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Another blizzard and another weekend spent at home.  This time the snow started to fall about 10am on Friday but for approximately 6 hours it never accumulated on the ground.  The ground was just to warm and melted what ever fell on it.  Not until late in the afternoon, with the temperature rapidly dropping, did it start to stick.  This is about the time the snow kicked into over drive.

the snow blanketed everything

Through the overnight hours it snowed and snowed, adding to what was already on the ground from Tuesday which was about 4-6″.  All morning and well into the afternoon it snowed at my house.  I spend most of the day working on the computer and getting some organizing done.  In fact with the exception of shoveling my sidewalk/truck and watching Terminator: Salvation, I didn’t leave my man cave.  I got my finances in order and worked on a travel map that I have been meaning to finish for years.  I am missing a few pins, but it shows every city I have seen a concert in.  Eventually I will get the total number of shows seen in a city corresponding to each pin.  Most cities I been to only once. A few cities, like Washington DC and Baltimore, I have been to 8 and 7 different venues with several times that number of concerts in each of those cities.

I love to travel and see concerts

I also got a lot of coding done on taping.org.  Mostly PHP to calculate totals and such.  Like always, most of the changes I made are on the back end and don’t add much visually.  Let me tell you, it was a lot of fun figuring how to get PHP to read a line in a db results query and keep a running total of the values.  I can do this in Java pretty easily, but PHP is a whole new beast.  Thankfully the basic concept of how to accomplish this is the same in both languages.  The rest of my time was spent entering and updating information already in my db to take advantage of the calculations I coded earlier in the day.  Now that 90% of the site has the basic functions I wanted to implement, I find myself spending more time enter and updating information in the database.  I will continue to split my time with data entry and writing code to analyze all the data into useful information.

I might not have left my house all weekend, but it was great spending the time at home just getting stuff done.  Saturday when the snow was still falling I would often stop my coding and just look out the window, it was very peaceful.  I almost turned my desk around to face out the window and soak up nature.

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I have this Butterfly Bush in my back yard and all summer it grew.  It has probably been growing un-checked for years.  So when I finally moved in this monstrosity of a bush was every where.  I did a quick hack job to keep it from spilling over onto the deck but I knew later I would have to cut more.  By the end of summer I was sick and tired of it and I got my hatched and cut it WAY back.  It was a good 15′ tall at this point.  Eventually I cut it back to a manageable 3′ bush, but have no fear!  Come spring it will grow and grow quickly.  It should be back to almost 10′ by the end of summer, just in time for me to whack it again.

So before I gave it a good trim, I took some photos the morning I took it down.  True to it’s name, butterflies love this bush and were always hanging around.  When I took these pictures there were no less than three types hanging around.  The light was just perfect that morning for shooting and the butterflies were very accommodating to my shooting.  I think I got some great shots, check out my gallery for more.