I almost got February and March Thing of the Month both done for the end of March. Then I almost got March and April done at the beginning of April. I was going to power through and finish the folder I had the most almost-done, from Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus.

But I had like four of eighty-something photos resized, and the photo I was most excited by was the one of a cactus into which someone had scratched "Olive." Even that was because of the obvious "OH NO, OLIVE! BAD GIRL! BAD, BAD GIRL!" joke. And none of the pictures I can find of her have her looking shocked or guilty or don't-give-a-damn enough anyway (she's terrified of everyone who isn't me, but every time I look at her, she's either asleep or wiggling around trying to make me notice how cute she is. Though she is very cute
).

And if it's supposed to be fun, there's no point in stressing yourself out trying to get something done by some arbitrary deadline.

I've had all the photos from one of my favorite places in Indiana done for ages, though.

Bloomington is about an hour south of Indianapolis. One of its big tourist draws is Brown County. Bloomington is actually in Monroe County, but Bloomington has a population of eighty thousand and a university of forty-some thousand, and Brown County has a total population of fifteen thousand. You could house the largest town's population in a wing of one of the big dorms on IU's campus and have plenty of room left over. So... yeah, it's basically part of Bloomington. Brown County has a big state park there, and about half an hour east of Bloomington is Nashville, a touristy little town that used to be an artists' colony in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Another half an hour or so east of Nashville is Indiana-Columbus. It isn't Brown County, but it's known for having a huge collection of super-Modern churches and civic buildings for such a small town, and IN-46 between Bloomington and Columbus is a fun drive.

Maybe fifteen minutes east of Bloomington on 46, right before you get into Brown County, a little road goes up the side of a ridge. You only notice it because there's a used car dealership that looks like it used to be a chain steakhouse of some kind on the corner of the intersection, out in the middle of nowhere. There's also a sign for T.C. Steele State Historical Site with an arrow pointing up the ridge road. The first year or so that I lived down there, I passed it and passed it going to Nashville or Columbus, assumed it was a plaque or something, and meant to stop and check it out some other time.

What it actually is, is the house and painting studio that Hoosier native son T.C. Steele had built up at the top of the ridge back when it was really in the middle of nowhere, back in the 1910s or so. He was apparently quite famous about the time that Cincinnati was having its big artistic renaissance (I want to say the last quarter of the nineteenth century into the first decade of the twentieth, but I don't remember the dates exactly). The state preserves it as a house museum/garden/park and sort of arts center, and it is the most beautifully serene place. If you pay them five dollars, they'll take you on a tour inside the house and studio, but mostly I just went up there to look at the frogs and flowers and trees.
( Read more... )
( WARNING: SPIDER PICTURES )
( WARNING: SNAKE PICTURES )
( AND I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE DRAGONFLIES FREAK YOU OUT )
( Safe now )

Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

It's weird to me how time moves on. Challenger has always been with me, one of those deep scars that's faded so that you can't see it, but that still flare up sharp and fresh if something jars them wrong. I didn't even realize it was that particular day until I saw something show up on my Facebook feed.

A single-engine plane flown by a man who'd been (I think) an Army reservist crashed at airfield east of Dayton on Wednesday, and yesterday or Wednesday a young woman died when her car crashed with a school bus north of here. So the Dayton Barely News and their sister TV station have had literally almost nothing to say the last few days except for "Dohhh, airplanes just keep falling out of the sky here! So dangerous!/AN VETERAN HERO!!!2!" depending on the angle they want to exploit, "yeah, we guess it was too bad this lady died but there were kids on the bus oh noes! Why didn't they have seatbelts?", or "Okay, so it's actually been pretty nice here through all this terrible weather six hundred miles east of us, but oh my god, you guys, it snowed near Cincinnati! And this town two or three hours southeast of here totally got nailed with a foot of snow! It counts! We're included in the Snowmageddon of '16! " The only mention of the Challenger anniversary was a short closing story on the national news.

I was six when she died.

I remember barely any of it. Or at least barely any of the details. But I think it's sort of my memory equivalent to "where were you when Kennedy was shot?"
( Read more... )

Back a couple weeks ago I was all like "oh yeah, I have all these pictures I need to post, so I'll try to do something daily or weekly for Three Weeks for DW!" Aaand now it's well over and I've yet to do that because the weather turned nice and medical stuff happened. So not so much.

I had all these plans for Zoo of the Week or Art Museum of the Week since artography is surprisingly fun and people like to look at animals, but that kind of thing all sort of runs together if I did a bunch of posts in a row about the same general topic. It's all stained glass meerkats or whatever.

So this is just someplace I've been a few times and really liked.


( Photos, +like a billion )

Oh my god, I cannot tell you how happy "The Librarians" makes me. Premise: there is a library of magical objects run by Noah Wyle chewing up the scenery in Tenth Doctor mode and a very prissy John Larroquette, and they are responsible for training the new crop of librarians and making sure magic things don't fall into the hands of the poor man's Malcolm McDowell. This is like a show made just for me; it's just so goofy and cheerful and cheesy, and is about fantasy librarians.
( Spoilers maybe for Sleepy Hollow and the Librarians )

The other show I love lately is "Forever." It's mostly just another New York City-based police procedural, but Ioan Gruffudd is beautiful and sometimes you just need that eye candy. But I like the characters, and the acting and writing are pretty good for what it is. I thought that I could guess how an episode I'd mostly missed went just from the last fifteen minutes. When I watched the whole thing online, I had the broad strokes right, but there was a lot of developments and character interactions that I missed. I love the relationship between Ioan's character and Judd Hirsch's. There seems to be genuine affection between them, and the writing seems to respect them both, instead of just making Hirsch's character an annoying sidekick.

Also the premise is that his character is immortal and comes back to life naked in a body of water after he dies, so the possibility of Ioan Gruffudd showing some skin is always worth watching for.

The scene at our house last night:

I come home from work and I figure I'll start som laundry and then go to Monday evening knitting--one of the amazing things about Bloomington is that I can knit with friends of mine three nights in a row, plus Thursday, plus at least four other meetups I don't go to--after I check a few things on the Innernet.

Then somehow I end up at r/nosleep and start reading stories. Even though I've just got over being stay-up-until-dawn spooked by the "Abandoned by Disney" series of creepypasta for a week. Because I'm somewhere between a masochist and an idiot. And they're not that bad. The premise is that you're supposed to treat the stories as if they're actually real reports of happenings and they're supposed to be within the realm of suspension of disbelief, as well as meatier and better-written than AND THEN A SKLELTON POPPED OUT. Overall, they're not that scary. They're interesting in a way that I might write another post about when I'm not on a tablet, but the events are too far out in most of them for me to buy them, and everyone copies the popular ones, or at least most of them have common tropes. I can't believe that many people's lives have turned into ripoffs of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers" at once. But the series I started because they're they're supposedly the scariest ones worked as well-written, good suspense stories.

And as the light from the window turns grey and then blue, and good suspense turns into eldritch cosmic horror, well, it gets a little creepier.

And about then:

Window: MWEEEROOOH WREEEEE HRRRR

Me: Olive, quiet.

Window: WWWWOWWWN WAIIIIREEE RRRROWWNN MWAAAHHRRR

Me: Olive! Quiet!

[The window is even angrier.]

Me:HEY! Shut up! Shut it!

I was starting to get up to turn the lights on anyway, so I look up to see what's going on. At this point it's worth mentioning that our house has a sort of shotgun layout with my room on the corner, and my front window is the only one that looks out on the street in front of the house. I have the futon I can't get rid of in front of that window, even though the window frame behind it is pretty deep. I look over and I don't see Olive behind the shade, but I sure can hear her. The roommates' kitten is perched on the corner of the back of the futon. From his posture, he looks like he's bugging her through the blind. Neither of us really like the kitten, because he eats all her food and steals all her toys and my yarn and uses her box and is always in my room harassing her and trying to slash my Achilles tendon from under the bed. I feel kind if bad for him since he's only about five months old and his people are never home, but he is a pain in the ass proportional to his size (and he's a Maine Coon mix, so it's huge).

So I grab him off the futon and chuck him out while he tries to see what work he can get done on gnawing through my wrist.

Window: NWEEE HWAAAHWOWWWR WAIII OWWWNN REEERRRR

Me: Goddamnit Olive, he's gone! Shut the fuck up! Shut up OLIVE

Olive [scuttles in, her ears fanned back and her eyes big] Dwee neep ahhh!

So there's that moment where your brain really doesn't know how to parse thing or react to it. Of course a second later I realized it must be my roommates' other cat, the little black one, and just about the same time she popped out of the window to yell at Olive because now there were too many damn cats in the room she's apparently just now decided belongs to her. I still don't know what she was yelling at. The window looks out on the front porch, but there wasn't anything out there when I checked. Maybe she was yelling at me because I was yelling at her.

So now there are two cats that think they belong in here, and I'm slightly creeped out by the thought of what's so exciting right outside my window at night.

The other day I sat and watched a pair of house sparrows have dueling dust baths in the gravel driveway across the street. Apparently there was a larger and more choice little hollow of dust at the end of the driveway and one next to it. After some hopping and fluttering and shouting, one would dash into the better pit and start to roll around and shake its wings and body in these little staccato burst--wrrt vverrt vverrt--(I don't know why a bird rolling around in the dirt sounds like a vibrating phone in my head. It just does)--while the other one hopped around the edges and yelled at it. Then the other sparrow woulld show him, boy howdy, and jump into the other dustbath and start ffloofing its feathers out. Once or twice one rushed the other and took its spot, and every so often they'd jump out of their baths and hop around and scream at each other. But mostly they sat there and went VVRRT VVRRT and FLOOF FLOOF and screeched.

I'm sort of surprised how much wildlife there is in our neighborhood, which is mostly all the sort of old-and-plain-but-decent neighborhood you get on the outskirts of campuses, where the grad students and some locals live. Our house was built in 1931 or 1932 and we're across the road from a church built in 1951. I suppose part of it might be the big old trees all over the place; I think the two in our back yard were probably planted at the time it was built, and they're doing just fine. But we have bluejays all over the place, and crows and cardinals and pileated woodpeckers and some sort of phantom hawk I've never seen but hear all the time. I wrote a metadata schema for classifying birds (and I called it the Bird Recognition Data Schema--BRDS--and thought I was terribly clever) as my metadata class final project, and I was inspired to choose birds because of the mourning dove that likes to sit on our porch. He just plops himself down on the concrete and goes HOO GOOOOO right outside my window at the crack of dawn.

There's a morning glory vine that started growing along our porch railing just last week that's halfway along the porch by now. Apparently there was also a wasp nest in the porch swing next to our front door. Which I walk past every time I go out to my car, and stand right next to every time I have to unlock the front door. I didn't even know about it until I stepped out onto the porch and both my roommates were right outside the door. Because they'd tried to sit on the porch swing and discovered that there was a wasp in the bit of wasp nest in the porch swing and... apparently poured water all over it? I guess? Because that side of the porch was very wet.

Our house was built in 1931 or 1932 and has the problems that a lot of houses that age do. When I unlatch the windows, the casement slides down at least as far as the lower window, so my room is full of bugs. The cat adores it. For some reason a lot of big grey moths come in through the crack at the top of the window at night. Olive, who is afraid of toys, is both delighted and rendered into a homicidal killbot by the moths. She chases them all over and leaps up walls and smacks them around like fluttery little hockey pucks. Then she eats about half of them and leaves me the other half-a-moth to find later. She's terribly generous that way. The one time I saw her lose one, she sat and stared at the Magic Window all the rest of the night like it was really good kitty porn, and even asked it to give her another moth once or twice.

But last night I found a firefly inside the house. It was on the woodwork of the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. It looked big for a firefly, so I stood there a minute trying to figure out if it really was one or if it was some other kind of beetle. I'd just leaned in to poke it when it started flashing its light very fast. So I turned out the light and watched it flash in the dark.

It seems early for fireflies to be out, but I guess it's better than the kitchen moths we have all over the place.

I always get really restless when spring starts trying to come back. Even when it's forty degrees out, if the sun is out and it's too nice a day to waste inside. There are so many place to go and so much beauty starting to come out after everything's been so dead and grey. I can't find my camera's battery charger, it's still packed somewhere. But my phone's camera only has two megapixels less than my Nikon DSLR, which is ridiculous, but still means I have a pretty good camera right in my pocket. So even when I'm having trouble with my knees, I need to go places and see things.

Last week was spring break, and I had these grand ideas that I was going to get All This Work done. Instead I went to see my parents for a couple days, and I spent the rest of the week at least an hour from town. I went to a little town near Evansville out southwest of here because I liked it even in November when I went down there in November to take pictures for an exhibit I had to plan for a class. I went into Evansville to go to the zoo because it was a zoo and I was right there, so of course I was going to the zoo. I went to Indianapolis twice. The first time I found the city market, which reminds me so of North Market in Columbus, which is one of the things I miss so bad about it. The second time I went to the Children's Museum, which I last visited no later than 1986 when I was seven year old, and remembered nothing there but it was pretty fun. I went to West Baden Springs and French Lick, the two old resorts about an hour south of here. I actually didn't go to Columbus, because I go to Columbus almost every regular weekend. The reason I didn't go to Fort Wayne is that it's a little far to go to the other zoo, but mainly because the thing the camera isn't good at is animal photography. I might yet if I can find my battery charger, since there's a honey badger at the Fort Wayne zoo.

And when I started moving photos over to my computer to resize and upload them, I discovered that I never really got around to editing the massively overgrown "unedited photos" folder like I meant to. There's stuff in there going back to 2012. Now that I've been doing some weeding, it's down to 1,950 files. I've been lucky in that my family has the resources and like to travel, and like me to go with them when they travel. I have pictures from going to the air show at Oshkosh and over to see family friends in St. Paul last year, and pictures of gardens in Madison and Chicago I saw when I drove up to Madison for WisCon last spring. We went to my aunt and uncle's near Valparaiso in Florida for Thanksgiving this year and spent most of the trip that we weren't sitting around the house walking "the range," a piece of parkland owned by the air force base which was really surprisingly pretty. And there are pictures of my cats. There are so stupidly many pictures of my cats.

And one of the things I thought when I started this journal was that hell, if I don't have anything to talk about, I can always do a photo post.

So I guess the question is, what should I start with?

( Sort of long poll )

I'd been wanting to get in the habit of doing a pic spam weekly or so, because there are eighteen hundred files in my unedited photos folder and most of them are of things I meant to write about at some point. And I wanted to get more back into actually posting writing or even posting regularly at all. But I have no time right now since the last week of the term is next week and I still have three papers to write.

I did want to do the December "give me a topic" meme, though. December is half done and writing anything at all just because I want to before about next Tuesday? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, but it seems manageable right now.

MEME

Pick a date below and give me a topic - it can be anything, from fandom related to life related to art related to whatever you want.

They will probably be brief, or not, depending on the subject.

Also, I reserve the right to decline prompts that I don't feel equipped to meet.

Topics: you can get an idea from my tags/from the stuff I usually ramble about/from things you maybe wish I talked about more but don't.

You can request multiple topics (as long as they're on different days -- one topic per day!!).
( dates )