Ungrateful Guest

Dorothy Parket was once a guest at San Simeon, the treasure filled palace of William Randolph Hearst. Miss Parker was observed making love to one of the other guests, and was asked to leave.
Miss Parker was amazed. Mr. Hearst was openly staying with his mistress, Marion Davies, and there was much drinking and "adult activity" in evidence. She was also impressed by the multitude of art treasures on vulgar display. Finally, she expressed herself with a poem.
"Upon my honor
I saw the Madonna
In a niche By the door
Of a well known whore
And a prominent son of a bitch"
Miss Parker once was going to have dinner in New York with Tallulah Bankhead, Montgomery Clift, and Truman Capote. The evening never got past the cocktail hour.
Resume
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker 1926

details

So much for restraint. Today is the day to be totally self indulgent, and describe a day in the life in excruciating detail.
6am The alarm goes off. I turn it off and roll over in bed.
830 am I get out of bed. I am up in time to see my brother on his way to church.
I am on the internet by now, and feeling like day old feces. Yesterday was a blah day...I got some laundry done, ripped a few cd's while watching "Austin Powers", took a nap, had a glorious bike ride, and made an inflammatory comment at a jesus worship blog.
While this may count as a good day (I did not get thumped on the head), there were disappointments. My new cd/mp3 player has its limits when playing mp3's...it apparently will only play some of the tracks on a mp3_data_cd. While it is a good idea to back up my music files on a cd, I apparently will still need to make music cd's to listen to the tracks. The music that I listened to was disappointing. There is a bunch of jimi hendrix tracks that I downloaded a couple of weeks ago, and listening to them, I found them in sore need of a commercial minded editor.
So, I am on the internet, and I go to Purgatorio, and find a feature on fractals. I see an image that catches my fancy, and decide to produce a sticker picture of it.
Now, there are several steps to this process, and sometimes the process is more fun than the actual production. I made a "setup" file, which consists of the image in a box with x_y coordinates along the edges. Production wise (oxymoron alert), this is a good move, as it will enable me to see where the parts of the image are on the page. I then made a template for the actual image.
Templates are not female temples, although there is a certain similarity. After a spell of work, and a pot of coffee (I had oatmeal for breakfast), the image was ready to begin work on.
All this time, I am listening to "wrecking ball" by emmylou harris. The woman is a goddess. Also, she does not dye her hair, and looks great with grey. Old fogeys arise!!!
930 am- If I am going to work in the yard today, I need to begin now, before it gets too hot. There are two chores staring at me today...mow the grass, and move the rocks out of the driveway.
So I go out, and see that the gutters need cleaning out. I go up on the roof and pull the ...matter...out of the gutters. This stuff is not really leaves; it is mainly deteriorating flower petals and other detritus from the poplar and sweetgum trees. I throw it on the lawn, where it will feed the ...lawn (it is primarily weeds mowed close to the ground)
After I get through with the gutters, I decide that the rocks can wait until later to be put up. I still don’t know what to do with them...the stone circle doesn’t have room for many more, and the other storage places are filling up. Could it be that I need to DO SOMETHING with all these rocks?
1030 am.... I call Robert. I have been talking to him on sunday morning for a few years now, and the recreational chatter does me good. I tell him about a nature preserve I have found near buckhead, and we make tentative plans to go explore it, along with ooze, the blind chowdog.
11am.... I take some pictures to illustrate this essay. There are several things to note.
The grass seed I planted earlier this year is growing faster than the weeds, and does not fit in. This was a bad move.
There is poison ivy in the yard.
The rocks are not going to go anywhere until I move them. Nor will the dogs next door quit barking. It is a sunday morning all over...the jesus worshippers are making noise about jesus, and the dogs won’t quit barking.
The garden is going nicely. The zucchini plant has some nice blossoms, the beans and tomatoes are going well, and I haven’t found any babies under the cabbage plants.
01:37:32 PM
I soak in the bathtub for a while, get out and dressed, and put a cd on the stereo (Paper Moon by Nick Drake). As soon as the music starts, and I walk over to turn the volume down, the phone rings. It is Robert, and I agree to meet him and ooze at the caribou parking lot at 215. We are going to the nature preserve.
5:37:13 PM
So I get to caribou and wait. After a while, I look in the parking lot and robert is there.
The nature preserve was great. The trail wasn’t very long, but there is a mysterious wall at the end of it, as well as a set of steps. The steps were recently built and do not look like they will survive many hard rainfalls.
There is another part to the preserve at the end of a couple of roads. We went there, but Robert didn’t want to go back in there while wearing short pants. I went back to both parts with my camera on the way home. The second part was pretty, but full of bugs and nothing really special.
5/22/2006
6:59:42 PM
The rest of the day was nothing special. I bought a rack for dishes to dry on, and got my brother to use it without much argument, and he even said thank you later.
I did go for another bike ride before it got dark. This is the best time of year to ride, after dinner and when the heat has subsided, but while it is still light outside. Daylight savings time is a great innovation. This area is so pretty, I was thinking I was riding through a resort on saturday.
Of course, I had to work today. I have agreed to drive while the store is finding another driver, and that is mostly what I did today. As I said, I hope they find another driver soon, and have a position for me when I get back inside.
5/22/2006 8:15 PM
I thought I would go to bed early tonight, but I decided to post this feature. I picked out some pictures that I took Sunday, and reduced and saved them so I could post them.
When I post a lot of pictures, there is a certain amount of waiting involved while the things download. To pass the time, I put a movie on the VCR. Saturday, while I was ripping cd’s, it was “Austin powers”. Tonight, while I am trying to download pictures, it is “the Texas chainsaw massacre” The vampire hitchhiker just cut the cripple, and I think that is the funniest thing I have seen since….oh I will think of something.
And, blogger is not working, so I will have to post this thing without pictures. The horror.

Miss McKenzie's Room

Oftentimes, you will hear people say, “ I always remember where I was when I heard about ______.
This classroom is where I was on November 22, 1963. We had been in the cafetorium, working on our “skit” for an assembly. Some of the kids were acting up…it was Friday afternoon, and we were ready for the weekend. We were hustled back into the class by Miss McKenzie, who told us that President Kennedy had been shot during a parade in Dallas Texas.
The building in front today houses the air conditioning. In 1963, we opened the windows and used fans when it was hot.

Computers were a novelty then. I am not sure I had even heard of a computer. To do the work of today’s pocket calculators would have required a mainframe the size of that classroom.
Fourth grade was quite a time. Kennedy and Oswald were killed, the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show, and Cassius Clay whipped Sonny Liston.
Miss McKenzie was also our fifth grade English teacher. She had us enter an essay contest sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy, writing about the Battle of Atlanta. One of the rules of the contest was a prohibition of the phrase “civil war”. The acceptable expression for describing that conflict was “War Between the States”.
After fifth grade, Miss McKenzie married Mr. Bradshaw, the seventh grade math and science teacher.

285 hex

Finally I have a picture to post.
This one was a struggle. I did a “sketch”, saved it, made a few changes, saved it under another another number, and so on. I decided to sequentially number them, starting with “image01”, “image02”, and on down the line.
When I had a design I wanted to build a model of, I was on “Image92”.
By this time, I employed one of my gimmicks…take a previous design, and put a border around it.

Frequently, the first model is going to look terrible. This one is …boring. After a few changes, I came up with the color scheme that I produced.

Mothers Day

Looking for a few chuckles last night, I went to one of my favorite “ho ho” blogs. Instead, I found a thoughtful piece that someone wrote about his Mother.
In the seven years since my own Mother left us, I have done my best to ignore Mother's day. Of course, when you repress/ignore something, it just comes back to slap you harder later. This piece about ____’s Mother came out of nowhere to "slap the slop" out of me.
There is so, so much I could say about my Mother. While she was human and there were things to complain about, she more than made up for it with love, generosity and abundant good humor.
Mom was a devoted, sincere Christian. While she was disappointed when I did not adopt this lifestyle, she had to good grace to accept me the way I was. Her love never diminished. As I look at the ugly behavior of many Christians today, I remember her as an example of a good Christian.
I will go on tomorrow, back to the life I have today. This life is but one of the many things Mom gave me.

Grandmothers are another reason to celebrate today. “Gran” has been gone 35 years now. Born in the 19th century, she was the 11th of 12 children. Her father fought in the War Between the States. In 1929, just as the depression hit, her husband died, leaving her with two small children. Somehow, she made it.

is this a joke?

Sometimes, I will try a random phrase with .com at the end of it. Tonight, I tried http://www.lol.com/ and saw something amazing.
As many of you know, LOL stands for Laugh out Loud. It is an all purpose expression in the world of instant messenger, used for a variety of things. Sometimes it is used appropriately.
So, LOL.com has a joke at the top of the page (duh), a bar saying “tell me another” and then a box with an ad from amazon.
The book featured in the ad is “The Truth” by Al Franken.
Is this supposed to be funny?

ho ho

Saturday evening, and time for an after dinner stroll. At the top of one of the hills (In Atlanta, flat land is man made. Everything else is up or down hill.) there is a house with mint plants growing outside the fence by the curb, and it is easy to pinch off a few leaves and chew on them as I stroll.
After I get onto Clairmont, there is a frame shop across from the “Mint” chinese/thai restaurant, formerly known as “Ho Ho”. The frame shop was a drug store at one time, back in the pre chain days when the majority of drug stores were independently owned.
Flash back to the summer of 1964. My neighbor and I went for a walk one day, and we wound up in that drug store. I saw a tabloid newspaper with a headline “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Bullet Hole”. I opened a copy, and sure enough, there was a picture of a body on a slab with a wound in its belly. It has a sheet over its head, so I am not sure it was Mr. Oswald.

Panentheism anyone?The church that sponsored that sign is across from the mall. I have been inside one time, to attend a wedding. My brother is a member.
IMHO, the message on the sign is useless. You couldn’t live without god if you tried. If you tried to turn your back on god, she would still be looking you in the face.
This is one of the less offensive messages I have seen there. This can be annoying if you are just driving by a building to go to Mcdonalds, and somebody pulls your chain about god, or worse, jesus ( Is your problem with jesus intellectual or moral?).


Dumpsters, on the other hand, are in an apartment complex behind the frame shop, and you have to go there to see them. Usually this is when there is a yard sale. “Put trash in dumpster, not on ground” is a more useful message than the church sign.
And god contributes the kudzu and pine tree backdrop.

honeysuckle

Tellyawhat, this has been a great night for a walk.
It started when I finally got a check from the temp agency. It seems as though the lady I have been working with got another job, and no one knew to mail my check. I made a phone call Monday, and the check arrived today.
I signed the check, wrote the account number and “for deposit only” and filled out the deposit slip. I always carefully open the envelope the check comes in, and I re use it with the check and the deposit slip. I write the amount on the outside, so I will know what to punch into the atm when I get there, and I also add the account number, because “**it happens”.
I walked down tobey road, and passed my brother, who was “power walking”. I appreciate exercise as much as anyone, but I think being outside and working my legs is enough action. Arm waving with weights is too much work. It goes without saying that I don’t have the stroller, dogs, and cell phone that so many strollers seem to require.
I passed by a house that is about to be bulldozed. I walked into the yard, and found a nice collection of rocks along the driveway. The next few days should find me gathering stone there.
All this time I was enjoying the honeysuckle. The air is loaded with the stuff these days, and I think it is great.
So I get to the mall, and as I am about to walk in I see the guard locking the door. I walk around, past the restaurant where I did dim sum on chinese new year, down to the atm. There is the curious location of a bakery next to a dental office. Walking around the back, I go past the aa meeting hall. I have long thought I should go to a Tuesday night meeting, just to see what it is like. Of course, I didn’t think of it until 930 pm this Tuesday night, so it will have to wait another week. Now, I quit drinking 17 years ago, and made my phone call to the meeting place 10 years ago. By those standards, I should make it to a meeting around 2022. I would imagine that the meeting hall would still be there…those things don’t seem to go anywhere. This one is aggressively discreet, for obvious reasons. However, when you see a nondescript meeting hall with a bunch of cars in front on a weeknight, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it is “friends of bill”. At least when they meet in a church you can pretend it is choir practice.