I love black and white photography. I enjoy Ansel Adams, sure, but I have enjoyed black and white photography outside of his work as well. Today the sun was shining in through my egress and I snapped a few shots with my mac. Not quite archive quality but the light was inspiring. My hair is not.
Do you ever have those conversations that just kill you with laughter? Each exchange of the conversation builds up to an even funnier ‘bit’? Me, too. Except that I can never remember then when I’m sitting in front of my computer. Its like my brain shuts off. I could walk away from this keyboard, have an exchange with Jessica, laugh, laugh, and laugh some more, come back here and my mind would be blank. It would be like I never talked to Jessica except for having a vague recollection of laughing with her.
I would say, “If I had a nickel for every time I had a funny conversation…,” except that a nickel isn’t worth as much any more, and you’d just feel worse that I have the memory of a flea.
At our local mega-giant-club-store-where-you-buy-in-quantities-that-would-feed-third-world-countries they had a compost bin for a price I couldn’t pass up. I bought the bin because I hate throwing away so much food. We throw out so much stuff wrapped in plastic trash bags that could be recycled that I’m embarrased to be involved in the process. So along with recycling glass, plastic, paper and metal products I’m also recycling some of our food waste. That food will go into the compost bin, get eaten up by bacteria, and according to the line drawing that came with the instructions, will come out as small lines of garden goodness.
We’ll till the compost into our dirt and then our dirt will be happy. Happy dirt for happy worms that will be eaten by happy birds. I’m hoping the happy birds will then drop happy bird droppings on our car instead of the sad or solum droppings that they now drop periodically. Because that would make me happy. Not as happy as, say, not having the droppings hit my car at all, but better than sad droppings. That’s why you should compost, too.
What environmentally friendly/fiendly things do you participate in? Not “earth day” which is just a joke, but real things that you feel emotionally involved in like driving a Hummer or a Prius?
There is nothing like country music and line dancing to make you wish you married your sister. Or if you don’t have a sister, maybe you wish you lost a dog or something.
Squaredancing on the other hand makes you wish that you had coordination enough to dance more sophisticated dances like you see people doing in theater productions. Don’t get me wrong, squaredancing is fun because its easy, but after evaluating my ability to play simon says where every call is something simon said, I’m ready to take on dancing with the average Joe. Its like reality TV only its reality. I have relatives who went to school for dance, I have even more relatives who ballroom dance, but its just not in me. When I have danced ‘improvised dance’ I think that some people present were ready to call 911 to make sure that the ambulance was hurrying because the convulsions were getting worse.
This last Saturday our church had a dance – but it was a square dance. Various members of the congregation stayed home because they had some sense, but we wanted our girls to be able to have fun. And fun they did have [<- that sentence was so Yoda, I don’t know where it came from]. And we as adults had fun. It was the first time I’d danced with my wife in public since we got married. 8.5 years of not knowing that the easiest way for me to dance with Jessica was to take up square dancing.
I think next year I need to wear suspenders.
For the fun of it I’ve decided to take advantage of the free 10,000 step a day exercise program. I’m going to try to walk 10,000 steps or more a day. That way, if I calculate correctly, I can increase my ice cream intake to quarts a day instead of my usual summertime intake of half a quart a day.
What are you going to to do participate in my weightloss program? No, not for you, for me? Will you help me walk 10,000 steps a day? For every comment that gets left on this post I will add 100 steps to my daily steps up to 2,000 more steps (or 20 comments, whichever happens first). I’ll add a bonus 100 steps to my daily count if someone can tell me what book the title of this post comes from (besides my wife, who knows this book most likely because she’s read it).
Tally:
Total: 10,600 steps a day is now my goal (or roughly over six miles). Achieved today by an end of the day walk-around-the-sofa-fest.
Tonight after work Kurt called and invited us to go bowling with he and Becky. <complete lie>Being avid bowlers</complete lie> we said, “Yes!” I actually enjoy bowling now for some reason. In fact tonight I bowled a 157 on the second game. Anyway, we said that we’d go bowling in part because it would be Abby’s first exposure to bowling. She was excited because she happened to have on a shirt with different sports balls pictured on it, so it was the ‘right’ shirt to wear. The video linked below is her first ever bowling experience. Enjoy it, it makes this daddy proud. Slowly, but surely, proud. I love to see Abby’s joy. And it doesn’t hurt that Uncle Kurt is yelling, “Go ball, Go,” either!
Evie, too:
Yesterday at Lowes we picked up an aloe plant. How cool are these plants? Somehow the plant got a part of one of the ‘leaves’ broken off and the capsules inside werer full of the alue juices that I grew up wiping (with disgust) on my arm for sun burns. Plantlife just amazes me. Maybe I’m a bit of a bat botanist, or maybe I’m just a weirdo, but having plants give us fruits, vegetables, medicine and beauty is sometimes overwhelming for my little brain.
The upside of having an aloe plant will be that I can look at the spiney arms regularly. The downside is that I kill most of the plants I’m in charge of.
Having just loved using the shaving oil, shaving cream, badger brush and after-shaver lotion from ‘The Art of Shaving’ that I mentioned around Valentines day I went into the store again tonight and bought a safety razor. I couldn’t help it. I have been enjoying shaving 7 days a week (on average) for the last month and just had to go to the next level. I’m a junky. I even bought shaving soap (and a cup) last weekend to see how that differed from the shaving cream.
When I’m walking on the sidewalk I have to take a consistent number of steps per ‘chunk’ of sidewalk. The average sidewalk rectangle takes about two steps to traverse. I know this because I’m more than likely counting the steps.
I also like to visually follow lines in the sidewalk to their destination. If they were lasers they might cut through that house or tree or fence and then they would keep going.
I blame my parents for these problems 😉 My dad and mom cultivated a healthy imagination in my young mind which has served me well for various things, but it also means that at times my imagination doesn’t shut off or that, worse, when my imagination takes hold of something morbid, something wicked, or something strange, it keeps going. My co-contractor and friend Matt once told me to stop when I was riffing on something with a waiter because everyone else had run the concept through their minds and were done and mine was still going. I think the waiter was glad Matt asked me to stop.
You’ll notice on other blog posts that I like to write about things that escalate or lists that have three things in them. I write like this because its part of my brain’s imaginary trajectory of things. If it has three things its thorough enough for my laziness, if it has more than that it is my brain letting loose. The mouse trap story from a few days ago is a perfect example. I had to take the mouse in the garbage can to a large universal perspective because my brain didn’t let go.
I have problems, but they’re ones that I’ve lived with for so long that I don’t think about them. My imagination tells me that my father-in-law will read this and say, “Ah, it all makes sense now.” My mom will read this and think, “Randy, I’m sorry for somehow making you weird. Its mostly your father’s fault.” My dad will read this and he’ll think about all of the weird things he did as a kid and how he continues to do them, too. I’m most certain that all of this is not related to weird Freudian sexual tension but more than likely related to the fact that I’m probably just an anomally in the Matrix.