Kim, Yes i made the quilt,and the uncle sam on the porch i got at a yard sale several years ago for 3.00.When you turn him over it's an easter bunny.So in spring i display the bunny,til after easter,then turn him over to uncle sam. I still have several more patriotic cross stitch things to put up,but i have to wait til i recover from surgery.I also recently started adding Red to my kitchen so i can carry the R/W/&B out there as well. Can't wait to see your other things. Kathi

It is a heavy art paper. I didn't realize until we got the magpies home that we have two other pieces by the same artist that we bought at the Camden Art Festival. I believe the artist applies paint (or ink) to a block and then she presses the block to the paper. There were a couple of other pieces of art depicting birds that I really liked, but I got "out bid" on them. They were embroidered with fine silk thread onto cloth.

Bob, that photo is really great. You should submit it to a nature magazine, like Birds and Blooms maybe. Oh I hate bald faced hornets. They are soooo aggressive. I had a bunch chase me the house one day and when I slammed the screen door they were hanging on to the screen! I inadvertently mowed under their big nest they were building under the eaves of the old outhouse. The spider in your photo with the green - I don't think I've ever seen that before.

Aurora over Icelandic Fault Image Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado (TWAN, Earth and Stars) Explanation: Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. Exactly this week in 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth's magnetosphere so forcefully that they created the Carrington Event. A relatively direct path between the Sun and the Earth might have been cleared by a preceding CME. What is sure is that the Carrington Event compressed the Earth's magnetic field so violently that currents were created in telegraph wires so great that many wires sparked and gave telegraph operators shocks. Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced. The featured aurora was imaged last week over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth's large Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.