Lawn Signs on a Casual Drive –

Saturday, September 5th, 2015 -( 27˚C / 81˚F — Clear and ‘Pretty’ outside @ 4:00 pm In Atlantic Canada )-

Very Unscientific Observation While Driving around today just after noon:

 

Counting Political signs:

Red /  Liberal = 8

Orange / NDP = 7

Blue / Conservative = 3

& I didn’t see any Green / Green Party signs on anyone’s lawn –

& I didn’t count the blue sign in front of a vacant building that’s been for sale for at least 2 years.

& These are just Individual houses with signs up on their lawns. Highly traveled intersections have big signs up that represent everybody.

 

Note: Two orange signs that were up have disappeared from Canada Street, here on the North Side of town. I didn’t stop to ask anyone why –

Thanks, that’s all for now, I’m dealing with a wicked headache.

 

~~~~~ Jim

September is here. Time to scream or smile?

Tuesday, September 1st, 2015  -( 22˚C / 72˚F — Sunny & pleasant @ 2:41 pm in Atlantic Canada )- Some of today’s progress in photographs –

Wood shed under reconstruction.

A little bit of progress with rebuilding the wood shed. Last winter’s snow broke the frame. This year we’ll be bracing the frame, putting up a back wall to close it in instead of letting the weather cover and/or wet the wood. Today I got a little more done toward that end.

Pallets leaning against steel shed under a roof we can't see.

These pallets are now under the roof of the wood shed we’re rebuilding, which moved some of the clutter away from a highly visible area against the corner of the house which is closest to the road.

Corner of the house closest to the road.

This is the corner that is slightly less cluttered since the pallets that were leaning here moved under the wood shed’s roof until we process them.

Orange Sign on the lawn.

We’ve taken a stand in favor of a nurse running for office and the political party we believe has the combination of being electable and has Canada’s best interest at heart. This is after a lot of soul searching, and bearing in mind that my Yogi friend – who is probably the person I know in this life who is closest to God – said it’s not a good idea to vote for anybody because if they get elected, you will then earn a share of all the Karma that comes about because that person was elected, for instance, if you vote for somebody who campaigns in favor of Protecting everybody’s Civil Rights and supporting a strong defensive military to avoid being attacked by nasty neighboring armies, and the guy, once he has the power, locks up several innocent minorities and launches a surprise nuclear war against those ‘dangerous’ neighbors. Then you’ll be in trouble with your soul.

Purple flower and other plants near the stone wall.

– And – Some of the end of season plant sales that Cathi was the happiest about are showing us that they happy that they found a nice home. & They know they are loved and appreciated. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

Monday Morning – Resurrecting Old Computers, Installing update #120 of 220 —

Monday, August 31st, 2015 -( 16˚C / 61˚F — Cool & sunny & bright @ 8:29 am on my sister’s birthday here in Atlantic Canada )- (& it’s 2:29 am in Alaska, where she is 🙂 )

Denali photo in a tweet

A ‘Tweet’ this morning. – Says U.S. President Barack Obama is renaming what they’ve been calling “Mount McKinley” back to Denali – the Native American / First Nations’ name for that mountain – I’ve seen it, haven’t climbed it – my sister might almost be able to see it from where she lives or works on a clear day – Jim

— So, yes, I’ve been trying to fix some problems on an aging computer that came with Windows XP Media Centre back before Windows 7 was released and has had a few quirks – had its system font changed to symbols by a boy with an inquiring mind and fixed by his mother who had to jump through microsoft hoops to do that. – Had a houseguest mess around with settings so he could connect through proxy servers to a group in Africa that was closed to Canadians – and things like that. For the last week I couldn’t get a lot of things to work right, went out and bought some used memory chips to more than double the pitiful amount of RAM it had and deleted tons of redundant files and applications and it still wasn’t able to check for all those pain in the rump ‘updates’ that microsoft wants you to believe you need and really want. — until last night, about 12 & 1/2 hours ago, when it finally realized there was enough space on the newly cleaned and defragged hard disk to download and install almost three years worth of all those pain in the rump updates. – I think something might have frozen because it’s been sitting on “Installing update 120 of 220” at least since 7 am this morning. There’s a caution sign that’s warning us about trying to shut down or restart — Like “don’t do that-” I may have to close my eyes and push the button and see what happens and maybe start all over again with the updates shortly – maybe it has enough of them under its belt so it won’t have an electronic mind fart next time. ?

— Shrug –,

Happy Monday?  Poor Cathi had to go back to work this morning — it rained so much on her last week off that she didn’t finish working on the ‘new’ pallet bed frame she’s been working on this month.

— But, anyway, Happy “They’re changing Denali’s name back to what it was called all along by Native Americans Day” –,

And now the pets are threatening to tear me apart if I don’t feed them within two minutes 😉

~~~~~Jim

Don’t Vote For Anyone Who:

Don’t Vote For Anyone Who:

— Believes they answer to some human being ‘higher’ than you.

— Believes they know better than you do how you should live your life.

— Believes there is any such thing as ‘The Great Unwashed”.

— Looks down their noses at any Religion.

— Looks down their noses at any nationality.

— Looks down their noses at any group of people.

— Looks down their noses at anyone.

— If you get the idea, add your own lines to this.

 

~~~~~ Jim

Weekend Progress @ the Pallet Factory?

“Wicked Early?” Monday Morning, August 17th, 2015 -( 17˚C / 63˚F Mostly Cloudy & still dark @ 5:30 am here in Atlantic Canada )-

Woodshed roof is in place.

We hefted the woodshed roof back in place on Sunday. – Still have to reinforce the frame’s leaning uprights. But we have the basic frame in place. And the cordless electric screwdriver’s batteries are either both dead or planned obsolescence has struck again and the charger’s warranty is finished. 🙁

I recently retweeted / reported that France has passed a law making planned premature obsolescence a crime. The less than two year old batteries to my cordless electric screwdriver won’t charge. Whether it’s the batteries or the charger – it’s a crime. Viva La France! Now all we gotta do is sharpen our teleportation skills and teleport the executives to almost every company in the US and Canada off to Devil’s Island, and just to make it interesting, maybe we should send them back in time to the height of that prison’s ‘effectiveness’? -Schnarr!

Pallet and patio blocks beside porch steps

Cathi wanted to sand her bed frame down and get it ready for paint on Sunday. But first she discovered that Jassper was digging a hole too close to the porch steps on the East side of our house. She filled the hole in, levelled the ground there, had to move a mint plant and set her flower pot full of lettuce on the pallet. The smallish patio blocks are still pretty heavy. While we were looking at her handiwork, Jassper had to come out and inspect it with us. He did a little sniffing, didn’t complain – Cathi thinks he ‘respects boundaries’ but- I bet he’s planning his next tunneling job while we sleep.

Cathi offering me a water bottle.

When she realized she needed to chill for a bit, Cathi went inside on got herself a refrigerated bottle of water. When she saw me taking photos of what she had already accomplished she came back out beaming, “Just in time!” and handed me a nice cold bottle of spring water.

It was hot and muggy on Sunday. Cathi got up and out with a plan to ‘get stuff done’ and basically, just got started on what she wanted to accomplish when the heat got to her.

Palet Factory?

After we got the roof up in place and Cathi went to put a monkey wrench in Jassper’s latest mining efforts, I started taking apart a pallet. Instead of getting the whole pallet ‘processed’ I got the boards off one side and needed to get out of the heat and humidity for a bit. I did knock those nails out of those boards and then pried them the rest of the way, And checking on the battery charger inside was a frustrating ordeal. But this was the ‘scene’ when I realized it was just too hot to continue. – before I continued by getting those nails out of those boards.

Then I went inside and instead of composing a diatribe against ice-holes who fiendishly plot and plan new ways to incorporate planned obsolescence into their ‘products’ I discovered most of the old ‘Handbook’/Guide to the Computer Game we just might get finished and up and running one of these days. — And I needed a little more frustration in my life, I guess, because trying to do too many things at once – I was experiencing terminal lag here and finally had to quit out of a couple programs that are  not usually memory hogs- but I think I survived. It just took me all night to do something that should have taken twenty minutes.

— shrug –,

~~~~~ Jim

This Week At The Pallet Factory

Thursday, August 13th, 2015 -(  24˚C / 75˚F — Cloudy and a bit muggy @ 2:57 pm in Atlantic Canada )-

Pallet Factory

Cathi’s hard work: the two pieces that will soon be the bed frame are leaning against the front of the steel tool shed. The shorter piece will be the ‘chair/couch back’ support when it’s up and the extension that turns the wide bed into a double bed when it’s down.

Um… Cathi was on ‘Holiday’/Vacation all last week, She got more done at the ‘Pallet Factory’ than I did, pretty much completed the basic design of her bed frame for the guest room. I mean she built it, pounded pallets apart, trimmed the pieces down to size, bleached the wood, screwed the slats into place on the frame, even took a break, and reclined on the bare wooden bed with the slats in place and said she was surprised at how comfortable that was. We delivered her latest painting to the community centre on Thursday, Attended the Centre’s opening ceremonies on Friday, drove across the river, had ice cream and lived to tell about it 🙂

Pallet wood leaning against a house

Another section of the backyard pallet processing factory: Pieces of wood that have been liberated from pallets are leaning against the house under the overhanging eaves. The long pieces have been bleached. The short pieces are waiting their turn under the sponge 🙂 On the left are pallets with ‘rescue-able’ plywood, waiting to be rescued.

On Tuesday, the 11th (Which I believe is my niece Jalissa’s Birthday) I went out and knocked apart what was left of one long (8 feet?) pallet, Reinforced the broken 2×2’s that are the frame of our wood-shed – which collapsed under the weight of last winter’s snow. We’ve been through two winters here and both had ‘unusually heavy’ amounts of snow, which the climate change prophets say we better get used to –

Underside of a woodshed roof waiting for repairs.

This was the wood shed roof, before it caved in under the weight of last winter’s snow. The one lighter coloured 2×2 across the middle is screwed into the weathered-grey 2×2. It’s not that easy to see the bits of ‘new’ 2×2 pieces screwed into the old, broken 2×2 at the top of the roof (which is sort of laying on its side, supported by a rain barrel) Um If your name isn’t Hercules, you probably shouldn’t try to move 8×8 feet sections of even a fairly wimpy roof by yourself. 😉

I’ve also been going through old photos I thought were lost and pieces of stories/novels that were hiding on old hard drives that weren’t really dead. ( “Only sleeping?” I’ve had to go into the control panels and tell every computer I’ve had in the past fifteen years not to put the blinkin hard drives to sleep, because that crashes the computers every time. Sometimes it takes two or three tries to get the hard drives to wake up. If I knew for sure this was something that evil ice holes calculated to purposefully drive us crazy I would have to struggle valiantly to control my temper and not want to join a jihad again ice hole planned obsolescence and computer frustration conspiracy proliferators. That’s a mouthful- )

piece of wood drying inside the porch

“Interesting” piece of character-oozing lumber that was used to hammer three pretty nice pallets into a three-tiered shelf system for plants ‘on sale’ this last spring. We pried the shelves apart from their vertical support pieces and diagonal bracing pieces. This was a diagonal, I think, I knocked all the nails out, sanded it, bleached it, stained it with an oak ‘gel’ stain and will coat it with maybe several coats of polyurethane before I use it to brace the legs of a desk in my office.

One piece of wood that has an ‘interesting’ look to it, which is destined to being cut to fit and screwed in place to support the legs of a desk here in my office, has been sanded, bleached and stained and is waiting for us to go out and buy some paint thinner so we won’t have to buy a dozen cheap brushes to add the several coats of polyurethane it will need to ensure against slivers.

Proud puppy horse after flipping a bowl upright.

m. LeBoof – proud of himself for winning a round of bowl hockey, and blocking my way through the kitchen for about five minutes- The point of bowl hockey is to keep knocking the upside down bowl around until it magically flips upright. & Why do dog’s eyes shine back white when human eyes shine back red? And cat’s eyes are usually either green or amber when bouncing back flash?

& the dog was so happy to see me come back inside from my afternoon of messing around with pallets he played hockey with one of the bowls that usually contains cat treats or ‘wet food’ for cats, but the dog sometimes gets anything the cats leave behind. And he’s become quite animated about batting the bowls across the floor and trying to turn them right-side-up. It’s quite a noisy and animated process, and I’m repeating myself -oops.

~~~~~ Jim

 

Cathi Delivered Her Painting to the New Community Centre

Wednesday, August 5th, 2015.

The new Community Center, which began its life as something like the Alex Gibson School in Marysville, New Brunswick, which has been incorporated into Fredericton – will open tomorrow, Thursday.

School Turned Community Centre

We were happy when we first saw new signs of life around the Alex (?) Gibson School off Canada Street in the Marysville Section of Fredericton. We saw kids playing, people improving the gardens, and then learned the building was being turned into a Community Centre – Which is something both Cathi and I dar-dreamed -without telling each other- that we’d do if we hit the lottery.

Today Cathi delivered a painting of hers to the new Community Centre, in time for Tommorow’s opening ceremonies.

Cathi at the Community Centre

Cathi, with her latest painting in a fabric shopping bag over her shoulder, paused to let me take this photograph in front of the Community Centre.

Cathi on the stairs in front of the Community Centre

We paused to appreciate the building and to read the sign over the front door that told us the name the school had gone by.

Painting in old classroom

We got tour of the new Community Centre, This classroom has a painting of somebody who looks like Winnie The Pooh Welcoming students (and now us?) to Mrs Hudson’s ‘Hive’.

Map Of Canada painted on a gymnasium wall.

The School’s Gymnasium was already seeing use by somebody teaching Ju Jitsu – and there was this nice map of Canada on the Gymnasium wall.

Cathi is off all week, we’re planning to come back tomorrow for at least part of the opening ceremonies.

— Today was interesting and fun 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

Sudden Rain Halts Work Outside, So Cathi Painted A Painting.

Tuesday, August 4th, 2015 -( 17˚C / 63˚F Overcast & Dark @ 11:59 pm here in Atlantic Canada )-

— Cathi, who has been planning to get creative with pallet wood after seeing what several people have posted lately about what they’ve been doing with wood rescued from shipping pallets, had to halt her activities this evening and get everything – especially the electric drill and portable electric screwdriver – inside before the loud rumbling thunder split the clouds and pelted us with rain, and possibly hailstones- I don’t think we got any hail right here, but the area might have seen some.

— But also, she’s lamented lately that she hasn’t painted anything in years. There is a new “Northside” Community Centre open or opening soon and promising to display the work of local artists, so —

Pallet work in the rain

Not Orbs this time- those are probably reflected raindrops. It was pouring rain very shortly after Cathi made it inside. I got this photo by stepping outside under the bit of roof over hang here at the porch. Of course, there could be some ‘stealth orbs’ checking us out here. 🙂

— Left of center above is the frame Cathi is putting together for a guest bed in our guest bedroom. She was working feverishly, trying to fasten the last  of the slats, which will be vertical in this case- When the thunderboomers told her the downpour was almost here.

Painting on an easel on a credenza in our living room

Cathi’s painting is drying on the easel atop the teakwood credenza we sanded down and re-finished several years ago. Her box of art supplies is open on the floor and the paintbox is resting open, happy to have helped her accomplish something beautiful.

— No, she did not become discouraged and give up on her creative energy because one project had been thwarted- Nope, this is her 2nd week off this summer and she was determined to do things she could be proud of. So she sat down, got out her acrylics and painted a painting.

Cathi smiling

The beaming Artist.

— And, of course, the dog wanted to take credit for inspiring us to get outside and do stuff in the first place, and had his romp in the rain, came back inside looking daffy and ruffled and wet and happy, and, when I wanted to take a photo of Cathi and her painting, the dog wanted to get in the way and remind us that any time there is a dog in the room, we’re supposed to open up the ‘fridge’ and give him a treat. – hmmmmm —-

Dog in his crate.

Dogatory – The puppy-horse wants to show us what a good dog he is in the hopes that something edible will be his reward. 🙂 There’s a sheet over his crate that we pull down at bed time. This gives us maybe ten minutes of peace for a snack or something before he starts crying and whining and we want to cry and whine and remember the time before our long-term house guest hadn’t yet spoiled the almost trained puppy to the point where Cathi can’t bear to hear the mournful yelps and moans when he’s wondering what he might have done wrong to be locked up in his canine purgatory. You should see his eyes glow white through the security cameras.

— It’s been a productive day for Cathi, and an interesting day for me- after I fell asleep twice deleting spammed messages from this wordpress blog I took a nap and woke up to find that She hadn’t just started a painting, she pretty much finished it. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

New Look- & Thank You Jassper!

Spooky photo.

Spooky photo of a reflection of me, Jim, taking a picture of my spooky reflection in a window or patio door, or something like that, in 2008.

Okay- We’ve been busy in a lot of areas lately and when we checked this page/ these pages for the first time in months, we found that:  1.) There were 1,942 spam comments waiting to be deleted. & 2.) ‘upgrading’ to a much hyped newer theme can be a pain in the, um, bum.

Jassper, bless his heart, has been fantastic at sitting there, going through the mind-numbing task of making sure none of those spammed comments had anything to say worth allowing them to be approved for, and posted live. I think he said that two out of the first 400 he’s gone through might have been legitimate comments and/or worth checking out.

The new theme, “evolve”, has a couple great features and, as far as our needs and tastes are concerned, a lot of superfluous nonsense-  The developers went way out of their way to make the theme user friendly, probably aimed at the 15 to 35 year old crowd – which means my step son could have whizzed through it at the age of 5. 🙂 But it has some annoying features that I haven’t been able to figure out. The suggested height of a header was “125 pixels”. This like almost everything else about this theme, is customizable. So I changed it to 200 pixels and that worked, for about ten seconds. Then the stupid thing snapped back to showing only 125 of the two hundred pixels of the old header image I had to re-upload. There probably is a setting in here somewhere that I can change, manually, by diving into the code in the code editor, reading through thousands of lines, finding the right line, overwriting the setting with the new numbers, re-saving or ‘updating’ and then sitting back while the wheels spin and hope that when I look at what I think I have just fixed, it just might be what we thought we had all along.

Sigh.

They have some color settings here that are marked “Important!” in the code, as seen through the editor. And I can’t figure out how to get rid of the plain vanilla overly white background all around the guts of the page and put in my own color, or ‘colour’ since we are in Canada. 🙂

And- I wasn’t thrilled with the very green colour block around the ‘sticky’ messages that are supposed to stay at the top of the list of ‘posts’ to be displayed whenever any of you out there in reader/surfer land come pay us a visit. But that may be one of the things in the code that is marked “Important!” And right now, I’m too tired to argue with them or mess with the code to see if changing the color setting launches an ICBM attack on our closest allies or anything.

It also took me between ten and twenty minutes of clicking through all the user friendly options to find the button to push to turn off the ‘featured image’ function, which grabbed the first image in the post and displayed it larger than the image was supposed to be displayed, and displayed it on top of the rest of the article, as a link, so articles with images had a huge honking featured image above itself and then the same image in its normal size down inside the article where it had been told to hang out- and articles with no images included had a huge light gray box with a spooky semi translucent image of a ghost camera above the article, so fraekin huge that the images were often twice the size of the article itself. But I did find that box and clicked it off, grumbling, “We don’t need no stinkin’ featured images.

And Jassper has promised to sit down and delete another couple hundred pieces of garbage ‘comments’ tomorrow and we’re pretty sure we turned off the ability of anybody to post a comment here if they’re not on our staff. So if you really have something to say that we might think is valid and worth posting, you can send it to “jassper@aerendel.org” and if you really want to become another unpaid volunteer here, say so, and we’ll send you a user password set to ‘contributer’ and screen everything you try to post until we’re damned sure we can trust you. Sorry, we only needed to get burned once before we turned hard on potential volunteers.

Don’t tell anybody, I just yawned.

— Thank you — And we hope you find something here that makes your day more enjoyable or at least more informed. And since these pages here are more or less aimed at relatives and close friends, we would probably be surprised if you did find something that really tweaked your interest here. But then, again, you may have found something in/or one of the other pages that fired your enthusiasm, and you can write to jassper and tell him you’d like to contribute to that page, include a user name and either a password that we hope you can change later or we’ll pick one for you. & don’t forget we need your real email address to send you this information.

& I’ve clicked every category we currently have listed as pertaining to this message, and that’s what we’re all about, so far. New categories might explode into our consciousness any time, day or night-

— Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful life time, and a wonderful happily ever after –

————— Jim

 

Doe & Fawn, Cathi’s Photo

Monday, July 14, 2014. 9:03 pm.

Cathi got  a much better shot with her cell phone than I did with my camera.

Doe and Fawn through Porch Window

Same Doe and Fawn as below this post, Cathi Harris took this shot with her Galaxy SII Cell.

There it is. Taken at about the same time I took my photos that came out so … um, not so good.

 

~~~~~Jim

Doe & Fawn

Monday, 14 July, 2014 -( 28˚C / 82˚F @ 8:30 pm )-

Deer and Fawn

Deer With Fawn, July 14th, 2014.

Deer With Fawn.

Deer With Fawn in fuzzy darkness falling #2, July 14th, 2014.

Our neighbours told us that the deer who has been coming around lately (which is odd behaviour for a deer, they usually disappear all summer and start coming around to augment their diet in September) had triplets and probably needs all the good food she can get.

Tonight we saw a deer and one fawn. I can’t tell one normal deer from another, so I don’t know if this is the mother of triplets and one of those fawns or not. And I had to use the flash and I didn’t want to scare them away, so these are the best photos I got.

~~~~~Jim

I’ve Seen A Lot Of Green Things Lately (Poem from 1971, rediscovered in archives)

I’ve Seen A Lot Of Green

Posted by Jim – July 14th, 2014

I’ve seen a lot of green things lately
growing, trimmed to fit a grasping
need to feel our power over life
and cars still speed past my window
in a hurry to get to somewhere
they’ll probably wish they weren’t
yet their noises sometimes call me
to follow as far as your door.

Don’t ask me how I feel
I’ll tell you, whenever something touches me
or reaches for my eyes or mind
some complicated network
made of things like telephone lines
somehow pulls impressions
to a place where they’re measured and
set in line with things that have
happened
before.

Don’t ask what turns me on
the music that once filled me
echoes of small ideas and wasted energy
though I’m sick of reacting to things
I can’t control
I’m lazy and lagging
I want to start something
that makes sense
beyond all this
but I’m tired.

Don’t ask me what I want
I’m afraid to tell you
someone with soft hair
whose eyes I wouldn’t push
away from my mind, leaves
an image that won’t let me think
to the time I’ll stop my dreaming.

Don’t ask me what I’ve found
I’ll skip over the rulers of darkness
and light
and mathematical formulas
that can teach you why
the Earth moves and grass grows
and forty thousand people a year
have to die in cars;

And I’d tell you
I’ve learned that I need her
Her!
and daily look for reasons
to make her laugh
which set aside
fears that keep my hand
from reaching for hers.

Jim Wellington (4t try, august 24, 1971)

Tom Rush Poem etc.

Tom Rush

(A Tribute To Tom Rush And Crazier, more Hope Filled Days / Daze)

 

=====

 

( This Is To Tom Rush /
But That’s Not A Title )

I’ve seen you reaching
to understand the feelings
of everyone around you,
like you thoughts yours didn’t matter,
you remind me
of the things I like best in people

People; we’ve known our share
(pass the wine friend)
we know that our heaviest burden
is that we care
too much for things
that never give us a second thought,
we’re soldiers in a war
to bring love to our friends
who fear it the most

have to admit it though,
we sure know how to live,
if livin is losin,
if livin is losin your soul
twenty times a day
(tied off with a crumpled bow
and tossed) at the feet of the living
whose dreams are bound to die
before their time

they’ll be back, Tom, the people
when their losing
brings them to the questions
we gave them answers for
when they were too young to ask,
when their breasts were new
and full of energy,
full of idealism
that told them
the world was theirs

they’ll drag their heals
and feel their tears
and wonder about dying,
the way we did,
before we saw them ready to fall
before we were ready
to fight all manner of gods
for their happieness,
to strain every muscle
in our hearts
to keep them from crying

pass the wine, Tom,
the waiting is on us,
empty as a corpse.

Jim Wellington (1971)

 

=====

(( I came home from work one morning, to an empty house. All my “hippy friends” and house mates had gotten up early to zoom off to New Haven to the farmers’ market.

I’d had a rough couple days, with a new friend named Richie, whose parents had kicked him out of their house- he’d scored some really bad acid and spent a couple hours puking his brains out in our reassuring bathroom.

-And a fifteen year old girl had wondered into the house, wide eyed and helpless, looking like somebody’s perfect daughter, flawless skin, beautiful eyes, thin young body wearing bell bottoms and soft suede shoes, a tight tee shirt of brown textured material with a wide cut between her hinted at breasts- the tee shirt held closed by criss crossed shoe laced leather. Long straight dark hair, innocent brown eyes. She was just barely hanging on to her sanity after some idiot had given her a first taste of Lysergic Acid Diethalimide .25 and she was calmly trying not to explode into millions of fragments that might never come back together right. I managed to let he know we believed she mattered, she was a wonderful human being with better than infinite potential. She wanted to hold my hands and look into my eyes and absorb that truth and feel really good about herself and the universe that was coming together to save her from her parents’ particular form of insanity. But that inrush of truth and beauty and hope and love threatened to explode her again. I think, somehow, I said something that had her laughing with joy and launched her bad trip into a much better field of exploration.

And I had to go to work in the midst of all this, leave Annie surrounded by friends I trusted to stand back and stand guard to make sure she was safe and happy and learning as much positive information as possible without exploding all over the place… (a poster of Jimi Hendrix turned and looked at her and said, “What are you doing? … What did I do?…” ) And Richie from Long Island finished puking his brains out and sat around for a while staring at a very frightening panorama of monstrous faces forming the air around him and later asked for a ride to the emergency room, and he survived- ((( a couple days later he was playing his guitar and teaching me licks from Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane… )))

-But I was freakin drained, dealing with long haul truck drivers who told me my beard looked like their girl friend’s private parts, and the clerk work at the trucking company office kept coming and never gave me a chance to sit down and catch my breath.

-So I came home to our hippy beach house and put on my newish copy of Tom Rush- the album that starts with Driving Wheel. And I cranked it a little louder than I would if anybody was sleeping upstairs or on the couch or passed out half hugging the washing machine… life was that kind of an adventure….

And I fried myself a couple brown eggs and got the toaster to work and found enough coffee left in the pot to bring it all together into one of the better breakfasts I’d tried to cook myself…

And I sat down in the living room (in the mix-matched furniture that only looked right in a rented beach house)

And the music filled the universe with magic- every note relaxed and soothed another part of me that I hadn’t realized was on fire. And Tom’s voice was the soul of compassion and I could see the old man with white hair sitting on a park bench, looking through fading eyes at a world worth loving, and I wanted to get up and dance to stuff my momma would have warned me I better not dance to, all night long. and I wanted to drop my guard and feel the pain of crazy people who had a lot more to offer than I’d ever realized.

Star Children from the other side of the universe were coming to earth and infiltrating our wild and crazy hippy get togethers and donating secret bits of love and wisdom and compassion and hope. And they were using unassuming genius folk singers to help them spread their message.

I had to sit down and write the above poem, straining to feel and find the words that fit together just right

I typed up two copies and gave one to Annie (the fifteen year old hope of my lost tribe’s wildest uncontrollable generation)  She kept a crumpled up copy with her and read it read many times after being used and abused by flower children and people who hated flower children. She went to a Tom Rush concert because of that poem and loved every second of it.

And I thought I lost my last copy of that typewritten poem but found it yesterday in a stinkin mildew and mold ridden mess in a storage unit a family member had filled with stuff that my brother in law had not burned when he set his house and fire and blew his brains out, never getting over the loss of my sister to cancer….

And the original is inside a plastic page protector and this copy will be saved on five or six hard drives and on the web in at least three sites.

Yeah, life is still worth living. Even if the only wine I want is the spiritual kind that warms you to the core of our universal soul and spirit.

—–Jim, July 12, 2014 (Full moon tonight) ))

Saturday Evening

Saturday, March 22, 2014. We might have gotten 5 new centimeters ( 2 inches? ) of snow-

Parking lot, Cars covered in snow.

Snow coming down in mall parking lot.

This was probably the height of the snow storm. Later, it turned to misty rain, then back to light snow.

4 people at a table in a restaurant.

Dinner at Saigon Noodles. Our waitress saw me taking a photo and volunteered to take one with me in the picture.

We had a graduation, a registered nurse exam passing, an engagement and an anniversary to celebrate all at once. It was a nice, happy relaxing time.

~~~~~ Jim

 

Deer Photos with “Sports” setting

Tuesday, March 18, 2014. -15˚C / +5˚F // -25˚C Wind Chill at 7:00 am.

Deer near house.

Deer photo, shot with digital camera set on the ‘sports’ setting.

While I was in New Hampshire, zooming around the state with one of my best all time friends, I actually learned something.

First, when photos in a semi dark restaurant came out blurry, my cousin wondered why I didn’t use a setting that fixed that.

Later, when my friend spotted something and took a photo from the passenger’s seat of my moving vehicle, I asked him if he wanted me to pull over or stop so he could get a steadier shot, he replied, “Oh no- I use the sports setting. It freezes motion.”

Shortly after that I had a “Well -duh!” moment and realized that my camera did have the same type of setting and I had found a broad range of specialized settings, (Like “Night Time”, “Sunset”, “cuisine”, and so on) almost by accident. I had originally breezed through the instruction booklet and only read in depth what I needed to know immediately, like how to put the battery and SD Card in and get those right… But- yeah, the night time setting does came in handy. And now the sports setting… yum.

Look carefully beyond the young deer to the left of the others (with his or her head twisted around to see what I was up to). There is something white under the branch of the evergreen back there.

That is a White Deer under the evergreen tree branch.

This is a telephoto shot. Not extreme, but I did not use a tripod or hold my breath until my head exploded.

The white deer in the photo above is usually hanging way back behind the normally coloured deer in this group. He or she is a bit more spooky than most and it is hard to get a photo of this guy (or gal), especially when surrounded by white snow. (( One shot that Cathi got, somebody looked at the white deer and said, “Ah come on- that’s a goat.” No it isn’t.

Family of deer in shade on snowy hillside.

Another telephoto shot. Again, I’m happy with the results and I did not have to take half a dozen shots before I got one steady enough.

Yes, I could have used this setting before. My life would have been a bit less stressful. My ‘Professional’ self critical sense a lot less active, my frustration levels less acute.

See? It’s good to have friends.

(Imagine your favourite smiley face here.)

~~~~~Jim

 

Cat Help

Monday, March 17, 2014. Bitterly Cold most of the day. Wicked Wind…

Cat Behind Cutting board.

Cathi likes *Not* to have cat help while preparing meals.

On my recent whirlwind trip to New Hampshire to see my 90 year old Mother while she was visiting for a couple days from Alaska. I bought a nice homemade cutting board from an old (and close) friend.

Cat looking grumpy behind the cutting board.

This cat is not impressed with the placement of Cathi’s new cutting board.

Tonight, Cathi called out, “Hey, this cutting board is the perfect size, come check this out.”

Max, the cat, is not as happy about this as we are.

~~~~~Jim

The Committee is in Attendence

— Thursday, March 06, 2014. -26˚C / -13˚F @ 7:00 am. (( or -18˚C/0˚F — Depending on who you believe and which thermometer they’re reading ))

Several Deer on a hill in the snow.

A family of wild deer, looking for something to eat, just outside our porch window. The white deer is on the far right. This might be he best of about ten photos I shot in a hurry.

I should measure the distance from the window to the top of that bit of hill back there. I think a couple herds of deer come around looking for food at odd times. We notice them most often in early morning and right around sundown.

Several deer through a porch window.

We’ve been calling these guys, “The Committee” as they welcome Cathi home from work and sometimes watch her leave for work in the morning. They are rarely this close to our house.

Technically, this is not  a wonderful photograph. You can’t plan for events like this. Frost on the window in the process of melting left circular blobs. I think the speckles are bits of ice on the window to the left.

Deer on slight hill just outside our window.

This is another shot of the “Committee”. Plus you can see the white deer near the centre of the group here. The flash went off so there are odd reflections in the window. The flash did not scare the deer off.

Let’s see, I petted reindeer in a tourist trap theme park (“the North Pole”) in New York State and felt the velvet of their horns when I was a five year old. Also got pretty close to tame deer at Santa’s Land in Putney, Vermont. But I don’t think I ever got this close to a real family group in the wild like this.

Oh, and I was probably two feet away from a huge Moose who was stretched out to reach the lowest branches of a tree outside my sister’s living room window. If that moose lost his balance he could have come crashing through that window, and I might not be here to tell you about it. (Especially if two tonnes of flailing hooves and frightened Moose landed on me, or near enough to kick me to death…. eep.)

~~~~~Jim

March is here, and the snow is pretty darn high.

Sunday, March 2, 2014. (Sally Spencer’s Birthday)

-12˚C / +10˚F @ 11:11 pm.

Lots of snow with a path cut through it.

Woo Hoo Hoo lookin out my back door. (Cathi calls this our front door.) But Credence Clearwater didn’t sing it that way— (This was Mid February)

For those of you who miss the snow- I won’t be the kind of jerk who leers and says, “hell, you can come shovel me out any time you want.” There’s already more than enough of that personality type around.

Driveway dug out of snow.

I think this was the same day, a Monday, garbage day. And the lovely snow plow guys left me a huge ice rock hidden in the three feet high mountain of snow they tried to kill me with. (Anybody who leaves a mountain that high blocking a driveway should be liable, &/or charged with attempted murder, don’tcha think?) That block of ice nearly killed the brand new snowblower. & who knows what kind of consequences broken blades flying around might have had.-

But it is beautiful.

Slightly foggy photo with deer in front of neighbour's van, back of his house.

I think this might have been my Aunt’s birthday, February 26th. There are 3 or 4 deer hanging out in one of my neighbour’s back yard, in front of his van- a foggy stone’s throw from my porch. One of those deer (far left?) might be the nearly invisible white deer who comes around to visit and dares me to get a decent photo of him or her.

Box labeled "Mushroom Farm" with mushrooms growing out of it.

“Mushroom Mini Farm” bought from a local supermarket.

We never quite became snowbound, but I wanted to say, “What do you do when you’re snowbound? You grow mushrooms.” Our favourite local supermarket is part of the Loblaw’s / President’s Choice chain and they had these mushroom mini farms in a very conspicuous place right in front of the “in” doors and Cathi said, “Hmmmm-” (she likes mushrooms.) We ate a few of these and I’m still alive to tell you about it.

Flat panel teevee on a wall with a stained piece of wood to help hold it in place.

Television holding project, still unfinished, but almost there-

Latest Project: Got this far today while it was still light outside. The vertical piece of wood is something we needed to make sure the 3 inch screws the mounting bracket came with: (a) didn’t go through the wall and out through the siding and (b) offered an extra measure of support for that above mentioned bracket. We got the wood from our nearest Kent Hardware store and got the stain from the same place. (I think we got the wood and stain about a month ago-) I got to use my new super spiffy mitre saw to cut the 45 degree supports for the shelf that is still down stairs drying. (tacky) One of our cats believes he owns the bed and had to be scared off with an electric drill and kept away by plunking a guitar case in his favourite spot. Cathi is very much looking forward to actually having a dresser with its mirror up and useable in the very near future.

And I think Mercury is no longer Retrograde as of Friday the 28th. Which is good news to a lot of people I know and care about.

((( Yay! )))

~~~~~Jim

Night Photos at the River

City lights and reflections on ice with some snowy foreground.

Fredericton by Night, January 30th, 2014. The St John River is frozen. The truck beside us had his headlights on. I think this is quite a photo. (I got lucky).

Sunday, February 2nd, 2014.  (( Happy Birthday Lisa and Ricky )).

+1˚C / +34˚F @ 7:35 am. Wind Chill is at 24˚F / -3˚C.  Snowing, Possibility it might mix with rain or “Frozen Mix” later.

On Friday, we ran around like crazy and got quite a bit done, even managed to stop at a local pub for dinner, ran home, unloaded groceries, jumped back in the jeep and zoomed down to the boat launch at the foot of Gibson Street and got there early for an experiment the love of my life was conducting with fellow Students of A.R.E.

We were supposed to sit there for fifteen minutes. She was supposed to observe her environment and take notes and other members of her group were supposed to remote view what she was doing and draw pictures and take notes and report back to the group to see how well they did.

The city looked magical while we were there. Most of the photos I took came out surprisingly good. A couple are a bit blurry, but still better than I had hoped.

City lights refelcted on river ice.

Different angle, different section of the city across the river.

As I hinted in the caption to the first photo, a truck parked next to us had his headlights on. I hoped we weren’t worrying him with our cameras, turning around and looking in all kinds of crazy directions and trying to stand rock steady while shooting in the dark.

My Olympus camera has settings for night shooting that I can’t always find, and when I found them again this night, it was almost by accident. I tried to review the last couple shots I took when the options menu came up in a manner I didn’t expect.

One of the shots I took turned out to be a ten second video clip. I don’t know how that happened either.

 

City lights, reflections, dimly lit snow, shadow of a person taking a photo on the right.

The shadow on the right is the wild and crazy love of my life, the light in her hands is her cell phone, I think. She got a yummy new digital camera for Christmas, but I think she has the cell in her hand here. She commented that the lights and their refletions looked like candles.

—Maybe it is her new camera in her hands, (hard to tell in thumbnails) The headlights made the snow and tire tracks look really interesting.

 

Lights, Reflections, Shadow, light from a camera viewfinder.

Basically, the same shot as the one above this one, turned just a bit to my right. This is the only shot I took where Auto Levels adjustment made any difference at all.

& The last two photos here were just screaming to be included.

City lights & reflections

Another shot of the city lights reflected in the ice on the river.

City Lights, Reflections and Some snow in the foreground.

And the last one in this group. With a hint of the snowy boat launch area (Which is a whole lot less snowed under than it was a couple weeks ago.)

Here the piles of snow and snow-blown reeds near the water’s edge (Ice’s edge, this time of year) looks like gunk floating in a dark river. I don’t know, I think the ice on the river could easily be mistaken for water in these shots.

—Creatively yours….

~~~~~Jim