That Yucky Verbal Diarrhea

Those of us who love to write but have nothing really significant to say and even less skill in saying it are like the distracting  nats of the evening air. We arrive at a pause in the day, not large enough to really cause a ruckus, nor interesting enough to cause a little pain, but still annoyingly dancing there in front of your face and being a distraction from the lovely sunset as you lose your place in blogdom.  You feel guilty because they did comment on your post yesterday and so you tediously read through the post and hope to find some grain or idea to help you comment and to return the favor.

This writing is an addiction with us. We love the words and we love the pictures we can paint with them. No, we cannot paint like Van Gogh or tell a story like Vermeer with light and shadow, but we are compelled to take the white screen canvas and sprinkle letters here and there hoping they form words and hoping eventually the words form sentences and perhaps, miracle of miracles, a complete thought! Keeping that train of thought on the track is another task frequently beyond our enthusiastic and spastic skill. Getting to the point of a story or valuable lesson is certainly a challenge for our energetic scribbling. You may wonder...DO we have a POINT as we scribble through the list of the mundane activities of our day?

But, you, my blog readers, are ever so forgiving, because you faithfully return. You let me splash a noun here and smear a verb there and even overuse the exclamation point. You let me clutter the canvas with superlatives.  You wonder if I have ever heard of "spell check."  You wonder why I put every other phrase in quotes and you wish the parenthesis keys on my keyboard would break.  You let me split infinitives (whatever they are) and end sentences with prepositions all in an effort to capture something that was recently remembered from my past or to describe something routine that happened that day and to try to make it significant......because you know that sometimes I get lucky and actually post something interesting and a little thought provoking.   And then we can both smile at the end of the day.  I need you in this dance of design.

(The photo is something I was motivated to do because one of my bloggers is working on textures with her photos and I remembered I had this taken this rose photo in my garden this past summer.  I have reduced the size substantially, but it still holds the texture effect, I think.  You will have to click on the photo to really get the furry texture.)

The Answer

Here is the reveal on the gifts from Indonesia.  I am sure my Asian readers had it figured out, but were too shy to test me.  You may need to click on the photo to read the answers.  I have no idea how I am going to use all the large quantity of spices.  The coconut sugar is delish...just like candy or sort of like that southern Louisiana pecan candy only crunchier and wrapped in bamboo.

Travel Presents and a Guessing Game

As promised here is a photo of some of the gifts from hubby's travel in Asia.  Above is also a picture of a lovely small ikat table runner that my husband brought me.  (I have a nice collection of ikat weavings and this will add to it.)  In the first photo are all the little things that he brought home.  Can you guess all of them?  I will email a nice sunset photo or fall photo  (your choice--or perhaps a print) to the blogger who gets it right first!

(With the new Blog editor bar it appears that there is no longer a spellcheck?   I am a terrible speller and apologize until I can figure this out!) (I will turn on comment moderation.  I just checked the comments and no one has gotten all of them yet.  I'll give a clue...Indonesia was known as the spice islands.)

Odd Neighbors

Every neighborhood has someone strange living in it. That odd person that you pretend to be nice to, but you often wonder about them. They are just a little odd. Some idiosyncratic behavior of theirs makes you keep your distance. Perhaps they wander around in loud colored shorts or perhaps they peek at you through the drapes or perhaps they spend too much time washing that fancy car or perhaps they sit on the porch and pick their nose for what seems an endless amount of time. I am sure that sometimes my neighbor has second thoughts about asking me out to lunch as she did the other day. Her husband was out running a tractor, grading the roads to the farm they lease out, and she knew I had been alone for several weeks. So she offered a lunch date followed by a healthy walk around the island.

The reason I think she must have second thoughts about my stability is that she can now see me in my yard as the trees have become sparse of leaf cover. She can see Tabor walking up and down her driveway or standing out on her deck at all hours of the day with camera in hand. She sees me stop and then bend over peering into my camera with my butt out in the air like some freak flag flying and taking a picture of the driveway, or photographing the seat of my deck chair or even taking a picture of what at times looks like my feet!

I am sure she thinks I am a very strange bird. But I keep finding beautiful things as I walk around the yard that I need to photograph. I keep trying to stop time!




Do you blame me?

This and That

What does it say about us when we post colored charts for threat levels on terrorism and Canada posts colored charts for this .

I decided that I would adjust my blog settings so that any comments that come in more than 10 days after a post would be held until I could moderate. I did this because for some reason blogger lets spam and scam through for commenting on older posts. I get comment posts weeks later and of course I don't get back fast enough to read those posts to delete. So now they sit on my dashboard hidden until I decide to delete. I have been getting quite a few lately.

I also have been feeling guilty for not commenting on some blogs. I read the entry but can't really think of anything interesting to say when everyone ahead of me has said the same thing. So I just keep my keyboard shut.

My husband's trip took him across the many, many, many islands in the Indonesian chain as well as some bordering countries. Indonesia is both Muslim and Christian but Bali is mostly a hybridized Hindu. He noticed that the island and/or villages where the majority of citizens were either Muslim or Christian remained relatively peaceful and the areas where the division was 50/50 or 40/60 were full of rancor and anger as each group fought for control of the local political system. Why does God make people so angry? I know, I know...just had to write that

While staying at my daughter's house last week a young father came by with his son to play with my grandson. As we got to talking I learned that his wife worked for the FDA and was in the office where they worked on drug approvals for humans. He said she had been there for 10 years. I asked how she liked her job and he said that during the past administration their budget had been cut substantially and they had also felt pressured to get drug approvals moving faster and she had been very miserable. Now she is happy as they have been given a decent budget and are being allowed to do their job as professional scientists without any outside interference.

I took hundreds of photos of fall scenery over the last month and recently found that my camera settings had been on a lower resolution than I usually have. I guess it was from fiddling around with settings that I don't really understand as I experimented with photos. When I was younger I could immediately figure out a camera setting and easily focus on the subject. Now with age I forget to make changes and focus...well even depending on autofocus doesn't always work! I do not like getting old, but I do love having the time to play with the camera.

Hubby brought back a number of gifts from the islands...most from him but some from friends of his. I will post on that later. They are not the usual things one brings from an overseas trip.

Lucky Friday the 13th

I do not fear Friday the 13th. Both hubby and daughter are due home today. The winds have slowed and so have the rains. The water rose to the end of the dock but not over the top. No downed trees although the yard looks like a major battle took place. Those two trees that lean across the dock on the right in the photo above are widow-makers and I wish we could get someone to cut them down. It appears that since they are so close to the water we have to get a permit. (Others, of course, were not so lucky in this storm.)

I will actually venture out on this lucky day to shop for food since I have eaten every scrap that was in the refrigerator and now need to begin cooking for two again.

Boy I hope Mother Nature doesn't tie one on again like that anytime too soon!

Rushing (T)Rains

I had just returned from two days of taking care of two preschool grandchildren last night. They had tag-teamed me and while the deafening roar of children screaming, laughing, crying, shouting was still ringing in my ears, I removed faded jeans and sweatshirt to put on the softer pajamas as I heard the roaring and banging of the weather. The wind has been pummeling this end of the bay for over 24 hours. The rain bangs intermittently on my kitchen skylight and I can see the glisten of water in every area hit by outside lights.

I had arrived in the dark and hurried out of my car in the pelting rain to open the gate. There were no trees down in my driveway, but I am too far from the dock to see how high the water is and it is too dark to see if the wind has brought down trees elsewhere in the yard. I snuggled down beneath the covers so thankful that I have shelter from the storm and can worry about damage until tomorrow.

The continuing tempest of nature woke me at 4:00 this morning and I am sitting here waiting for the sun to push a little gray light through the tropical storm clouds. I am curious to see the sudden transformation of naked trees and also to see if there is damage. This lovely summer without any storm made me complacent and I am surprised by this violent aftermath of late summer that pushed her way up here in our late fall.

The sound of rushing trains continues as I post.