Heard about this on the news last night.  The article is short and doesn't say much, but it's a bit disturbing to know there's some messed up people in OKC and Tulsa going around burning dogs in their own backyards.  As a pet lover and owner of two very sweet cocker spaniels myself I found this quite disturbing.  I'm glad I keep my dogs inside on hot summer days so I don't need to worry about them.  I hope they find these miserable excuses for human beings soon.

http://www.koco.com/news/16931159/detail.html

Just an FYI for my friends out there.

I haven't been watching the news much lately so perhaps this is more well known and I just wasn't aware of it, but apparently there's quite a large tomato salmonella issue going on.  The list of cases now spans 17 states and a number of restaurants have stopped serving certain kinds of tomatoes or any tomatoes not grown from specific safe areas.

It's halfway through another week and despite the never ending supply of work I'm feeling rather pleased with myself.  Now I am not a programmer by any means, and frankly that's ok with me! I prefer to remain on the creative half of the team.  But learning new skills is part of a typical week around the office.

One of the reasons I love this job so much is I'm continually having to learn something new and reach for higher goals.  It can be a lot of work, and it's definitely easier to stay the same person you are and not make an effort to grow.  But it feels so good when you learn something new or accomplish something you couldn't have done a week ago.

For me this week, that's working with Smarty.  I'm still really new to it, but it's been becoming more of a part of my weekly tasks as time goes by.  This week, I got to make a template with Smarty that switched out entire stylesheets based upon specific answers to different profile questions.  Granted I still had to ask for help from those more familiar with the language around the office, but it felt so good when the look of my pages started changing to match my profile responses.

On Christmas Day my tree crew finally was ready to start the work on my property. I felt bad that they had to be there on Christmas but they assured me they preferred it that way as the goal was to have all storm damage cleaned up by New Years so that all the out of state teams could go home to their families by then. Quite a large number of teams, like mine, had been called upon to assist the normal Oklahoma crews get the work done faster. While I contacted England Tree Service, it was Champions Tree out of Houston who ended up doing my work.

The work they did at my house was impressive. Both of my 75 foot Mulberry trees were split down the middle (and I'll have to remove the rest of them soon too). And I had quite a large number of smaller trees needing work. As the City was to be hauling off tree debris in the upcoming weeks, all my broken limbs and trunks were piled upon my curb.

I've taken a few pictures to give you an idea of what it all looks like. Though sadly, it's not as impressive on film as it was standing next to it. The pile goes about 12 feet back from the curb, about 7 feet tall in places, and spans the entire length of my yard.  Full size photos can be found in the gallery called Aftermath in my Photos area.

Here's what's left of my poor trees.

calandria.onesite.com