If you aren't yet excited enough about seeing the "The Fellowship of the Ring" movie when it comes out, read this preview review. You will be.
posted:6:31 PM | link |

Although there ARE some large, but short trees dotting the hillsides here and there, and occasionally gathering in herds, most of the hills around here at this time of year look mighty.... washed, or scrubbed clean of scrub, as it were. *grin* Particularly when the summer is old and the rains haven't come yet, the barrenness is almost shocking in the bright sun.

I call this photo "blue and gold"....

To make up for the lack of links here lately, here's a story about glow in the dark salmon. I can just see the marketing on them now: "Just slap a salmon on the nightstand to make an ideal night light for your child!" heh heh.
posted:10:19 AM | link |

Yesterday I took a fresh look at the idea of what has meaning for me. I get rather frustrated and annoyed if I'm engaged in an activity that is busy work without any kind of personal relevance. The funny part is that I've been lamenting the LACK of meaning and direction in certain parts of my life, but all I had to do was flip it over. Realizing I didn't have meaning, gave me a purpose to look for it! *grin* I suppose I could have sat on my ass for a while longer complaining, but that was getting boring too - heh heh.

I love creating beautiful things - pulling together elements to create a new, harmonious whole, whether it's an art project or a bunch of friends just hanging out. Maybe it's the Libra in me - LOL. It's not just the act of, say, painting that's fun, but the process I undergo while I'm moving that paintbrush, for instance. And putting together NEW elements is really exciting and kinda 'living on the edge' of something I haven't done before. An example - I can sew reasonably well, although I haven't really done many clothes at all, and certainly not recently. The last thing I really sewed had been some square pillows for my futon, which I haven't had in five years - LOL. But I was inspired to get this fabric and ended up sewing up a 'commoner's vest' for John - and adding gold trim and brass eyelets and black cord and it came out looking SO cool. I wouldn't want to just say "I'm a writer." or "I'm a painter." because that seems to limit me to form. Hmmm - maybe I can say, "I'm a creator/harmonizer" - that shouldn't confuse anyone, eh? *grin* Anyway - those are my thoughts du jour.
posted:8:31 AM | link |

There's nothing quite like the smell of Elmer's Glue to take me back to days of sitting at my mom's kitchen table. She'd save up greeting cards from all year, especially Christmas, and then let us cut them up and glue them together in collages. (Later on, we'd take the Christmas cards, cut out the cool images, punch a hole in one end, thread it with yarn and then use them as tags on gifts. But that wasn't a glue memory - LOL - But anyway, back to the glue - *grin* - John's constructing a new kind of solar oven right now and is gluing aluminum foil to cardboard, which is what brought this up.) In elementary school, kids used to smear Elmer's glue all over one of their hands, let it dry, and then peel it off like a mold. I never did it myself, having mortal fear of running out of time while still having wet glue on my hand and then having to explain to the teacher that I had to go to the bathroom while trying not to 'tip my hand' - heh heh. That's all for now - must go continue to sniff glue.... ;-)
posted:9:53 AM | link |

Hey tom, I just wanted to applaud the recent photos you have up on your site - wow! You are quite the artiste! :-)
posted:9:11 AM | link |

John and I were driving home last night around dusk. About a half mile from our gate, I glanced to the right, down into the dry riverbed there. I yelled and stopped the car as fast as I could - there was a medium to large dark wild boar jogging along the rocks! I backed up a little ways so we could see more of it, but then it knew we saw it and it ran off more quickly. It was so cool though - I haven't gotten a good look at a boar since that year we had about 30 of them coming down into the live-oak groves a few years ago to eat all the fallen acorns. (They LOVE acorns.) You can imagine all the snorting and squealing we heard then - it was unreal.
posted:8:11 AM | link |

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.
-- Dave Barry
posted:8:33 AM | link |

I know that 'they' say that you should just be the person you want to be NOW and not wait for any particular thing to happen. This is good advice. I also know that I haven't necessarily been doing that, but I wasn't noticing. I started thinking about the kind of person I wanted to be, what kind of life I wanted to have, and how I wanted to allocate my time and realized I wasn't giving these items priority at all, rather I was awaiting certain circumstances to set these things in motion. Ironically, the desired circumstances were probably waiting for me instead. ;-)
posted:7:31 AM | link |