such as me).

Tragic, isn't it? A storm-damaged pub. But tomorrow promises to be sunny once more, and so I'll tidy up the birdbath, clean out the detritus and the pub will be open for business once more. Popular spot, this one, with the fly-in crowd.

Aren't babies adorable when they're wet? This is the third, baby-sized scadoxus plant, sending up foliage-only this year. Maybe next year it will have reached fruitful adolesence and will make its first attempt at blooming.

And while it seems like cheating to repeat the same flower that I blogged about previously, at least this is an updated shot from about half an hour ago. And besides, the Scadoxus really is the star of the garden right now and deserves a second moment in the limelight.

Get up close and it truly looks like this photo has been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of some exploding supernova in outer space. Boooooom! Lovely thing, isn't it?

Anyway, with Shivangi's slide show out of the way, onto the re-organisation of the blog, which has taken about three hours to do, so I am going to bore you with it for a moment, just to justify all the time spent!

On the right side of the page I have set up the 'labels' tool that Blogger offers, so that previous postings are grouped according to common topics, such as 'flowers', 'vegies', 'natives', 'cooking', 'herbs' etc.

There are some postings which defy easy classification, hence the 'left field' group in which you'll find motorcycles, dust storms, art shows and all sorts of odd stuff of highly variable quality.

What took me so long to discover this tool I do not know. I'm not one of cyberspace's sharpest denizens, I guess! And what took me three hours was laboriously working through all 250 postings I have done so far, trying to give each of them consistent (ie, 'sensible') labels that would then be picked up by the Blogger tool.

With my bad back restricting me to my office chair, it was the perfect little project to take up most of this soggy Saturday afternoon. Hopefully it will prove useful, and might encourage some of you to browse what the music industry likes to call the 'back catalogue'.