Things fall apart.

I managed to run one roll of film through my old Olympus point-and-shoot camera before it gave up completely. I think its little gears are stripped. That is one more thing I need to replace. But I'll probably get the pictures on CD ROM, and see about posting them on line, probably at Webshots. They are unlikely to be very good pictures, considering the camera and all, but at least they will give people a glimpse of what this bucolic hell looks like.

I'm still hoping that things will calm down in a while, so there will be time for me to think, and to write something a bit more interesting than I've done the last few days. I don't want to bore myself when I re-read this stuff in the future.

Lap Kitty

My cat insists on curling up on my lap when I'm using the computer. If I don't let her use my lap, she sits on the mouse pad. She sheds. The mouse is going to end up full of fur. So she gets to curl up on my lap. Cats.

It would be nice to be able to paint. I never quite got the hang of it, not with watercolors, not with oils. I'm actually not even a very good draftsman. I've only ever done a couple of drawings that I actually liked. But, today, I was noticing the afternoon sun behind patchy clouds, and the back-lit pines and the bare apple trees in the orchard, and I wished that I could paint that scene. A photograph would never get it exactly right. It would take a Monet or a Van Gogh or a Turner to capture the quality of that light and its effect on the scene. Still, I'd like to be able to do it myself.

Odd. I'm the only person in my family who can't draw. And I'm the only one who has any real interest in art. Heredity is cruel. Stupid DNA.