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photo / Wednesday / windshield time — Comments Off
22
Nov 17

Travel day

You often see curious things when you’re traveling. A sign here, a weird fence there, and so on. I try to take pictures of things I see, because, sometimes, you find a theme emerging. But I only saw the one thing today.

You feel like they are maybe picking on Merle, the One-handed Man here. The rest of the employees, they get a pass, but Merle, he needs to think hygiene at all times.

The sink was one of the old fashioned ones. You had to do operate the faucet, soap dispenser and hand towel dispenser manually.

Anyway, Thanksgiving festivities begin tomorrow. I hope you’re safely and exactly where you need to be.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Nov 17

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I have nothing

This is a store sign …

Specifically for a restaurant. Potbelly Sandwiches, to be exact. But when I see things like this I always think there’s an art form we haven’t explored yet. Shadow art exists, to be fair, and they even call it shadow art. You’d think that would be both obvious and maybe too ominous, but it exists.

Maybe this is isn’t about art, but about advertising. You could change your messaging without repainting your canvas.

adventures / family / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
20
Nov 17

And now, another installment of Storytime

The Yankee was out of town visiting with friends and family this weekend. It goes like this: her godparents have known her parents, individually for years. Her godfather and father grew up together. Her godmother and mother met in nursing school.

Now the two of them met at their friends’ wedding. They got married. Along came The Yankee and they became her godparents. The godparents had two daughters and The Yankee’s parents are their godparents. Now those young ladies are of course grown and have beautiful families of their own. They all got together this weekend.

The oldest of those kids was up for a story. So I found myself digging through, and passing along, photos last night.

Here are two now.

This first one is from the Cayman Islands. It was a graduation trip. We were off diving for a week and the locals helped us find a dolphin. He’d just turned up one day, they said, and was very social. They figured he might have been a part of a Central American dolphin venue, where customers likely interacted with him, but a hurricane had damaged where he lived and so he was back in the wild. But he enjoyed people. He didn’t like SCUBA divers, but he’d swim with you. And if you tried to out-swim him, he’d let you know who was boss.

But to swim with a dolphin, to pet and play with a dolphin in the wild, that was a terrific experience, just one small part of a great trip.

And here’s one of The Yankee and me:

It was one of our first family trips. My bunch went to Belize, where we did a lot of diving and horseback riding and exploring Mayan ruins. We didn’t see any dolphins this time, but I did get to catch a bunch of reef sharks by hand while SCUBA diving. (I’ll have to find those pictures.) That was another great trip. Even the snorkeling selfies were great.

Friday / photo — Comments Off
17
Nov 17

The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part XI

You talk about leaves, and you could get into photosynthesis, the breakdown of chlorophyll and pigmentation. You could talk about the yellow light in the sky, and you could get into the earth’s rotation upon its axis and the directional angle of the sun. You could talk about the cool air, and we could talk about how Michigan isn’t good at its one job: keeping Canada in Canada.

But we never talk about the bark on the trees:

The moody, stark contrast; the silent, stern and dark colors … That has got to mean something here.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Nov 17

The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part X

I always start thinking about the paradoxes of autumn — the beauty, the foreshadowing, the pause before bad weather, the vain attempt to keep and hold and show it off — when the first leaves turn. And it is an arboricultural certainty in our part of the world that the first tree to have the great big sigh from green to yellow or red is a maple.

So it is nice to see one stubborn maple out there hanging on this late in the game:

But the tree knows, the trees have been singing about it to us for sometime. That last branch is about to pick up the tune as well. It is only a matter of time.

The last one of these tomorrow, he said. “Thank goodness,” came the reply.