Wham-bam toodle-oo, bamboo, and pictures, too — part four

So it works now. I have this nifty ”visual” toolbar in my WordPress “Write” screen, along with my “code” toolbar, and it makes it way easier to place photos in the post. No more hassling with pictures running off the screen, etc. Once I import the picture I’ve cropped elsewhere  I have a little box I grab and yank 7/8th of the way across the screen and release, shrinking the image once, then grab it again and release, and then a third time and — ouila! A photo that fits inside my post’s column!

It’s probably been this easy for all of you all along, huh?  It makes me wonder how many little doo-dads work differently for all of us, and we never know because we don’t see each others internal dashboards and work screens.

All that and I’ve finished the damn-boo, too. When I had chopped the last rhizome and root out this weekend, I looked up and found Edie absolutely sprawled in the sun at the bottom of the deck stairs. Perfect — her sprawled amid the remaining rhizomes would have made the picture I wanted and reflected the way I felt.

Of course, when I went to pose her, she popped up ready to play. It took some coaxing to get her to return and lie down again, and there was no way to return her to the carefree spawl of content abandon in which I’d found her.

Here’s Edie girl looking grumpy after a hard day’s work, not her own:

And Ernie looking drowsy in the same spot:

The only work they’d really done was sunbathe, but it reflected how I felt, sort of. At one point on Sunday I sat in a hole I’d dug in a cramped corner of our raised garden bed, looking at the remaining bamboo rhizomes hiding under the surface, and thought — I’ve never been down here in this spot of my own yard after half a dozen years here, and when am I ever going to be down here again? An odd thought — but these things do occur to one when dodging work.

It’s seasonal, of course. Of our two basic “Mediterranean climate” seasons, I’m out in the yard ocasionally during summer evenings and nights. Visits on winter days are just for routine maintenance, and I’m hardly ever out here winter nights. Okay, there was the late lager brewing incident. And one annoyed winter evening when the contractor dumped huge piles of dirt on the fresh grass sod I’d put down, despite my telling him not to. (Nothing quite like taking a shovel to a fresh mound of soft dirt in darkness, cold, and drizzle for working off a day’s annoyances.)

So it’s summer days we’re most likely to be out here, and the whole reason I’ve been in this nook of the yard lately has been this bamboo patch, neglected for years. But it was kind of nice, sitting in the dirt and resting for a moment. A cool yet sunny day, gradually warming.  Here’s a shot of the bamboo stalks and rhizomes, as I dig underneath them:

Until our nextdoor neighbor, Kiwi began barking again.  What’s dog for “Get back to work over there?” (It sounded like bark-bark-bark to me.)

 Here’s the pup who sneaked under the fence to say hello: