toddherrold.com

My mother recently visited us here in New York and was impressed with my orchid collection. Our apartment seems to be uniquely suited to getting these notoriously challenging flowers to re-bloom and when she came we had an Oncidium that was busting out all over the place with 3 spikes containing roughly 30 flowers each.

Taking a big chance, she bought me an orchid sent via UPS. I can’t remember what the company was, but it came in spike but not in bloom and was mostly in good condition. With a little self-assembly and some TLC, this Militonia bloomed out quite nicely.

So, here are the pictures. Thanks, Mom!

I just got back from a family trip to South Africa where we went on safari and visited to the wine country and Capetown. It has been a struggle to go through the over-1000 pictures that I took and try to cull the best ones to put up on the website. People keep asking for them, but I’m still working on that, so you’ll have to check back later.

I took a few REALLY SHAKY videos while on safari and put them together as a gag for the grandparents Gregory, who were the impetus for the trip. Here it is just for fun. Don’t be too harsh, as this is the first video complilation that I’ve ever thrown together. . .

Maybe I’ll start moving from photos to video at some point, but this is really just for fun over the holidays when we have a South Africa reunion:

South African Safari with Oma and Opa Gregory:

One of my friends emailed me this short note about an albino baby deer that someone found recently. It’s quite a site!

Not far from Houston, TX. Beaumont.

We have a total albino white tail fawn. It’s probably a good thing he was found by humans, as he probably wouldn’t have lasted long in the wild. It was a very eventful day around here… A once in many lifetime experiences!

Mark saw this lil’ feller run out in front of a car, thought it was a lost baby goat. Stopped to get it, and WOW. A real Albino Whitetail Deer. Just hours old, but doing fine. No Moma deer around. The car, in front of Mark, nearly hit it.

Well, he is THE neatest thing we have ever seen. And, such a ‘freak of nature.’ Only ONE in more than a million are even born. He took his bottle of food, followed us around the house…….doing great.

One of Dad’s best friends is our Game Warden. I called him and he came right over. It is against the law for us to keep him. The albino fawn will be transported to a place where he will receive adequate care and love. They take in wild creatures and, we were told, they will not return this fawn back to the wild.

He is snow white, pink eyes, ears, nose and hooves. The kids called him POWDER. He is SO small.

Spending a lot of this summer on the computer working on a project for my brother down South. He’s fed up with workin’ for THE MAN, and so he’s going to work for himself, setting up a shingle on his new real estate brokerage in Conway, Arkansas. That sounds a bit more grandiose that it is. . I hear it is a one-room, shared office space, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?

Anyway, I’m very excited for him and wish him the best with his new business. He asked me to help him build his website, and so I procrastinated for a while, did some research into the real estate side of the web-world (something I used to know nothing about) and got very close to paying a design firm to host and develop the site. . . Then I got really frustrated that you had to spend a few thousand to get anything even semi-professional, so I decided I’d build it myself.

First, I tried to build it using a Content Management System (XOOPS) that I use on my other sites, The Hotdog Blog! and IdolNotes!, but with a more business-like template. I spent about a week on that, and it looked pretty good, with some really great content! - only to get to the most crucial part - the real estate listings - to find out that XOOPS hasn’t been optimized for real estate listings and I got bogged down trying to fix a very outdated open-source plug-in that I was trying to use. . .

So, I had to scrap it and started looking for another open source option and was pleased to find Open-Realty, which is still a young software, but has a lot of great features and heaps of potential. It’s the other side of the coin, it’s really great for listings, but not great at integrating outside content. One big plus, is that they’ve got some great templates going.

Turns out, it was not too difficult teaching myself the unique aspects of the Open Realty code, after having spent so much time digging through the guts of Wordpress, Xoops, Gallery, and php! I got it up and running in a serviceable fashion after a couple of days of coding.

Anyway, here it is. It is still in draft form. It’s got a few bugs and I haven’t added any real marketing text or actual real estate listings, but I thought I would share it:

Herald Realty Group

Of course, this is just a hobby for me but maybe I should think about putting up my own shingle? That MAN can get really tiresome!!

A friend sent me these two Bud Light marketing clips. They’re pretty funny.

Listen to: Bud Light Real Men of Genius - Mr. 80 SPF Sunblock Wearer

and

Listen to: Bud Light Real Men of Genius - Mr. Paranoid of the Ocean Guy