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Burning California
We’re covered with smoke here. You probably saw something about it on television. Everybody I know is fine, so don’t worry. We’re all rubbing our eyes and coughing but we are in no danger of having our houses burn down. The fire near us is a whole city away and there are lots of streets and concrete between us. I guess that’s one good thing about living in an urban area. We don’t have that much wild brush to burn up here.
It probably wasn’t very smart of me but I was so in awe of the rose colored light, I packed up Baby Bug and took her down to the tide pools for an impromptu photo-shoot. I hope she doesn’t blame me when she develops asthma later in life. I don’t know how bad it was to be breathing this air. It didn’t hurt to breath and I saw a few other families out enjoying the strangeness of it all.
Maybe I can sell my photos and pay for her doctor bills. Ack. I shouldn’t joke like that. But it was pretty amazing to be out in this strange other-worldly light, taking pictures. I would have stayed longer if the battery in my mom-minivan camera didn’t go dead. Along with everything else that is dumb with this camera it also has a battery that goes dead with very little warning. It lasts the normal amount of time but when it starts blinking that means your photo shoot is pretty much over immediately. Even turning it off and then back on again doesn’t work.
But guess what!!!! I don’t hate my doltish camera anymore! You know why? Because it’s waterproof. WATERPROOF is sooooooooooo cool! It was the weirdest feeling to deliberately dunk a piece of electrical equipment in a tide pool today. I was all ready for it to shock me or at least start changing funny colors on the lcd screen. But nope. It just kept on working and working. I LOVE IT!!! My camera is an amphibian! How cool is that?
You should have seen the look on the girl’s face who was standing near me when I dunked my camera in a tide pool. Her eyeballs popped right out of her head. Priceless, that’s what her shock was. I think I’m going to go around dunking the camera in water just to repeat that over again.
Being amphibious makes all the other stuff that I hate about the silly camera not so bad. I can put up with the slow shutter button response. I can put up with pukey color it adds to all my photos. I can even put up with the stupid lcd screen that goes dim one second after I start to frame my shot. I’m sorry I said all those mean things about it because when it comes to taking a beating and still keeping on ticking, my camera can kick your camera’s butt. (I say that affectionately, of course. As a rule, I’m against cameras fighting.)
But enough about the silly camera. It was really fun showing Baby Bug the tide pools. I can’t believe I haven’t taken her down there more. I used to walk there all the time when she was small enough to fit in the baby carrier but I never let her actually get down and look at the little crabs walking around.
It was like walking around on the moon. Poor Baby Bug, I was so distracted by my picture taking that she got herself in quite a pickle. The ground is very uneven and rough and her little feet just couldn’t find an easy way to go where she wanted to go. Eventually, she fell into a pool and got very upset because she had her shoes on. “Shoes ON!” she cried.
I love her little orange shoes but she has nearly outgrown them so I told her it was okay that she got her feet wet. I couldn’t very well take her shoes off because the rocks are sharp with barnacles and crustaceous skeletons (is that redundant?). So I decided her little orange shoes could take one for the Gipper. Or Gromit or whatever. It was worth it for the experience.
Okay, yes, I admit it. I was selfish and I wanted to play with my amphibious camera. Take one for me, cute little orange shoes. (Actually the shoes are fine. Much like my camera!)
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S is for Snake and T is for Turtle
I’m feeling very reptilian these days. Hmmmmm…..
S is for Snake, of course! Baby Bug and I like snakes. We like to draw them. That’s one thing that she can draw already. She can draw “nakes” and “bubbles” and “grass”. Not bad for 21 months.
I don’t love snakes personally but I’m not squeamish or anything. I’ll hold them if you insist. I don’t think they feel gross on my skin. They are actually really smooth and warm. My only concern is that I don’t want them to poop on me.
My roommate and best friend in college (who I’ll call Biff, affectionately) always had snakes. I’m pretty sure she still does. She was allergic to cats so snakes were the next best thing. She loved her snakes. She’d take them for walks through the grass in the court yard of our apartment building. She’d clean their spotless cages every day. She’d force me to drive her to the pet shop so she could buy them fresh crickets. Her snakes were the most spoiled snakes ever. Just thinking about it makes me happy. I love happy pets.
Don’t ask me what kind of snake Biff had. That information has left my brain. In fact, I’m a bit concerned that she is going to read this (or any other snake lover for that matter) and have a conniption that I colored this snake incorrectly. There are no pink snakes probably. If this bothers enough people, I’ll change this snake to a more politically correct snake color. Just let me know.
I have a snake story! It seems to be the theme here lately after that endless underwear post I wrote yesterday. Yay stories! I hope I haven’t told this one before.
Biff, the snake lover, was a regular prankster. She came by it naturally. Her dad was a prankster too. I remember once we were painting one of our friend’s vans (yes, I painted a van once) and Biff’s Dad lit off a stink bomb right underneath the van and smoked us out. I didn’t know her Dad very well back then and I just could not get it through my head that a Dad would do such a thing. But he did. All the time. I learned to love him for it.
Biff liked to pull all kinds of stunts on me when we lived together. Her favorite was hiding condoms on my side of our shared room (we were poor and had to split a room). This was TERRIBLE to me because I was a very good little Christian girl and I was “saving myself for my future husband”. Yes, I was a prude even at 23 but that is another blog post.
Finding a condom in my room was like finding a crack pipe. I died a thousand deaths every time I would reach under my pillow and pull out this disgusting candy wrapped rubber thing. What would my parents say if they found out I had condoms in my room?!!! The horror! I don’t know what I did to get her back but it may have involved turning the volume up on her alarm clock. Biff was not a morning person.
We also had another roommate. I’ll call her Mary, which is actually her real name. We loved Mary. She was completely opposite of us and great for playing jokes on. She was a science major and always had her head in a book. Except for the times when she would blast heavy metal music and jump on her bed to entertain us with air guitar solos. Oh, the memories. I could ramble on forever.
Anyway, Mary had a bit of an anxiety condition. I think it had something to do with her heart. Every once in a while she would freak out that she couldn’t breath. She also took caffeine pills so it could have been related to that. I’m not sure. Maybe she’ll read this and correct me. Whatever it was, it was pretty serious.
One day Biff decided to hang her snake’s old disgusting dead skins (because, as you know, snakes shed their skins) on Mary’s door. I think she even saved them up for the occasion because she had several of them. Biff taped the crusty long white scaly skins to the top of the door frame while Mary slept.
You guessed it. The next morning Mary had a heart attack. She had to get up at five a.m. because she worked in a top secret government lab (I’m not making that up either) so she discovered the snake skins in the dark and pretty much fell over dead from surprise. I guess feeling rough scaley things on your face when you are not expecting it, is pretty frightening.
Mary didn’t really die, of course, but it sure was scary. She couldn’t breath. She had to lay down. She had to breath into a paper bag. It was a pretty big deal. Poor Mary.
I don’t have any turtle stories. Turtles cute and they live to be 102 or something. That is kinda neat.
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In other news: I have been picked to be the first interviewee for a new website about inspiration boards. My dribble about myself is pretty lame but the idea of the website is cool. I think she is going to interview artists weekly and ask them how they stay inspired. Click over, it might just inspire you!
