Geoff commented:
"So if they plant wildflowers each year, how come next year there aren't lots of wildflowers already in place? Those little autonomous self-replicating systems have been doing it without human intervention for what we scientists call "a very long time".... Of course they could plant the wrong wildflowers. Or they could hose down the city streets with anti-wild-flower chemicals at the end of each Wildflower! Arts! &! Music! Festival!..."all excellent questions, none of which I have an answer. perhaps they are high-tech wildflowers, designed to be obsolete at the end of the fiscal year? perhaps these wildflowers are not native to Dallas (and live only in quiet seclusion near Lady Bird Johnson's ranch near Austin, Texas) and hence are nuked by a combo of the summer Texas sun and overly-zealous mowing crews?
Deep thought #28: What better way to celebrate motherhood, than with wild flowers?
Vying for my attention is the Asian Festival (today only) and Scarborough Faire: the Renaissance Festival (weekends through Memorial Day weekend).
I've attended Renaissance Festivals in Colorado; California and Texas, and me thinks the others are better. The Renaissance Pleasure Faire and Artisan's Market (southern California) was the most entertaining due to the availability of quality actors (roaming the grounds, working the booths, etc.) but the mountain scenery in Colorado (south of Denver) was mind-blowing. In comparison, the ones in Texas are just boring (not to mention hot), but I suspect most people don't know, since they have no point of comparison.
There is no joy in Mudville
Another side-effect of spammers is .. you can't even say goodbye. During Tuesday's RIF, I didn't have a lot of time to "say goodbye" (email) to co-workers of the past 15 years. I caught a lot of folks by mailing 4 aliases (while I still had a sun.com address) of recent (last 2 years) co-workers, but that left out another 13 years worth. Not to mention casual (twice a year, but still important) contacts.
So, it was painful to see all the email bounces via mms.us.syntegra.com, whose trigger I obviously pulled. The first few went out, but the rest were bounced by syntegra's filter. Too many messages from the same sender in too short a time, I guess. No clue if I'm now on their permanent filter list, or I'll just have to send no more than (insert arbitrary number) messages at a time.
