Harriet Brown Gets Comfy
Category: Photography
Subbituminous Coal
There has historically been a good bit of coal strip mining in this area (Coal City is just up the road). So, it was not surprising to have several pieces of it turn up in my yard; it lies close to the surface here. I was surprised at how colorful it is, though. I always thought coal was uniformly black, but this has lovely reds and blues and yellows. It also flakes apart into thin layers. I’m going to try to separate more layers, without crumbling them, because I think they’d make an interesting addition to an art project.
Not Persephone
Pandora is 19 years old. She’s pretty spry and active for an old cat, and continues to wield a wicked sense of humor. It’s hard to picture her as a kitten. All I remember is a tiny puff of fur, fearless and full of fun. She was the runt of the litter, and noticeably smaller than her littermates. That never slowed her down, though. Only days after I got her, she climbed into the fridge. When I noticed she was missing, figured out where she was, and opened the door to let her out, she was completely unperturbed. She hopped out and made a bee-line for the dog, tackling her ears and demanding to be played with. As far as Pandora was concerned, everything was an interesting adventure. That has been her approach to life, for as long as I’ve known her.
I can’t believe it’s been 19 years. Nineteen years. It’s such an unlikely sounding number.
The snail in his museum
This was possibly the world’s most gregarious and inquisitive snail. When I picked him up, instead of retreating, he extended himself and pointed his itty bitty antennae toward me. When I placed him on my gate, to take his picture, he immediately started checking out his new surroundings.
Sunday Dogblogging and an Instant Review
Harriet often sits upright on the couch, with her paws on her belly, like a little old man watching television. This time, her left paw was strategically placed, which cracked me up, so I got out the camera.
Instant Review: An American Haunting
Ms. Lea, D, and I went to see An American Haunting last night. I just wanted to see a movie–it didn’t matter which one, as long as Tom Cruise wasn’t in it. I like horror and ghost stories, so An American Haunting sounded good to me.
It is allegedly based on a true story, and I had done a little reading ahead of time on the story and various explanations for what had happened. The first 2/3 of the movie seemed to follow the general storyline fairly faithfully: The father pisses off a neighbor in a land deal gone wrong. The neighbor is thought to be a witch. She curses the family. When a series of strange occurrences plague the family, they blame the neighborhood witch. Most of the haunting involves tormenting of the family’s daughter, then, later, the father.
But then, the movie took a bizarre right turn. Instead of the common assumption that the neighbor was responsible for the haunting, the movie storyline involved the father molesting the daughter, who then had some sort of psychotic/supernatural split. It was the daughter who was responsible for the haunting. Why she would have spent years tormenting herself is a mystery to me. Perhaps it was a passive-aggressive way to get back at her father? In any event, the daughter does end up getting her revenge on her father, by goading her mother into poisoning him. After the father’s death, the haunting ceases.
I didn’t get obsessive about doing pre-movie research, so I could’ve missed some theories, but nowhere did I come across a father-molesting-daughter theory. And, while there was some set-up for that conclusion, it ended up feeling abrupt, like it had been tacked on at the last minute.
I do wonder if the daughter might have been epileptic. In the early 1800s, when the haunting took place, it was thought that epileptics were possessed by spirits. Exorcism was a common “treatment” for the disease. It may have been preferable to make one’s community believe you are the victim of a haunting than to admit that your daughter was possessed by evil spirits. Someone with epilepsy might have been blamed for all sorts of bad happenings, so deflecting the blame onto a neighbor would have been a stroke of PR genius.
Self Portrait
Self Portrait in Window, 16 April 2006
Carriage House
16 April 2006
The perspective in this photo is correct. The upper wall of the building, between the windows and the eaves, is bowing severely.
All interspersed with weed
Seed Pods with Spider’s Web
I ought to be making devilled eggs, but instead, I’m playing around with Photoshop. I’m too tired and cranky to want to fuss with food.
As a result of last weekend’s power outage, my phone–I only recently realized–has not been receiving incoming calls. I was able to make calls and get online with no problem, but anyone who tried to call me either got a busy signal or the call was dropped after the first ring. Very odd. So I had to take yesterday off work to wait around for Cody-the-phone-guy to come out and fix the problem. This is, I believe, the fourth time I’ve had to have my line repaired after a power outage. Hrmph. There’s nothing I can do about it, because the failure is out at the pole, and not anything inside my house. I would think that, eventually, Some Bastard Company would get tired of having to make repeated trips out here, and might fix their frigging phone lines. I’m not holding my breath or anything, though.
That’s all by way of saying that I had to get up ass early and go into work this morning. Working was not–I repeat not–on my To Do List today. Hence the crankiness. And it’s raining, and is supposed to keep raining for the better part of the next week. That meant that I spent my unscheduled day off preemptively mowing instead of doing anything remotely entertaining. Again, resulting in much crankiness.
Alrighty then. I’m off to cleave wee eggies in twain, so that I can take them to Ms. Lea’s birthday festivities. I’m also supposed to bake her a cockeyed cake, but I completely forgot that I’m out of both sugar and flour. Even the mighty cockeyed cake requires sugar and flour. Oops!
I’m really hoping that the liberal application of alcohol will improve my attitude, because somehow I doubt that having to spend the afternoon and evening with hordes of people will.
Oooh! One good thing did happen today. On my way home from work, I got to see a bitty buckskin Quarter Horse. He was brand-spanking new–so new, that he was tottering around behind his mamma like a drunken little sailor. I had to pull over and watch him for a few minutes, he was that adorable. He managed to find his legs well enough to boink straight up into the air at one point, which nearly induced a sugar coma in me. I thought for sure he’d fall over, but even though he swayed a bit, and looked a little bewildered at what he’d just done, he stuck the landing. It was wonderfully funny, as if he had no idea how or why he’d gone up into the air. Boink!
And useful sassafras
Or till rust will come upon the screw
Rusty screw
Dandelion
Lightning seeds
Heart
I spent a good bit of the past weekend outdoors. The weather was gorgeous–sunny and warm with a perfect breeze. I decided to take my camera out and get some spring-y pictures. It was also a good excuse to play around some more with the macro settings.The dandelion seed image is un-retouched. All I did was resize it. The others were Photoshopped. I knocked down the saturation and upped the red and yellow channels. I also added some noise to the last image. I did a crappy job of squaring my camera to the tree branch, so the bottom portion is out of focus. Hrmph.
In local news, there was a nasty wreck near my house last Sunday, knocking out the power for over 6 hours. As I came home yesterday, I noticed that a big chunk of an electric pole was lying beside the road near Fish Creek Bridge. Yikes. We also had some asshat kids go on another mailbox-bashing spree. I guess we should be thankful it was mailboxes and not people’s heads, but still… I mentioned that I spent my last $14 on gas? I did not exactly factor a new mailbox into my, um, “budget.” Luckily, I originally bought the cheap-assed plastic model, which is pretty much unbashable. The rotten little vandals tore the door off it, but the box itself is still in decent shape. Unlike my neighbor’s mailbox, which is totalled. This went way beyond the usual drive-by whacking. Whoever did it took their time. It can’t have been easy breaking the door off my mailbox, and my neighbor’s was hit from two different directions.
red paper boat 