At Rest

First, a quick apology for not having posted in the past several days. I don't really have much excuse, except being tired and mildly busy. Also, this snow and cold weather and the early dark have a kind of depressive effect on me, so that when I get home all I want to do is laze around with a book and a cup of coffee!When we drive, we almost always look for the blue highways. (An aside: that's a great book, by the way, Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. It's a memoir of his travels around the country by back roads...the so-called "blue highways" on the map.) I always like the blue highways on trips. What the heck do you get to see from the interstate? Nothing but median and billboards. When you're driving on a regular road, you have the chance of seeing something like a sign that says "Pet Cemetery" with an arrow. And you can choose to turn down that road on a lark, just to see what you find.

I'm almost always one to take the turn down the side street and see what we find. On the way home from the toy museum, we came upon a huge pet cemetery. Seriously, this place had more acreage than a lot of the human cemeteries we've stopped to visit. The graves we found were no less touching or sentimental than anything you'd find in a regular cemetery.The cemetery has been open since 1919, but we didn't find any graves older than the 1960s or so. Unfortunately, the place was positively swampy from the rain, which made exploring kind of difficult.

I managed to get some shots from the paths, though.

Most of the graves had pictures of the pets, which was very sweet.

I did happen to see a couple of living animals while we were there...several white tailed deer came out of the woods to munch some grass.

And lastly, speaking of animal pictures, here's Liam's 2nd grade school photo. Isn't he the funniest ham you've ever seen?

Hideously Cute

Or maybe cutely hideous.

The toy museum had a small display of these Palmer Cox "Brownies." I was enthralled.

Check out this band...look at their ugly, adorable little faces! The best one is the tuba player. Doesn't he look like he's peeved because he has a big round butt in his face?Best advertising slogan ever: "It's that after taste!"

I think my favorites were these two.

This Post Brought to You Courtesy of Two Dudes

OK, I complained last week about how I don't get to take many pics these days due to my work schedule and the lack of light. Luckily, Dan took some shots today! All of these are his.As you can see, we got a significant snowstorm last night. Remember the snow pictures from last week? Well, all that snow was melted, so this is all fresh. We got about 6 inches or so here in town, and some areas in the snowbelt got around 10 I guess.
This is the flowering tree in the neighbor's yard. Our lilacs looked similar, very bowed by the weight of the snow. Dan shook them off, and hopefully no major damage was done.
I don't know why he didn't get a shot of our other neighbor's house; their small tree was split right in half by the snow!
And lastly, here's Liam coming home from school. He digs his new skeleton hat...it has eyeholes like a ski mask.

During the storm last night, we actually had THUNDER AND LIGHTENING. That's pretty unusual, even in a freaky weather area like ours. My work pal Pete happened to be taking some shots of the snow and got it on video. Check it out!

Where Little People Go to Retire

We took a drive yesterday to the Fisher Price Toy Museum. I took a lot of pics...I'll share them ad nauseum over the next few days, but I thought I'd start with my absolute favorite part: The Little People toys I had when I was a kid.When I was a kid, Little People were actually little. Not like those giant things with arms and legs the kids today have. If you were dumb enough to put one in your mouth, you deserved it if it got lodged in your windpipe, I guess.There were four of us kids in my family, and we were all born just two years apart from each other, so we mostly liked the same kind of stuff at the same time. I guess that was nice for my mom because she could get one toy and we'd all play with it.

We weren't very well off, so I know a lot of our toys came from the thrift stores and yard sales. But one lucky day, the Little People Fairy came down from Fisher Price Heaven and blessed us. A lady up the street had kids much older than us, and they'd outgrown all their kid toys. We ended up hitting the Little People jackpot!

All of a sudden, we had enough Little People sets to build a whole town! There was the A-Frame house, so exotic!

There was the camper, with its cute little charcoal grill, and the molded seats were the Little People could relax.

There was the airport, with the helicoptor and the jet!

There was the school bus. (He's out of focus here, but remember the sad and mad Little People? We always assumed they were the bullies)

There was the school, which I loved, and by God, SESAME STREET! With Hooper's STORE! (In the display here, poor Mr. Hooper is taking a rest. At least that's what they told Big Bird.)
See the swing set and merry-go-round? We'd always have "accidents" where the Little People would fly off their swings or off the merry-go-round and have to go see the "school nurse," which was the Little People lady with the blonde chignon. Remember her?But my favorite thing was the castle! I loved that thing!See that turret on the right where the prince is standing? There was a nice little trap door. I used to make my little brother stick his arm down there and he'd get stuck. I swear I did that to him multiple times. Apparently he wasn't a quick learner.

Maternity

I took these shots a couple of weeks ago for my friends R. and D. who are expecting their first boy very soon. To be completely honest, I wasn't 100% impressed with the shots I got this time, but I got a few good ones. If anything, it was definitely a good learning experience.

What do you think for this one, black and white, or color?

Flashback: Walnut Creek, 10-16-08

I didn't get home tonight until almost 6pm, and of course, it was very dark by then. No opportunities to take new pics, so I had to browse through the hard drive to find something I hadn't shared yet. I settled on these shots from the Walnut Creek Marina at the foot of Manchester Road that were taken in mid-October.

The marina is situated at the mouth of Walnut Creek, where the creek empties into Lake Erie.

It was getting close to sunset, and the wind was really strong.

The waves were building as we took a few quick shots.It was a beautiful, if chilly, fall sunset.