The three orchids below have been blooming in March. The Wildcat is finished and the yellow Phalinopsis has just begun. The Pink Phalenopsis has been in bloom for at least a month and has just added two more flowers.
Wildcat 
yellow phal. 
pink phal
From Times Colonist – March 31, 2005
By Tom Spears
A new assessment of Earth’s environment – this one from the United Nations – brings the usual gloom, with a twist: Sometimes a problem that has been going slowly downhill reaches a ‘tipping point’, and bad things happen very suddenly.l
A prime example is the sudden and final crash of Canada’s cod fishery. Another is a situation in India in which people gradually cut the trees on a mountainside until there was sudden flooding and cholera.
The catch is that you can’t forecast when we’ll reach these tipping points. It’s like waiting for a house of cards to fall down, say organizers of the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a work by 1,300 scientist, economists and others in 95 countries, to be released today.
The fancy name for this sudden crashing is ‘non-linear degradation’, but A.H. Zakri, a Malaysian genetics professor who co-chairs the project, puts it more simply. “After a certain amount of time when you keep degrading the ecosystem, you would reach the tipping point and then all hell sort of breaks loose.”
There have been plenty of overviews of Earth’s ecology, but Zakri says this one is unique because it ties the pollution and endangered-species issues to the UN plan for global development. The key, the report says, is that we are pushing some resources too hard in our struggle to make economic gains.
Among the worst threats:
¨ Vast amounts of ordinary fertilizer from intensive farming are polluting our water and causing ‘dead zones’. Fertilizer is turning out to be far more lethal than many chemicals we usually consider toxic.
¨ Many dry areas are running out of fresh water. Canada’s Prairies are one of the regions under threat.
¨ Climate change threatens to cause more dry areas, but also more severe storms and floods. No country has a good handle on fighting this problem.
March 31, 2005 I signed up for 500 MB of hosted space with go.daddy for $37.92 for a year. I must change my settings on it to say yes to front page extensions I think. Billie will tell me.
I got a call from Billy at __daddy today. He gave me some good information that I think I should probably act on. I can get 500 MB for about $35. I will probably try and find a template to do a page; although I am slowly learning a bit about how to use Front Page. I have a WS_FTP now too, thanks to one of my good "STEVE" internet friends, who shall go nameless for now.
In April, I think I will try and be more organized with my blogs. One for computers, one for gardening, maybe one for other stuff., or maybe just one big long blog for the whole month.
