No Pictures Today?

On a trip of any kind, on a vacation or not, what do I do? Constantly? Every day?

Right! I take LOTS of pictures.

It was a busy day seeing things (Ronnie found a chocolate factory to tour), eating things my dietitian would not approve of (but not gorging myself on it, not to worry), picking up my mother at the airport (she was coming home from visiting her family in South Dakota), and watching tonight’s hockey game at my sister’s house (OK, we’ll win it in five, at home, instead of in four, on the road).

Now I’m just jet lagged and off my feed enough to be at the point where I don’t quite know without looking what time it is or even what date or day of the week is is. With the daily routine gone, so is my sense of time and space.

I figured I would share a picture or two, as I normally do. But I took almost no pictures today.

You heard correctly. I took very few pictures today. Only about a dozen.

Part of it was the weather – it got rainy with a low overcast and lousy visibility most of the afternoon, so I’ll have to wait to take phantasmagorical panoramas of the green Green Mountains. (I guess tomorrow I could take pictures of “rain things,” they’re novel to me even if they’re normal for you…)

About half were pictures I took to demonstrate my iPad to my mother — the good news is that I’m not going to have to teach her how to use a smart phone or tablet. But the goofy pictures of her and me and The Long Suffering Wife at dinner are: a) personal and not appropriate for posting here, and; b) oh, who are we fooling, of course I would post them here, “appropriate” or not, but they are really low quality and suck as pictures, so you’re off the hook and don’t have to look at them.

All of the rest of the pictures were of a beautiful spider that I saw at the airport. It was on the outside (which no doubt helped my opinion of its beauty) so I could get really close to it without there being any chance of actually coming into contact with it. So I did. Good pictures.

But I realize that spiders are a trigger for some people. My first wife was absolutely TERRIFIED of spiders, no matter how small or how far away, so that’s a phobia I’m sensitive to.

(brief pause while I have a brilliant idea, especially for the late hour, and go do some things to completely change my train of thought)

I wanted to share the spider picture, but didn’t want to freak anyone, so I posted it here, on my Tumblr page. I’ve been wondering what to put up on Tumblr beside pointers to this blog. This may be the first clue about how it can all work together.

In addition, while digging around for the spider picture, I also realized there was another set of pictures that I took today.

I’ve mentioned in the past that different cities have different “art themes.” This is a setup where they have dozens or more identical fiberglass figures which are then painted bizarrely and auctioned off for charity. Angels in Los Angeles, cattle in Kansas City, “hokie birds” in Blacksburg, VA, mermaids somewhere in a Virginia coastal city, jackalopes in Midland, Texas.

In Vermont it’s dairy cows, apparently with the theme “The Cows Come Home To Burlington.” (The plaque had a website listed, but I get an error trying to link to it, so maybe that’s dead.) In the airport, on one of the baggage carousel, is this one.

See, even when I don’t take pictures, I take pictures.