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Ranking My Collection of Star Trek Christmas Ornaments

This is not an exhaustive collection of Star Trek Christmas Ornaments, but it’s the ones I have. So here it goes!

Star Trek Enterprise-E / Sovereign Class Starship Christmas Ornament8. Enterprise E / Sovereign Class

I’m with Captain Freeman on this one: I do not like the Sovereign Class ships. They just look hokey to me.

Voyager / Intrepid Class starship Christmas Ornament7.Voyager / Intrepid Class

I have mixed feelings about Intrepid Class ships, with their goofy, gel-based computer networks, and the pointless moving nacelles, which the ornament doesn’t even have.

The Galaxy-Class, USS Enterprise D Christmas Tree Ornament.6. Enterprise-D / Galaxy Class

I grew up with the Enterprise-D, so I kinda have a soft-spot for it. Though the whole saucer-separation was a bit hokey, it was still a solid ship.

Romulan Warbird Christmas Ornament5. Romulan Warbird

I loved these guys. The inside of them reminds me of a 90’s mall. Oddly, kitbashed Warbirds turn up in random places, like the 1980’s reboot of The Twilight Zone episode Quarantine.

A Klingon Bird-of-Prey4. Klingon Bird-of-Prey

How can you not love this one? I don’t think the style of the bird-of-prey has changed much over the run of the series. It makes a pretty good ornament.

The USS Enterprise, no bloody A, B, C, or D3. Enterprise / Constitution Class

Just the plan ol’ Enterprise – no bloody A, B, C, or D. When you watch the original pilot for Star Trek, it looks like they were going to be a lot more ambitious with the ship at first, but scaled it back a bit. No matter – we love you all the same.

The USS Defiant Christmas Ornament2. USS Defiant

The Defiant is one of my favorite ships of the Star Trek universe. Tough and fast. And it makes a great ornament too!

The Galileo Shuttlecraft Christmas Ornament1. Galileo / F-Type Shuttlecraft

I loved the original Galileo from The Original Series. The ornament has a button on it that delivers a message from Mr. Spock: “Shuttlecraft to Enterprise, shuttlecraft to Enterprise. Spock here. Happy Holidays. Live long and prosper.”

Giving Up

I’ve really been struggling with my Fedora/NVIDIA setup. Not to long ago, I swapped over to the KDE Plasma spin of Fedora, and everything has been fine EXCEPT Cities: Skylines absolutely refuses to run on the NVIDIA card. Other games seem to do fine: the Intel UHD GPU will hand off more complex stuff off to the NVIDIA card. But for some reason, it just won’t hand off anything to the NVIDIA GPU. I tried a number of things … among them trying to launch Cities with switcherooctl and using the -adapter flag when launching Cities.

Instead of trying to spend more time figuring out what’s wrong, I decided to just set the primary GPU to the NVIDIA card using the directions here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/how-to-set-nvidia-as-primary-gpu-on-optimus-based-laptops/

And it worked! Cities: Skylines is now running on the NVIDIA GPU … because it has too! Still not as beautiful as is looked under Windows, but a lot better than runing on the Intel GPU.

It kinda sucks, because having the NVIDIA card set to the primary GPU drains the battery and heats up the laptop, but since I rarely use my laptop off the AC Adapter, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Since it looks like this only works in an X11, I guess if I need to save power, I can login to a Wayland session. Or maybe manually set the NVIDIA card to a lower state.

I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert …

I’ve been having good luck with my Bird of Paradise plant and decided to try planting some other bulb plants. I know: strictly speaking a Bird of Paradise plant is not a bulb plant, but close enough. I planted a number of ornamental bulbs, but I also planted some onions and garlic, and out of all of them, they are coming up great!
An onion bloom
I’ve never actually seen an onion bloom. It’s kinda cool. And it’s already attracting visitors …
An onion bloom with a butterfly on it
And one more picture … a little stink bug on a new Bird of Paradise shoot.
A stink bug on a leaf

Movember 2022


One of the guys on my rugby team does Movember – where grow a mustache during the month of November to raise money for various men’s health issues. Movember started in support of prostate cancer awareness, but has grown to cover other men’s health issues like suicide prevention. It’s pretty cool, so I do it too.

If you have a few scarves lying around, how about throwing a few on the pile for men’s health? You can do that here: https://movember.com/m/14637302?mc=1

Sea-O-Sphere 2

I got a chance to go to Galveston today and so I collected some water for Sea-O-Sphere 2. I got some of the water from this one from a tidal pool and the rest straight from the ocean near East Beach.

I am still living with your ghost; lonely and dreaming of the Gulf Coast

In the photo, straight ahead is the Houston Ship Channel. To the left and right is the tidal pool I got some water and sand from.

The tide was out, and the sand from the ocean side … well it’s a lot coarser and filled with little bits of shell and whatnot. I found a little bit of seaweed that I’m pretty was dead already, but I threw in. And I took a little piece of grass that was growing near the tidal pool. I don’t thing it will survive, but we’ll see.

So there it is with the other Sea-O-Sphere on the window sill. Looking at it, I thought I saw something swimming around in it. I tried to get a picture, but it came off looking a bit like one of those photos of Big Foot.

Sea-O-Sphere

So I went to Corpus Christi for 7’s by the Sea. I got half way there when I realized that I had left the glass jar I had intended to put everything in at home. Ooops. Fortunately I had a couple of empty water bottles I could used.

Beach in Corpus Christi
I am still living with your ghost; lonely and dreaming of the Gulf Coast

After the tourney while we were packing up, I took a moment to go out and get two bottles of ocean water, some salt, a little mussel, and some seaweed.

When I got home I dumped the seaweed and sand out in a bowl. It smelled kinda bad. Hope that’s not a bad sign.

So then I started putting everything in the jar. I’m using an old kombucha jar from HEB for all of this.

So I shoveled in the sand and stuck the seaweed in there. And the mussel as well. I think it might be dead, but I put it in there anyway.

And here’s the finished product on the shelf!

I think I might head to Galveston this weekend. If I do, I’ll make another Sea-O-Sphere from water/seaweed from there. I’d be interesting to see if anything different happens between the two.

Life in (a Prego) Jar

I’ve been watching a lot of Life in Jars on YouTube lately. I’ve always been fascinated by little self-contained ecosystem. When I was a kid, I did a very bad terrarium for a science project (I don’t think I got a good grade on it). I had the aquarium for a long time after and used it to keep critters and crawdads in until a friend knocked it over.

When I lived in Austin, I made a little terrarium from an old candy jar. The bottom had some polished rocks. I’m not sure why I put those in there. It had a little fern plant, some moss, and a snail that I had found out on the Barton Creek Trail. Also, a rock from the parking lot of my apartment. The snail didn’t last long … just not big enough a space for it. The moss did well, but the fern would wax and wane. Unfortunately, during the last move the jar took a bit of a tumble and the rock inside broke the glass.

So I had an empty jar that was previously home to some Prego Alfredo sauce – yeah, I know, I could make it myself, but I’m lazy – so inspired by Life in Jars, I decided to stick some stuff in it and see what happens.

I started with some charcoal. I think this is supposed to help filter water? I just took a briquette and crunched is up using two large rocks.

Next I added some rocks and pine straw. I don’t think the pine straw is too good – I think it tends to make soil acidic. But meh … we’ll see what happens.

Next some dirt and a little clover plant that I dug up in my back yard.

I threw in some of these grass seeds, some berries, and a few pieces of wood with lichen and whatnot on it.

I was looking for some pill bugs but I couldn’t find any. I did find a worm and dropped him in. But then I thought: this little ecosphere is too small to support it, but he had already started squirming away before I could get him out.

There’s the finished jar, lid and dated, and into the window seal. We’ll see how it does.

I’m going to Corpus this weekend for a Rugby 7’s tourney. I’m taking a little jar that I’m going to use to get some sand, salt water, and maybe some seaweed, and see what happens to it.