Museum of Vanished Pottery

This is one of the leaves of our canna lily. At some point during the Spring of Insatiable Slugs (SOIL), when the leaf was young and still tightly rolled up, something burrowed straight through it. When the leaf unfurled, this was the visual effect we were left with. There are actually a few places like this on the plant, where it looks like we took a hole-puncher to it. The pattern looks too neat to be from a slug, but I have no idea what the pest might have been.

Yesterday was pretty quiet. The morning was sunny and mild, so I walked the dog on our long loop around the neighborhood and through the nearby housing estate.

She was very patient with my photography, but you can tell she's thinking about barking.

I also made my way through another 80-something pages of "Bleak House."  At one point I was reading a scene and struggling to keep track of who the characters were and what was going on. I looked at the character list and counted 34 major characters and 23 minor -- Dickens really outdid himself stuffing this book with people! Anyway, I was able to sort out who was who, at least, but some of the relationships are still vague in my mind -- and some are supposed to be unclear, for purposes of the plot.

I'm still not loving it, but I am going to finish this book. As much as I complain about it -- and I am going to complain -- I also want the challenge.

I thought about putting my Botswana photos on Flickr, as I mentioned the other day. I dug out the hard drive and was going through all my old photos and realized that I actually have quite a few that I never put online. I don't necessarily need others to see them, but Flickr is how I view, organize and manage my "archives." (I have more than 40,130 photos on Flickr, including a handful of videos, and I've tagged them and organized them into chronological folders, so when I search for something it usually pops right up.)

Anyway, I didn't start the Botswana photo project, but I did find some interesting stuff, like these pictures of pottery I made back in 2005, during a class I took in New York:

I only have one of these pots now -- the rounded vase in the middle in the last photo. I have no idea where the others are. I'm sure I gave them to friends and family. I remember particularly liking the one on the left in the middle photo -- the beige speckled pot with the green rim.

I wonder when I crossed the 40,000-photos threshold on Flickr? I used to see how many photos I had right at the top of my "photostream," but Flickr has now taken that number away and hidden it in my stats, which I never look at. When I finally got around to it yesterday, I was amused to see that among my top ten most recently viewed photos are those titled Tits, Boner, Busty, Sexes, Desire and Boobs. Gee, what could people be looking for online? (Most of those are graffiti-related, except for Tits, which is a picture of birds.)