Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
I thought today I’d show you a few photographs I took during my travels yesterday. Even though it’s winter and freezing cold with snow piled just about everywhere, I needed to get away from the house for a few hours. I reverted to my old habits, took my camera, and began my search for some old cemeteries.
“A cold and wintery resting place.”
One of the things I like best about living in New England is the number of ancient cemeteries that are scattered throughout almost every community. It seems that every large family back in the 1600’s that owned property maintained a private cemetery for their family members. Almost all of them have survived but most are difficult to visit since they’re away from public roads and on private property.
“This shows how old the cemetery really is. These folks were buried here before those trees existed.”
I became quite the cemetery visitor when I lived in southern Massachusetts back in the 1980s. My ex-wife and I owned a small gift shop and as part of that business I painted landscapes of local cemeteries and sold them in the shop. For a time I could be found creeping around the older of the cemeteries with a supply of T-shirts to stretch over tombstones to do gravestone rubbings. A great many people thought the idea of owning a T-shirt with their family name on it was edgy and cool. They sold like hot cakes. On one occasion I was visited by the local police in a cemetery where they questioned me as to my activities. Fortunately I was able to explain things to them and avoided arrest. Within a week I had supplied one of those officers with his own personalized shirt and was never bothered again.
“The day was too bright and made the names difficult to capture.”
I just love cemeteries, the older the better. It’s a quiet and serene place to spend a hour relaxing and reading old epithets. Yesterday I found a few within a short drive from my home that were accessible and not covered in snow.
“I tweaked this photo with software but still couldn’t get the names readable.”
I can’t wait for the return of Spring and Summer weather so I can search out a few more of the isolated graveyards and add their photo’s to my collection.
There was a time time in my life when I was the ultimate night person. I slept all day and worked and played all night. After work I’d visit a variety of clubs and bars returning home in the wee hours of the morning. It was a great time in my life because everyone knows the best shit happens after dark in the middle of the night.
I worked those hours for more than five years. My job required visits to massage parlors (not officially as a patron), strip joints (not officially as a paying customer), and even the occasional brothel (again, not as a paying customer). I became educated very quickly to the unbelievable quantity of nightlife activities, how to enjoy them, and even more important, how to survive them.
The more things change the more they remain the same. All these years later I’m discovering a whole new word of nightlife here in Maine that I’ve been totally unaware of. We live in what could be called a rural area. Our home is adjacent to a small river and a large forest of pines. We live far enough out that without assistance from technology (range extender) we can’t receive cell phone signals and are not registering on most GPS devices. It’s like living in Never-Never Land. That being said, we love it. We thought that “wildlife” in this area was mostly confined to the Portland metro area and was low key and had a minimum of crime to deal with. How little we really knew.
Last night we had an unusual snow fall. It snowed for no more than twenty minutes and then stopped completely. There was just enough snow to cover everything in a pristine white sheet. We went to bed after the snow fall stopped and remarked to each other about how white and smooth the back yard seemed with the new snow cover. There wasn’t a mark of any kind on that snow.
We awoke this morning and walked to the window and were shocked at what we saw. It appears that our backyard is the night club for most of the “wildlife” in this area. These pictures will give you some idea of the night time traffic taking place in our back yard.
We live our lives giving little or no thought to the “life” swirling around us every day and night. I saw tracks of coyotes, deer, chipmunks, squirrels, one lonely turkey, a big fat skunk, and a trail left by that sneaky cat belonging to our neighbors. I’m not surprised too often but this was amazing. I guess that one day warming trend we were blessed with brought everyone out to celebrate.
I think I may have to pay a little more attention to what’s going on around me. With a good lens and a small night light I might just be able to get some really interesting photographs.
Well the weekend has passed without much of interest to talk about. I have to tell you though that taking Sundays off from my life is something I recommend highly for anyone to try. No exercising, no blogging and no dieting. As always I remind you that Sunday as a day of rest for me is not a religious leftover from my childhood. It just happens to fit into my strangely scheduled current lifestyle.
We had another eight inches of snow through the night which meant I was to spend at least a half hour with my favorite motorized friend, the snowblower. The snow was wet and heavy and a real pain in the ass to deal with. I did it quickly so my better-half could access the outside world and then I returned to my day-off. I snapped a few pictures around the house of this storm because the snow was sticking to everything and made for some interesting photos.
The weather has warmed a little which brings out the visiting birds in large numbers. We feed them regularly but in frigid weather they become scarce. Since we live in a forested area we have three or four generations of woodpeckers that stay with us all winter. We place suet out for them because they’re the most successful in pecking it apart when it’s frozen.
They’ve been flying in and out in shifts so often they’re averaging one suet container a week. It apparently keeps them healthy and makes living through the winter months a little easier.
I then decided to leave the warm bosom of my house to explore the neighboring area for a few photo’s of the snow scenes. Here are three that should give you a better idea about what Maine is like in winter.
It’s now Monday morning and I’m back on the treadmill for a mile or two of good heath and exhaustion. The better-half’s loving the new slimmer me but I think it’s just her way of motivating me a little more. Either way it’s a win/win.
Well, the New Year is upon us and all the partying is hopefully over. I wish I had a dollar for every celebrator who made the infamous Walk of Shame is the last two days. I’d be stinking rich I think.
I’m told that now is the time for reflection on the past year both good and bad. It’s supposed to give us a better perspective on things and to help us improve in 2014. I honestly think that’s nonsense but for laughs I continue to go along.
Here’s a quick recap of my last three months. Please don’t get overly excited you might just hurt yourself. As we get into the December remembrances I’ve added a few photo’s to help you understand.
OCTOBER
Grandson’s Birthday Party
One Year Blog Anniversary
A Broken Leg
NOVEMBER
Way Too many Doctor’s Visits
Thanksgiving
Sister’s Birthday
God Daughter’s Birthday
DECEMBER
Better-Half’s Mother’s Birthday
SNOW
ICE
More Doctors Appointments
More SNOW
More ICE
Christmas Eve Dinner
Much More SNOW
ICE Storm
Christmas
Much Much More Effing SNOW
Effing Black ICE
New Years Eve
SNOW
New Years Day
MORE SNOW
What have I learned from all of this? One thing immediately comes to mind . . . SPEND THE FREAKING WINTER IN FLORIDA ! ! !
One last photograph for your enjoyment. I took this from my car so it’s not as sharp as I’d like but this guy was hauling ass at the time. One of the last few remaining survivors from the Great Thanksgiving Day Turkey Massacre of 2013. Now you know why he’s running so fast.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t like all the damn snow either.
We’ve spent most of the last two months preparing for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Since it was the first holiday season where the grandson was aware of what was going on, we went a little overboard with gifts and preparations.
On top of all of that my fiasco with this broken leg made everything that much more difficult and put more pressure on my better-half. We survived the insanity we created but just barely. I’m really hoping that next year we can learn from our mistakes and move forward just a little bit smarter. It’s hard not getting caught up in the excitement caused by having a young child in the mix because the holidays are more for him than the rest of us.
The let down with Christmas being over is unbelievable. The better-half has fallen into a post Christmas comma. She’s been sleeping for most of the day today just trying to rest and regain some normalcy. I haven’t done much better myself. I’m slowly recovering but I’m like a effing zombie today. I’m drinking a lot of coffee because my energy level is non-existent and all of my motivation to do anything else has evaporated.
We have New Year’s coming soon and thank God we don’t celebrate that holiday like these others. Two of our Christmas guests are now enroute to the Big Apple for the ultimate Times Square New Year’s Eve experience. They must be out of there freaking minds. My better half and I both get claustrophobic in a room with no more than 10 people, I can’t imagine rubbing elbows with millions of people in Times Square. That would scare the bejesus out of us both.
I’m hoping that our quiet time will continue for at least two more days where we can kick back, relax and enjoy the snowy scenery. I haven’t mentioned but we received another 4 1/2 inches of snow over the last 24 hours. It’s one of the times every winter that I enjoy the most, having a cover of fresh white snow over all the slush and dirt. These pictures were taken earlier this morning and you can see what I’m talking about.
It’s about time for me to put this computer to bed so I can get to what I’m really thinking about doing today, a long, warm and quiet nap. I’ll worry about New Year’s when it gets here.
NO MORE SHOPPING DAYS – HOORAY!
Well, another Christmas has come and gone. It’s late and the last of the family and friends have headed home. The day started early with my better-hale preparing some of her family traditions for Christmas morning. She makes a batch of cinnamon buns covered with lots of sugary icing. That and a large cup of hot coffee will definitely get your heart started. The grandson and his mom and dad arrived in late morning requiring the platter of shrimp to be unveiled and devoured. We all gathered in the living room around the tree for a time chit-chatting about this and that. It was obvious to me that everyone was just going through the motions until they could dig into the pile and open their gifts.
“The Aftermath”
As you can see an hour later and the room looked like Santa had shown up and then exploded. It took almost as long to clean up the debris as it did shopping to buy the stuff in the first place. The cat and grandson had a great time rummaging through the piles of wrapping paper and boxes seemingly more interested in that stuff than the gifts themselves. Kids!!!! Cats!!!!
Another hour has passed and everyone appears thrilled with their gifts so we snack a little more waiting for the next group to arrive. Our two visitors from northern Maine have finally arrived with tales of the previous day’s ice storm and the fact that most people up north are without electricity. It’s one of the hazards of living in Maine and those storms can be brutal. The last time we had one here we were without power for almost a week and a half. It’s difficult to sleep in a cold bed wearing a parka, gloves, and a tassel hat. It’s hard but we did it. The pictures taken during that storm are locked away where no one can seem them. We looked god awful.
After our new visitors had a beer and a few snacks the bowling tournament on the X-box began. I was able to avoid all of that because of my leg injury so I was the official photographer. Everyone had a ball with my better-half taking home the winners trophy.
Then it was my turn to cook and to fed the hoard with a decent meal. A honey-baked ham, rice, Brussels sprouts, and corn took care of everyone’s hunger pangs. It was followed later by delicious apple and pumpkin pies. Then after digesting for a while it was back to the X-box for a few rounds of darts which I also avoided by using “cleaning up the kitchen” as my excuse.
After loading up the cars they were off for the night leaving us at least two days of clean up. All in all a successful holiday gathering with a fun group of people. The better-half is scheduled for work at 5:00am and her son is flying out at 9:00am. Unfortunately none of us will be getting enough sleep tonight and we should be zombies all day tomorrow.
I hope your day was as enjoyable as ours. Merry Christmas!
Well the holiday is rushing towards us and we’re down to the last week of preparations. The weather here in Maine is certainly doing it’s part this year. It’s the eighteenth of December and we have two and a half feet of snow on the ground. It’ll be nice to have an old style white Christmas with the trees sagging low with snow and everything feeling clean and new. It also makes for some beautiful photography as you can see.
My leg is healing nicely but it appears I’ll need more time to get it back into shape. I feel a little stupid hopping around with that Walter Brennan limp but what can I do. It’s just nice to be able to walk around the house, drive my car, and to get out and do a little Christmas shopping.
I hate to admit just how much I miss being able to use those handy electric shopping carts to do my shopping. People are nicer to you, they get out of the way, and even let you get ahead of them in line at the register. I’m a bit spoiled I guess. I’ve come up with a solution for that problem though. I’m going to start carrying the air cast and crutches in my car. I’ll arrive at Walmart, put on the boot, grab the crutches and make my way inside to claim my cart. That’s what I call a real emergency kit. My luck, I’ll get caught doing it the first time.
I have a few more stocking stuffers to buy this week and my holiday prep will be complete. Thank God for Amazon who made my Christmas so much easier to deal with this year. Shop, click, and bing, bang, boom . . . it arrives at your house in two days. Next year I may attempt to make it a total Amazon holiday. I’ll first sign up for Amazon Prime which for $79.00 gives me free shipping on all purchases for a year. Order anything and everything I need for the holidays, have it nicely wrapped, and shipped with a card to relatives and friends anywhere on the planet. It’s called a "one click" holiday season.
My better-half has been like a crazy person for the last few weeks but she appears to have accomplished all of her tasks and is calming down a little. The house is just about ready for guests and family and enough beer has been purchased to keep her in that sentimental mindset which help’s her enjoy the holidays. She’s worked very hard this year to get everything done and ready without my help and it’s looking terrific.
She and her daughter spent a good part of the day yesterday doing something they both love. Manicures and pedicures all around. I gave my better-half a gift certificate for two of each a few weeks ago for her birthday. I knew it would come in handy during "crazy week". They were pampered and lotioned until they had no choice but to be happy and smiling. There’s nothing like a good looking guy rubbing and scrubbing your feet and waiting on you hand-and-foot. One of these days I might be forced to give it a try myself but with a good looking woman.
SIX MORE SHOPPING DAYS LEFT
I grew up during the post WW II era period and I remember seeing Kilroy graffiti many times as a kid and later after my enlistment in the Army. I never knew the history behind it and never felt the need to find out. There was even a time or two when I painted that logo on a wall while stationed on bases in the US and even after my assignment to Korea I managed to leave Kilroy here and there. I’m sure many of you have seen Kilroy over the years and now it’s time to tell the whole story. Thanks to my friend Park from Kansas City who supplied much of this information.
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You can find his likeness engraved in stone in the National War Memorial in Washington , DC at the rear of a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this brings back memories. For us younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is a part of our American history. Anyone born in 1913 to about 1950, is familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known but everybody seemed to get into it. So who was Kilroy?
In 1946 (the year I as born) the American Transit Association, through its radio program, "Speak to America ," sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article. Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax , Massachusetts , had evidence of his identity.
‘Kilroy’ was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, MA . His job was to check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework pay scale and got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn’t be counted twice. When Kilroy went off duty, some larcenous riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through again and count the rivets for a second time, resulting in double pay for those cheating riveters.
One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on. The many tight spaces he was required to crawl into didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected but added ‘KILROY WAS HERE’ in king-sized letters next to the check. He eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message.
Once he did that, the cheating riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks. Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint but with the war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection "trademark" was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships that the yard produced.
His message apparently rang a bell with our servicemen because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific.
Before war’s end, "Kilroy" had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo . To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had "been there first." As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.
Kilroy became the U.S. super- G I who had always "already been" wherever GI’s went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest , the Statue of Liberty , the underside of the Arc de Triumphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon.
As the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!
In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam conference. Its’ first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"
To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy yard in Halifax , Massachusetts .
And The Tradition Continues…
EVEN Outside Osama Bin Laden’s House!!!
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There you have it. Now you know.
I’ll begin celebrating today after posting this blog entry. When I retired the Anti-Stupidity Blog one year ago I challenged myself to start a new blog and to write for one year, 365 posts, without missing a day and not using graphics, catchy and cutesy headlines or photographs. It sounded easy at the time but it was anything but.
I needed a lot of willpower but after the first six months my reserve of motivation was almost exhausted. I worked through it and today that challenge and goal have been met.
I’ll start fresh on October 27th (tomorrow) with an better outlook and a return to what some consider normalcy in blogging. I’ll use the occasional photograph or two in the future but not gratuitously. The majority of these photo’s will be those I’ve taken myself. I’ll be adding a word or two in addition to the date to indicate the general content of each post. Since I’ve become somewhat addicted to this style of posting it will continue this way for the foreseeable future.
I’m looking forward to the next year and I hope you are as well. Tomorrow will be the start of something a little different but the endless quantities of totally useless information will continue. The trivia quizzes will return and number of new twists can be expected there. I’ll continue to comment on celebrities and their unusual activities, other inappropriate humor, and as many dirty and filthy limericks as I can find or create. I’ll do the occasional book review and anything else that catches my fancy.
The world is my oyster and I’ll keep searching for those proverbial pearls of wisdom to pass on to you. Onward and Upward!
I’m sleeping in a little today after the festivities of last night when our favorite and only grandson celebrated his first birthday. It wasn’t a huge party just a small group of family members to take a lot of photographs, eat some cake, and watch our newest member take his first steps into the world.
I haven’t had the pleasure of attending birthday parties such as this for a very long time. As I recall the last time was decades ago when my niece and nephew were new to the world. Since his mother is a believer in traditional values the party was just as you might expect. The star of the night was in fine form and hamming it up with everyone as soon as they arrived. He was all smiles and attitude and I felt like he knew it was a special occasion of some sort but wasn’t quite sure what it was. He knew he was receiving a lot of extra attention and really enjoyed himself.
Both of his grandmothers were there to coo over him as they’re supposed to do and he ate it up as usual. All of the family pets were involved (2 dogs and 2 cats) and were running around, having a great time, and enjoying the excitement like everyone else.
Then it was time for gifts as we sat around and watched him unwrap a gift, play with it for a moment, and then go for the wrapping paper. He enjoyed the stupid paper as much as the gifts. He was quite taken by a huge bag of foam blocks that he immediately dove into and began to play with. He’s either going to be some sort of engineer or possibly a Lego salesman. We’ll just have to wait and see.
The highlight of the night for me was the cake presentation. His Mom baked him a small green cake that he was expected to demolish and OMG did he ever. In one short minute the cake was man-handled, smashed, and smeared over anyone daring to get too close. Once he realized he could destroy it, he did so. His face, hands, arms, eyes, were covered as he shoveled it into his mouth with both hands. He was also nice enough to feed a good portion to the two dogs who were hovering around waiting for some. He was a real mess and I’ve saved plenty of photo’s to prove it. I’m looking forward to the day a few years down the road when I can show them to him.
He finally was dumped unceremoniously into the bathtub and scrubbed clean by an assortment of volunteers. He was dressed in his new fancy PJ’s and settled in for his final bottle of milk for the day. All in all quite a successful first birthday party. I hope the rest of them as just as festive and filled with people who love him.
What more can a person ask.
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