It’s been a really long, busy day and now I’m trying to do my daily post but WordPress is acting up and glitchy and I don’t want to break my streak of posting days and I don’t know what inspired me to go this route but here’s a really pretty picture of one of the stained glass windows in Prague Catherdral from my trip there seventeen (!!!!) years ago.
Winner! K thankx bye!!
Filed under Art, Photography, Travel
Balance. I think about it a lot.
On the one hand I can get really, really focused. Which can be good, it gets things done.
On the other hand, being that focused means that you can miss other problems, other threats, other things that need to be taken care of and might be just as important. Which can be bad, it leads to mistakes.
I sometimes get to where I was an hour or so ago and I have nothing for my daily post and I don’t want to take the time. I’m focused. I have no thoughts to share. I’ve used up all of my current pictures. I’m not going to get into the politics or news of the day because that’s a bottomless well of toxic sludge. I just want to stay focused and get things done and off of my plate!
Then I remember. College. Physics major in addition to working full time plus to make ends meet. Focused. Laser focused. I had to take a breadth class and the only thing I could find at 08:00 AM, when I got off work from the graveyard shift, was an Art 101 class. UC Irvine was legendary for “performance art.” (I’m pretty sure I’ve ranted at length about this elsewhere on this site, so search for it. If I haven’t, someone let me know, it’s a fantastic story. For now, just the summary version.) I was skeptical. To say the least. I wanted instructions to follow. I wanted to learn to draw or paint or sculpt or whatever. Get my “easy A” and get out.
As Coach Corso says, “Not so fast, my friend!”
The short version is that I learned to think. I learned to look at problems differently. I learned a skill that I can occasionally click on in my brain, to see things differently, to “think outside the box,” so to speak. And like the old joke about the guy who tells his guru that he’s too busy to meditate for an hour and gets told instead to meditate for two hours, the fact that I didn’t think I could afford the time to play around and come up with something to post tonight meant that I HAD to stop and make that time anyway.
So I did.
Nothing fancy, taking a bit of a generic photo from earlier in the week, transforming it, twisting it, transmorphing it, playing around for a while with this and that, listening to some weird ass music (Erasure, John Michel Jarre, and Enigma primarily) until I got to something that looked cool.
Balance.
When I was out watching and filming the Falcon 9 launch the other night, I also had my DSLR with the big lens, just in case the opportunity came up to use it. I tried to take one picture but it was immediately obvious that it wasn’t going to work. Because it was so dark the camera automatically tried to take about a 60-second exposure, I didn’t have a tripod, the handheld shot was going to be blurred and useless, so I just let the camera go and hang by the neck strap for the final fifty or so seconds.
It turned out remarkably interesting and even borderline beautiful!
The brave little robot camera, having been given an order by me, its mentor, boldly went forward to do its very best to comply and produce what it had been asked to.
In the upper left corner, I believe that’s the Falcon 9 rocket. And all of the arcs and lines? I have no clue. Probably street lights, maybe a plane overhead, maybe lights on nearby houses as the camera swung. Who knows?
But all together? Sublime.
Filed under Art, Paul, Photography, Space
The thing is with these “No Context For You” posts is that, while I may not be sharing any context for a blurry or distorted or altered image so that you can immediately figure out what it is and why, so far *I* have always known what it was, or at least had a pretty darn good guess.
Some of them have been pictures accidentally taken when the camera/phone got bumped or I had fat fingers while taking it out of my pocket or putting it into my pocket or some such thing. But when I look at the other pictures in the series around it and look at the time stamp to see where I was and what I was doing then, I can be pretty sure of my guess.
Not these! They’re colorful, which I like, but I found them in that old, old cache of misfiled cellphone pictures from 2008-2016. They’re old enough so that I don’t have a clue what they’re of or why/how they got taken.
A little mystery is good for us all. Granted, I would prefer to have the mystery be that I won that freakin’ HUGE lottery and I’ve used the hundreds of millions of dollars to establish myself with a secret superhero identity out fighting crime, injustice, and the Republican Party (but I repeat myself…), but no, we’ll just have to settle for the moment to being puzzled over some pictures that go back to sometime in late 2016.
They’re colorful. They’re weird. They’ve been found and pulled back from the abyss.
Take what you can get!
Filed under Art, Photography
I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time cruising Zillow, looking for that rainbow unicorn property that’s out there for our “forever home.” There are some truly spectacular places out there — if you have several million dollars to spend.
There are some very nice and perfectly acceptable houses in a number of different locations around the country, for $600K to $800K. Which is still a problem since we need to be paying about half or 2/3 of that if possible.
For $400K to $500K there are some very nice and perfectly acceptable houses – except for “something.” In a town that’s way too small. In a city that’s way too big. In a state where I would make it about a week before there would be folks with torches and pitchforks out on my lawn. On a lot with about three feet between us and the neighbors.
We’re going to move once, and ONLY ONCE if I have anything to say about it. The “forever home” doesn’t have to be 100% perfect, but it would help if it’s in the high 90%’s.
Oh, but those “fantasy homes!” The ones with fifty or sixty acres, on a river with a dock, an in-ground pool, six or seven thousand square feet or more, a barn and paddock and kennel and workshop, that huge built-in BBQ and patio and jacuzzi…
I don’t know if it’s worse to look at them and drool and dream and occasionally deal with the disappointment of knowing that we’ll never have one, or to swear off looking at them and just settle for so much less.
If you happen to know of a 2,500 to 3,500 square foot, one-story ranch on a 1/3 or 1/2 acre lot in a mid-sized college town in a blue or purple state for under $500K, let us know, okay?
Filed under Art, Castle Willett
One thing I noticed in watching all of the news coverage of Hurricane Ian slamming into Florida as a Category 4 storm was the lack of color in most of the scenes. The clouds and rain are white and gray and the lack of sunshine makes everything that does have color seem washed out and pale. The sea not only turns angry and threatening, but it turns gray and black with the whitecaps showing up as the winds explode.
Colorful signs and storefronts and home turn to debris, brown, gray, black, with occasional splotches of color which are quickly spun away and scattered by the storm, to be sunken into the brown and black storm surge.
I think that’s a good analogy for the way our lives are going right now. We want life to be colorful, filled with blue skies, green fields, yellow sunshine, white clouds, multicolored flowers. Instead, some days so many things feel like a hurricane going through our lives, leaving everything broken and reduced to various shades of white, black, gray, and brown.
Keep the color in your life. Fight for it. Cling to it. Share it with others. And if everything’s gray and black and white and brown for you, ask others if they can share some of theirs.
Filed under Art, Deep Thoughts, Photography, Weather
That moment when you try to do something that should be trivially easy in Photoshop just to have something different to post and you time after time after time get it demonstrated to you just how far down the toilet your Photoship skill set has gone.
Charlie Gordon world, here I come!
Filed under Art
For Christmas I got a wonderful little thingamabob, a night light that projects “aurora” on the ceiling.
“Aurora-like” might be more accurate, but it’s lovely and I like it a lot. It’s sort of like a kaleidoscope in night light form, constantly shifting and sending out varying curtains and streamers of red, blue, purple, and green light all over the ceiling.
The blue spot on the right is from the night light built into a fan. Combined, it’s quite the effect.
It’s not nearly as bright as this makes it seem – we do need to sleep, after all. But the lights are quite visible, especially when your eyes get dark adapted, and it works well as a night light (which is, after all, its original function) when my middle-aged body has to wander out of bed several times a night.
Very pretty. Very peaceful. Very relaxing.
And I’m a lot less likely to break a toe at 3:13 AM! We’re all happy about that.
Filed under Art, Paul, Photography
This finish line crossed
The race won for the moment
Time to relax, to read, to breathe – tonight
00:43:29 at the pond’s edge, no birds to be found at the feeder
But small critters occasionally scurry by for theft
Snow falling heavily
In Venice it’s foggy at 06:43:29, traffic slow and sparse
Across the canal someone’s television has flickered all night
Odd shapes flashing, occasionally recognizable, always foreign
As sea birds and gulls flash by in the mist like specters.
Los Angeles at 21:43:29 is cool and calm, another day entirely
Longing for travel and adventures, settling for far less again, taking what’s available
Tomorrow we begin again.
Filed under Art, Paul, Photography, Travel, Writing
When did it get to be the end of September?
Why do we make calendars in rectangular, regular, regimented designs when in fact it’s all chaos and it’s only by dint of sheer willpower that we can determine what day of the week and date it is?
I love the hubris, but I’m buying into it less by the day.
Filed under Art
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