Summer Balloons

Posted on August 25, 2004
Filed Under Living, Photo | 1 Comment

As summer fades here I go from having not much to do to having too much to do all at once. I have three shows in production at the same time. Fortunately they are all in the same theater, sequentially. That means I can cheat a little and do my light hang for one show with the next show in mind. The first one is a straight up standard play, the second is a staged reading, and the third a big Shakespeare. For the third the director wants some really complicated lighting. Cool. That’ll be fun.

As all of this is unfolding my nephew and his fiance are visiting the states from Italy. He is the only son of my youngest sister who passed away suddenly a couple of years ago. I wrote about that here . I do try and spend as much time with them as possible when they can get here. I would love to go there someday but don’t see that happening anytime soon.

One sign of the end of summer is the annual summer festival here which can be kind of fun. I have no choice but to attend as I live in the heart of the area it happens in. The weather was perfect this year and the crowds were massive. I am not a big fan of being jostled around by folks in a crowd but the photo opportunities are too compelling to not make repeated visits to the chaos. And if you’re into people watching, which is an always entertaining endeavor you could overdose at these events. And I usually do.

There are a few things about crowd dynamics that can really annoy me. Like why do some people find it necessary to gather in knots and talk right in the middle of the flow of people in and among the booths? This causes traffic backups and more unnecessary jostling. You throw in a half dozen baby strollers and you get genuine grid lock.

Then there are the inevitable helium filled balloons. They are colorful and can be photogenic in bunches but how much childhood trauma has been created by these? All day long you can see runaway balloons drifting slowly skyward in their brief moments of freedom unaware that soon they will experience an explosive ugly death as the helium expands beyond what the cheap latex can endure and colorful shards will fall back to the earth. I don’t know how many times I have a seen a child who is full of delight holding their new toy/friend on it’s thin white leash suddenly experience deep loss as the balloon slips away. Not too mention all the unintentional garroting of innocent passerby’s as the balloons bob back and forth unpredictably on strings that are too long. Sometimes the parent is aware and will try and shorten the string or get the child to pay attention to where the balloon is but that is a futile effort. This year there were a lot of balloons that were apparently starved for attention as they snuck into a lot of my photographs. For example…

Stupid

Posted on August 4, 2004
Filed Under Living | Leave a Comment

I suppose everyone from time to time does something that they consider in retrospect to be stupid. I have experienced this myself. Just yesterday in fact.

Injuring ones self is not a fun thing, when it is really stupid it literally adds insult to injury. At least I called myself some really insulting things shortly after it happened.

My landlord is replacing the door to my apartment which is quite old and has rotted from being wet all the time as there is no rain gutter on the shed roof over the door so water splashes up on the door and walls. Over time this has damaged the door(and siding). The new door will be solid and have no window and I would like to have a window there. There used to be a window next to the door, you can see where it was. On the inside behind the home center paneling the old window frame is still there and the opening has been filled in with particle board. I was checking to see how solidly attached these pieces of particle board were. I was using the simple time tested method of doing this by banging on the boards with the side of my fist. Giving them a good solid thump. About the third or fourth thump I didn’t get a thump. I got a very odd sensation. One I couldn’t place at first. And then I noticed my hand was stuck to the board. Bemused I exerted more force and my hand came away from the board. And then there was a little pain. What the heck? And then I saw it. A nail that had been driven in from the outside. Now there was no logical reason for the nail to be there. But there it was. And I had just thumped it good and solid. It had entered my hand, my little finger actually just past the first knuckle. From the nauseas I experienced I knew it had hit the bone and from the depth it had gone in I guessed it had skipped along the surface of the bone across the top of the finger. It didn’t really hurt at first. Then it did. I did the normal dance around the room all the while impugning my intelligence. It started to swell immediately and I did the cold water ice thing. Fortunately I had a tetanus shot not long ago, after an encounter with a rouge carpet tack, so that is not a concern. But it still hurts like all get out and I can’t make a fist and typing is painful to say the least. I haven’t seen a doctor yet. If it swells any more or get more painful I will but right now it feels like injury swelling not infection.

But gees, how stupid can I get?

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