Category Archives: doing it wrong

At least once a year I try to do a thorough bookshelf cleaning. I take things off the shelves, dust as needed. Remind myself what I have. I try to put stuff away that’s stacked around. I try to find things I am willing to part with. This is getting harder and harder as most of the stuff I have right now is stuff I want to keep.

I belong to the school of: we have enough stuff. If you want to bring something in, you have to take something out. Five bags to Goodwill on Friday! But not books. That was clothes and linens.

I found two books that we had unintentional duplicates of including one where I shelved both copies side by side. We have intentional duplicates too, but I’m not going to explain right now. I did put together a stack to pass along or give to the Friends of the Library.

This is the item in my collection that I’ve had the longest and never read. I went through a phase when I was a youngster where I thought I would collect and read classics. Over the years I have periodically revisited that idea, thinking I should read more classics. I sometimes manage to plow through one but more often I find that I would rather read almost anything else and give up on them. I am a simpleton. I don’t deny it.

The book says it was printed in 1972 and I was hoping it was a collectible and I could get $50 for it so I’d be motivated to get rid of it. But no such luck. I put it back on the shelf because I still might read it someday.

This photo is from last year. No snow out there now or in the forecast.

Yesterday was my birthday and the age is a secret although if you were here last year and have a grasp of basic math, I’m sure you can figure it out.

I got so much incredible birthday love this year. It was great – thank you everyone!

I celebrated my favorite way which included writing, reading, eating a nice dinner and going to the movies. The movie was Birdman and mixed reviews. (Mom, if you’re reading this, Dad would not like this movie.) We both really liked the acting and filmmaking but found the story a little uneven. I would definitely recommend to people who like challenging movies.

Starting in the fall I decided to get more serious about writing again but wasn’t really successful at that until November. The past two months have been productive for me. Which is my explanation why a bunch of other stuff has fallen away including the incredible content and spectacular artwork that you have come to expect from me. ahem.

I’m just going to keep plodding around, doing whatever I manage to do and we’ll see how it all works out. I still have one short story floating out in the world and hopefully you’ll get to see it soon.

Happy New Year.

For some stupid reason I decided to do xmas cards this year. I ordered them over 2 weeks ago and they sat here for a while. Then I did a few here and a few there. Then I lost interest again. Then I did a bunch and figured it was good enough. Then Bob used up all the rest.

Then we realized we’d left out some people so I bought some more. Then I couldn’t remember who I’d already sent them to.

So if you know us you can expect between 0 and 2 xmas cards from Pam and Bob.

I have had no concept of the date all week and was surprised to learn that tomorrow is xmas eve. I have one thing left to wrap, otherwise I’m ready.

I’ve only had time to do a couple of Photoshop tutorials this week. Learning composite images.

In the lessons the photos are always easy like replacing a photo of just sky and clouds into a photo that’s plain sky and a yellow flower. I was trying to do some funny ones but they were too complex so we only have these two sad ones. Although I think the cat is pretty funny.

This morning my spouse was stomping around the house. “Did you lose something?” I asked. “My pants,” he said.

He was wearing pants at the time so I wasn’t completely clear what the problem was at first although I guessed he couldn’t find his pants from the night before and needed his wallet and keys that were in the pockets. This was correct.

I was waiting in the car because we we were running errands and he finally joined me.

Turns out last night he couldn’t find his tote bag with his iPad because it was in the back seat instead of the trunk. But then he finally found it in the back seat and apparently put down the pants he was carrying in order to bring his iPad in the house.

I can’t wait until we get really old and dotty.

I did this last night in a big hurry. This morning when I looked at it I realized I forgot the stem when I worked on this photo so it looks like the flower is randomly floating in space. Enjoy!

I’ve been doing lots of things but I couldn’t tell you what they are. Well, I could but, who cares?

Today it wasn’t raining so I did some more clean up in the backyard. I scooped up a large bag of animal poop. A lot of it was good sized so it’s a dog or something bigger.

That last bit is a joke because what would be bigger in my yard? There is one corner where I think the poop is raccoon but today’s poop was mostly dog. Where is this dog (dogs?) coming from? It’s a mystery I’d love to solve but I can’t bear to waste any time on it.

Good news: Lufthansa paid up. Or rather, refunded my money. Meanwhile, I found out that Verizon was still charging us for the global data plan we added for Montreal. When they insisted over and over that it only would be for one month. I should have looked at the bill more closely. They refunded me $14 for 3 months worth of screwage. We’re going to call it good. How much is my time an energy worth.

When I sat down I had something worthwhile to talk about but it’s gone from my mind and I have chores to do.

Frog killed in road by car.

I’ve had an idea for a CSI post forever but I always wanted to wait until I had time to do it right. Forget it. I’m just going to do it really half-assed like everything else around here.

You get what you pay for.

The first time I ever watched an episode of Crime Scene Investigation was in 2005 when Quentin Tarantino directed an episode. This was a Las Vegas one. It has never been one of my regular shows but every season I watch at least a couple of episodes. I’ve seen a few of the New York ones and I watched one Miami one time and thought it was comically wretched. The Internet says Miami was on for 10 seasons so apparently a lot of people disagreed with me.

The thing that fascinates me about this show is I don’t think it’s very good, but it’s very satisfying. A problem is introduced at the beginning and by the end it is solved, generally without a lot of surprise or drama. The character emotions remain flat. They rarely run into major obstacles. Problems are solved often by tedious procedure, which doesn’t bother us because we just see the time elapse. Or else a miraculous piece of technology fills in the critical data. Or else some person comes forward with the exact piece of information they need.

I would love to watch this show with a real police detective sometime because I know nothing about police work but it’s hard to believe some of this stuff isn’t far-fetched. It’s a giant team of people who are rigorously competent and cooperative. There is nothing they can’t figure out. Like they find a teeny tiny carpet fiber and they put it into a machine that tells them where and when it was manufactured which will somehow lead to a list of people in possession of the carpet fiber.

Or there will be an anonymous phone call but a machine will be able to enhance the background sounds and via some other amazingly unearthed tidbit they can triangulate the location where the phone call was made and then police cars can zoom across town in minutes (no traffic in crime shows!) to rescue the orphans who were minutes from death. I guess I’m veering away from just CSI to any crime shows. I will admit to watching other crime shows.

Another one of my favorites was when a character was exposed to some terrible virus but another person on the team was able to contact a government agency to get one of the only 3 doses of medication in the country speed delivered to CSI that same day.

Have you ever even gotten a government official on the phone, much less to do anything, that fast?

I also love that due to the nature of the show they have to say all sorts of ridiculous things. Like a supporting character will have to go to the lead, who is the detective and explain that they ran the partial license plate that turned up three trucks that match the description of the getaway vehicle. Then the detective says: Good work, go track those down.

It would be like if I went to colleague and said: I found a Supreme Court case that is totally relevant to the work we’re doing. And he said: Read it and tell me what it says.

Or on CSI they explain the fancy process: “We’re painting the parachute with an porko-phenbolical solution,” Then some supporting detective will do ah-ha face and say, “Which when draped on the transpectrometer will show the pattern of the poison used on our victim!” Then they will smile and high-five at their cleverness.

I’m making fun of these shows but going back to what I said at the beginning, they are a nice escape because by the end the problem is solved. And you can jump in any time because while there is a tiny bit of ongoing story involving the main characters, you don’t need to keep up with it.