Pylon at Sunset
Category: Photography
The Princess and the Pea: a play in one act
Also known by its alternate title: All Your Blankets are Belong to Us!1!!! Which was a lot funnier before I fixed the glowy laser stare of dqqm. I’m not sure that fluorescent green pupils are really an improvement over red ones.
I Had a Dream, Joe
I’ve been sleep deprived lately. I haven’t even been able to catch up on the weekends, which really sucks. This morning, I was able to go back to sleep after getting up at an insane hour to let out Miss Brown and feed her. And, I remembered why I don’t like going back to sleep. I had the damnedest dream. Well, two of them, actually. One was about house hunting, and was really unpleasant and stressful. The second one was just plain bizarre. I was standing in my front yard, in the sun, talking to my neighbor. He was wearing a floppy “farmer” hat and pointing at something off to the southwest. That was all fine, but then I realized that he had no body. He was just a big ol’ floppy-hatted head and a hand wearing a flowered gardening glove. WTF?! There was a Wizard of Oz vibe about the dream, in that it was slightly menacing but reassuring in that “it’s just a dream” sort of way
I’m going to try to go to bed early tonight, so that I won’t be tempted to sleep in tomorrow morning.
Smacking
There are certain human behaviors that drive me batshit crazy. One of them is smacking and generally making excessive noise while eating. It’s nauseating. This is why I find the new KFC commercial to be both perplexing and offensive. Why would anyone in their right mind prefer the sound of chomping and smacking to that of polite dinner conversation? I mean, the whole point of sitting down to eat with others is that it’s a social experience, right?
This revulsion of mine is not consistent across species, however. What is sickifying in humans is thoroughly charming in, say, canines. Miss Brown gets her evening meal split into two portions: an after school snack and a bedtime snack. When I get home from work, I let her outside to potty while I put kibble in her bowl. When she comes back inside, she goes immediately to her bowl, grabs a mouthful of food, shoves her nose in my face, and proceeds to rub her kibble-crumb-encrusted lips all over me. While wriggling euphorically and chomping and making all manner of otherwise smicky-smacky lip noises. Ah, Teh Cute! It is to die for! Truly, it is about the most adorable thing in the whole wide world, as far as I’m concerned. But, if a human did that to me, I’d have to kill them.
Cattail and Bumper Stickers
I’ve been driving around with a nekkid car, which has been bugging me. The MoonPie of Delight was plastered with all sorts bumper stickers (what else does one do with an Onslowmobile?). I figured it was a public service to give folks something to read while they were stuck behind me in traffic.
Last week, I pulled up at a traffic light behind another blue Tracker. It was the BoD’s twin, except it was sporting all manner of red-white-and-blue stickers of the “These Colors Don’t Run!” variety. That was the last straw. I couldn’t let the BoD’s evil twin go unchallenged, could I? So now the BoD, too, is finally sporting stickers of her own, and I feel like I’ve done my civic duty. If I didn’t live in Red Central, I probably wouldn’t feel so strongly about plastering my car with pinko lefty propaganda. I think it’s important to remind folks that there is another point of view. I sometimes get the impression that folks around here have no idea that liberals exist in the wild.
We Have Normality
The migration is finished and I think most everything is working. I had a weird problem uploading photos this morning, but I’m hoping it was just a fluke. I was able to upload a bunch of files with no problem, but the second batch had to be uploaded one at a time. Hrmf. The email kinks seem to have finally been sorted out, as well, but I’ve lost a bunch of messages somewhere, and I fear they’re permanently AWOL.
On top of all that, my hard drive decided to crash and die last weekend. I’ve been pretty good about backing up files, so it wasn’t as tragic as it could have been. It was still a headache I didn’t need, though, considering that I’ve misplaced some of the programs I use all the time. Re-downloading them on my crappy connection was not fun. The good news is that I remembered to set the new hard drive’s jumpers before installing it, installation went smoothly, and everything is working perfectly. I even seem to have magically fixed a weird, non-critical error I was getting from Photoshop.
And then, as if life weren’t exciting enough, one of my air conditioners decided to die last night. Luckily, it happened while I was home and not during the day. Otherwise, it would have gotten dangerously hot in here for an elderly cat and a brachycephalic dog. It was too late to go buy a replacement last night, so I ended up going in to work early, then leaving when the stores opened. I picked up a new AC on the way home. It was a pain in the arse to install, though, because it’s so shallow that it’s not properly weighted for drainage. All the weight is on the interior half of the unit. Hrmf.
So, while I was experiencing my imposed computer and blogging hiatus, I was busy taking lots and lots of pitchurs. These are the highlights.
Crepuscular Rays
Echinacea
Zinnia
Dew on Leaf
Daylily
Cobweb Weaver
Storm Clouds at Sunset
And, it may storm tonight. Can a plague of locusts or a scourge of boils be far behind?
Note: The egg sac in the spider photo is about the size of a pea. Just to give you an idea of how ridiculously tiny those little hatchlings are.
Sunday Photoblogging
I woke up early again this morning, while it was still cool outside. The sun was shining through the trees, creating little fingerling rays of light as well as a long patch of sunshine on my otherwise shady yard. Within that patch, the dew glittered on the grass, so I got my camera and took some macro shots of it. There were also zillions of those little spider webs littering the yard. I don’t know what sort of spiders inhabit them. They look sort of like winged, eight-legged ants to me, not spiders.
After yesterday’s sweltering heat, this morning’s dew was wonderfully refreshing. It’s likely to be just as hot again today, so it’ll be nice to think of the coolness of the dew on my feet.
Crepuscular Rays
Evening Belt of Venus
Last night’s Belt of Venus occurred at about 9:30. Daylight saving time has wreaked havoc on my sky watching, among other things. I just haven’t been able to adjust to the new rhythm, so things have been hit-and-miss. I can’t get used to the fact that it doesn’t get dark until 10pm. I’m normally in bed long before then, and the light makes it difficult to sleep. I’m starting to wonder if my internal clock will ever adjust.
Sunlight and Fog
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. The folks at weather.com are a bunch of liars, apparently. I woke up to bright sun sparkling on a heavy dew, with a veil of fog skirting the southern edge of the valley. It was hot already, though, so I decided to get my butt in gear and run my errands early. Not that it helped much, because by 8am the heat and humidity were already oppressive.
Sunlight and Fog
Southern Ridge at Sunset
As I drove home from work on Friday, the sky was overcast and there were intermittent sprinkles of rain. The cloud cover thinned as evening approached, and I was hopeful that we’d be treated to a beautiful sunset. As it turned out, the western sky didn’t produce much of interest, but the clouds above and the southern horizon glowed a lovely shade of pink.
Technical note: My web host is in the process of physically migrating to new servers. I’m scheduled for migration on the 17th, which means they could begin as early as midnight Sunday. The move will involve everything, including e-mail. I’ve had a look at the helpdesk boards and there are quite a few folks who have been experiencing migration issues. Coppermine, which I use for my image gallery, seems to be making a particular pain in the arse of itself. So, if there are outages or other problems, they will hopefully be temporary. If not, I’ll try to get them resolved as quickly as possible. In the meantime, please think lots of happy, painless migration thoughts for me.
Thursday DogBlogging
Harriet spent last night’s storm crashed out on the couch. She was lying on top of her sleeping bag, which I’d just washed. It, in turn, was on top of several folded blankets. At one point, she attempted to re-enact a scene from The Princess and the Pea. Or, perhaps, Bitch of the Hill? It was quite fun to watch her trying to get comfortable on top of the mound of bedding. Just when she’d get everything scrunched to perfection, she’d try to lie down and would be foiled by the slick surface of the sleeping bag. After several attempts, she finally gave up and crammed herself between me and the blankets.
You can see, I think, that she is not much bothered by storms.
Did you know that dogs have eyelashes? I don’t mean the whiskers above their eyes, I mean actual lashes. Miss Brown’s are not long and glamorous, but they’re fairly easy to discern.
Rain, Rain, Go Away
It’s storming. It’s been raining on and off and on and off and on and off for days, and according to weather.com, it’s supposed to continue in the same pattern for the foreseeable future. Ugh. There are even some rumbles and flashes of lightning, but nothing consistent enough or far enough away–I’m not stupid enough to go stand outside in the lightning!–to motivate me to try to get a photo. Instead, I’d rather just grumble about the bloody weather.
Instant Review: Black Books
I just got the first season of Black Books from Netflix. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time. I nearly made myself sick. And, I’m not sure why. I suspect that others might not find it quite so riotous as I did. I think it just catered to my weird sense of humor, in all the right ways. Whatever the reason, I found it to be deeply, deeply funny from start to finish.
And, now, I’m going to get off the computer, because it’s starting to get a little nasty outside. I think maybe I should burn hecatombs to the weather gods, so the electricity won’t go out again. Eeep!
red paper boat 