Me, before my vacation
I just returned home tonight from a lovely four day stay with my dear dear friend Dori, in Montreal. I had so much fun!
How much fun did I have, you ask?
I had so much fun, I didn’t even miss the internet!
HA! Take that, internet!
Now I need sleep. Nighty-night.
I thought it was interesting that the fallen petals look like pale pink feathers.
I’ll start with an update on Nosehair. I spoke to Nemesis today! He was standing in the street, looking back and forth between Nosehair and another tree right across the street. I bucked up all my courage and asked Nemesis, “Are you going to cut down another one?”
“Thinking about it,” he replied with an evil twinkle in his eye.
“Who’s cutting them down?” I asked.
“The City,” he replied, and with that he leapt into his truck and sped away, no doubt to tell “The City” that someone is on to them.
Stay tuned for further updates.
OH, my title – Is it Ironic? Or Are They Just Drumming Up Business?
You tell me: I came close to being run over by a hearse today. *raises one eyebrow*
And totally unrelated to anything else:
Apple Blossoms!
Just a quick update today for those of you who are following my sad little story. I was standing with my back to Nosehair when I took these pictures today so he wouldn’t see the final moments of his neighbour standing tall (though I think he could still see over my head).
You can see the large parts of the trunk falling. While compared to the news of the world this is really nothing, I find it sad when these old trees come down. We’ve lost a few in the last year. Hopefully Nosehair won’t be next.
Kira suggested yesterday that Charles might send over some of his Windemere characters to help out with Nosehair’s cause, to avoid becoming one of my newspapers. Charles?
I feel like Snow White around here sometimes, minus the seven little miners.
Spring cleaning, for me, is not a companionless task. See the debris all over my deck? The blue jays sat on the edge of my roof yesterday and flung it from my eavestroughs, scrounging for insects in amongst the leftover leaves from the fall.
This morning I caught this mangy little guy nibbling on the scraps.
Now all I need is a nice long sleep…
I see faces in all kinds of places. This one is pretty easy to see:
Nice face
I took this picture a little over a month ago while delivering papers, but it never seemed interesting enough to post.
Here’s another I took the same day:
Death mask?
To me this one has more of a death mask feel to it. Do you see it? Maybe it’s just my crazy imagination.
And speaking of crazy imaginations…
I wonder if this first tree is unhappy about its new protrusion on its proboscis:
big tree zit
Maybe to a tree this is bling. I think I’d want to sneeze.
There are so many things I want to know! The minutiae of details I’d like to put into my stories require a vast amount of research. While I enjoy doing most research, it’s not all easy. For instance, I’d dearly love to know enough about horticulture so that I don’t have to search for pictures in order to name the flora I can so easily envision.
Like this:
I’ve been living with this hedge for three and half years and do I know what it is? Not a clue.
I’m good with researching things like diseases, psychology, historical eras and objects, sexuality, (okay, that one’s fun), culture, geography – all kinds of things. But when it comes to botany…
It’s just real purdy.
(I did just look up the difference between horticulture and botany.)
What do you have a hard time researching?
I had help today! 😀
Slave… I mean Alex
He even took some pictures for me!
His favourite
But the real adventure didn’t start until we came across the lady playing catch with her unleashed dog.
Me: (holding Alex by both hands as the dog is running towards us) He’s afraid of dogs.
Lady: Oh, he’s friendly.
Me: But he’s afraid of dogs.
Bitch: (looking around me at Alex who is straining to see where the dog went) Does he want to pet him?
Me: (hanging on to Alex for dear life so he doesn’t run into traffic) No, he’s afraid of dogs.
Psycho bitch: But he’s smiling…
Me: (in my head) Hey fuckflap! Have you ever considered how shitty you would feel if a kid got run over by a car because of your friendly fucking dog that you won’t restrain because you obviously know my son better than I do? Wake the fuck up and listen to me! HE’S AFRAID OF FUCKING DOGS!!!
In reality I said nothing because the dog had run off again. I should have said something.
In each of us the idea of it is cradled, warm and glowing. It’s something we wish for, something we strive for, something we hope to behold and to create. For each of us there is a singular nuance that we recognize and when we see it, or hear it, touch it, taste it or even smell it we know. It lights up a part of our brain like nothing else can.
It is beauty.
It moves us, it inspires us. It comes in so many forms. I remember once, I had taken an overnight flight from England back home so I had been up all day the day before and because of the time change and having to look after my kids… let’s just say I was exhausted. In this state, I was in the car for some reason and the song ‘Comfortably Numb’ came on the radio. I sat and listened to the entire thing. It wasn’t until the guitar solo at the end when I started to bawl my eyes out, positive that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life. …at least since I saw Pink Floyd live so many years before that.
How do you describe something that, to you, is so beautiful that it makes you cry? By giving it life. Like the gritty, piercing of David Gilmour’s guitar crawling up the back of my neck and wrapping me in a warm blanket of pure, ear-splitting devastation.
By giving an inanimate object a soul we can not only describe what we see but how it makes us feel.
Sakura
I see a delicate cherry blossom, known only to spring. It signifies both the brilliance and the swiftness of life and all its glory, for it comes and goes, so very quickly.
Beauty can be defined in so many different ways. For some of us it is in a face, in the sound of children’s laughter. For some it is home and the aroma of freshly baked cookies or the comfort of a roaring fire on a cold winter night. For some it is the exquisite line, where pain and ecstasy meet – the drop of blood, the single tear shed for love.
Beauty is one of only many things that move us, that make us want to write or to articulate our emotions in other ways. To be able to elicit in others the emotion that comes from our deepest most precious place where we know things such as beauty is a gift. It’s one that I hope to practice and somehow, perfect.
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