Meijer Brand Chocolate Sauce

Saturday, September 3, 2011

224HBD #9: Make a Treat or a Gift For Your Friends and Blog About It

I made cheese straws! Sort of. They came out kind of puffy, which is weird since I made them the same way as I have in the past. Then they crumbled to bits, so they were really more of mostly-floury-slightly-cheesy-bits. I don’t think I had enough cheese.

I also gave Andrew a piece of dough to eat. He thought it was cookie dough, and eagerly jammed it into his mouth, to his great displeasure.

But anyway, there’s my gift to everyone, even as not all that great as it is.

24HBD #8: Pick a Random Sentence From a Random Book. This is the 1st Line of Your Story.

“The mist goes on and on. As you walk things come up out of your thoughts, frazzles of memories swirling around you and binding together, gathering like ghosts out of the dark.” – from Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

The mist goes on and on. As you walk things come up out of your thoughts, frazzles of memories swirling around you and binding together, gathering like ghosts out of the dark. High school prom, your first promotion, losing your job, losing your wife of sixty years to the peaceful clutches of old age, your first date, your first flirtation, the moment you realized that you had something you would keep, if only forever existed.

Images flit by as you take each step, and as you come to a bend in the path, your thirty-third birthday party looms out, brighter than the others. The party when everyone was sober but you, and you made a complete ass of yourself but still there she was to pick you up and clean you up and tell you it doesn’t matter, it didn’t matter, everything is/was/will be fine. Everything is fine.

Everything is gone.

Shapes come out of the fog that curls around your shuffling feet, great spindly moss oaks that soar above, dripping moisture that adds to the coolness of the dark. You keep walking, confident if not completely steady as your life makes its way to you in disjointed, out of order vignettes, each one more precious than the last, each one featuring her or at least fueling your eagerness for the ones that do. Riding your first tricycle in the cul de sac in the house you loved for the first eleven-and-a-half years of your life, the house you cried over when your parents moved you away, the house you went two hours out of your way to drive by after you were old enough to do so without feeling uneasy, when the feeling of complete freedom no longer came with the guilt of breaking the rules of childhood.

Every memory, every feeling, every thought you ever had that led you to her, and every one after roll to you and through you out of the fog as you make your way through what is now clearly a forest path, lined with misty thistles and soft sighs of leaves in a breeze.

And then the memory of waking up without the familiar puff of breath on your neck, feeling colder than ever before even under the piles of winter blankets, and knowing…

Knowing…

And now the path is entering a clearing, the mist pooling around, and you drift, no longer shuffling, no longer weak, no longer gasping with age, gasping with the weight of a life lived and loved, weight you never knew you were carrying, weight that is lifted as you float down, through the ground that was never there, through everything that was and wasn’t and finally you can rest easy as you take yourself away.

24HBD #7: Go Outside. Pick a Starting Spot and Direction. Walk 100 Steps. Find Something From That Spot and Blog About It.

I decided to start at the corner of Congress and 18th, and walk west. 100 steps brought me nicely to the corner of Congress and 16th.

My walk brought me by some sidewalk that had, somewhere along the line, been swallowed by nature. Gonna happen to everything, someday.

And now to the main event! At the corner of Congress and 16th street, there is a fairly normal fire hydrant. It’s sort of shrouded in some nice greenery, some flowers, and a broken cinder block which, rather than detracting from the overall setting, somehow made the whole thing very picturesque.

Nothing special about it, but, I thought, pretty nice. I’d want to have a fire put out in the area, if I could choose.

Whenever I take pictures like this, or even pictures in general, I try to focus on small details. I think close up, off-center shots of everyday objects are so appealing. Now, this shot isn’t all that close-up, but it’s a bit off-center. I like the focus of my photography – in this case, the hydrant – to be obscured in some way. Whether it’s as part of the background, or zoomed in and focusing on a small part of the whole, I like the main subject to be de-emphasized. I think it makes the shots more interesting. WELCOME TO WHAT TIM THINKS OF PHOTOGRAPHY. You didn’t even know you were here until you got here, did you?

24HBD #6: A Look at Yourself Through The Eyes of Your Pet

PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME

PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME PET ME

LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN

LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN

24HBD #5: Write a Blog From The Perspective of Your Favorite Fictional Character

Lord Clancey III
Penfold Manor
#6 Charleton Way
London, England

To the Respectable Lord Clancey,

Having received your correspondence regarding the care and use of the Common South Wales Pixie, I can only respond with speculation, as the capture and subsequent care of these creatures is something I have had as of yet no personal experience with.

Your question, however, reminds me of a particularly intricate spell written down in Percifold Hargrave’s Of The Tameing of Magickle Creatures and the Dangers Therein in which he describes in great detail the methods with which to hypnotize the much rarer Red Pixie, which unfortunately have not been seen or written about in any capacity since the late twelfth century. Though hypnotization was not, I surmise, your original intent, I do believe his methods could be adapted to fit your particular situation.

Unfortunately, I am afraid this is the entirety of the assistance I am able to provide at the moment, however I will research the matter further and alert you if I find anything worth conveying. It would, in addition, do you well to find a copy of Hargrave and thoroughly study it, though obtaining texts of magick has been quite difficult in recent times.

I do hope this letter has found you well, and I look forward to future correspondence with your lordship.

Respectfully yours,

Jonathan Strange

24HBD #4: What The World Would Be Like If People Had Gills/Wings

I mean… it would probably have a bunch of people flying around, or swimming a lot. I imagine there’d be a lot of clothing specially made to accommodate the fabric requirements of a lifestyle full of free-flying or free-swimming. Parkour would not be as impressive, but there would probably be more impressive forms of it around.

Sharks would be deadlier. So would flocks of pigeons.

Video games would be lame.

24HBD #3: What My Life Would Be Like Without Computers

The majority of my time is spent on my computer. I’m quite proud of my computer. It’s one of my most prized possessions (along with my new watch, gumball machine, Charlotte the Cat, my wife, and the sweet shoes I got at the mall a couple of weeks ago).

On an extremely related note, the pictures I have of my computer when I first put it together and turned it on make me realize how dusty my house is, and how much of that dust has worked its way into my computer. It used to be so clean!

Anyway, I am going to approach this topic as if, by “without computers” it means “I am suddenly unable to use them”. The other way to go about it would be to assume that I live in an age without computers, in which case I would assume that my life would be very pastoral. Boring, even.

If I was suddenly unable to computer, I would have to come up with innovative mechanical solutions to everyday niceties. I would probably be always bugging my wife (one of my prized possessions, remember) to check my email for me. It would be kind of like that one time I didn’t have a cell phone until I was a sophomore in college, except back then I still at least had a computer, so I could be at least up to date on things on a day-to-day basis.

Communication would be more difficult. I wouldn’t be able to Facebook or Plussy-do Google thing, or listen to things on 8tracks.com. Look at all that promo!

I would have to play TF2 in real life. Changing classes would be more difficult, because I’d have to get into a new costume each time, and waiting until I died to do so would take forever – unless I was super brave all the time. But I might get reincarnated as a bug or something, and even if I come back as a human I would still have to wait about 20 years before respawning.

Who am I kidding? I’d just be scout every time. Clearly the best.

Probably the biggest downer I’d have from not being able to computer would be not being able to tell people how awesome my computer is. Seriously. Look at it. Bask.

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Saturday, September 3, 2011