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on the railroad again 2004-09-07 Francisco and I took two walks on railroad tracks this weekend; one on Saturday morning and one yesterday morning. Therefore: Things I Learned From, or About, The Railroad This Weekend -- 1) There's some mysterious connection between trains and those small opaque plastic juice containers--we saw So Many empty ones discarded on/near the tracks this weekend. 2) People have invented rail bikes! Like, bikes you can ride on the railroad tracks! Designs vary from adaptors you buy to put on a regular bike, to small trolley-like conveyances (for tracks no longer used by trains). I think we need to make/get some rail bikes, but what design to use? Hmm. 3) Yellowjackets and other waspy creatures really like nesting in split rail ties or under the ties, if there's space. I think we need to start carrying an emergency can of wasp killer with us, in case there's a swarm. On our walk yesterday, I really thought one nest was starting to swarm, and it freaked me out. 4) Writing/drawing on freight trains with paint sticks is just about the most fun thing ever. 5) Turtles are drawn to train tracks. I saw more turtles and shells of turtles this weekend than I've seen during the past few years. One turtle hissed at me when I tried to move him to a safer location, so I called him a bitch and left him where he was. He was not harmed--he had moved on by the time we passed by his former location on our way back, and there hadn't been any trains. Besides walking on train tracks this weekend, we watched 3 Netflix: 'Monster', 'Strangers In Paradise', and 'Sharpe's Honor', the 6th in the Sharpe series. On Sunday I took Boy to see 'Without a Paddle', which was, as expected, largely stupid, but which had some really funny parts anyway (also as expected). Funny stupid movies are something Boy and I both like, so I think we'll be going to more and more of them as time wears on. Francisco will not accompany us, for he doesn't appreciate the funny stupid. I also did some cleaning this weekend, including the Big Dusting, which involves getting out the vacuum with the hose attachment so I can remove dust from behind furniture and get the cobwebs out of the corners of the ceilings. I know I shouldn't have let the cobwebs form there in the first place, but baby, I'm BUSY. Maybe after Mitch Masters, Private Investigator has become a wildly successful book and movie series, a la Harry Potter, I will have a cleaning person who can keep the Big Dusting done all the time, but until then, if I don't see it, it's not a problem. Boy bought himself a new Playstation game this weekend and this headset thing that allows him to talk to the other online game players, and it's been hard for us to get used to. He'll be sitting there playing his game and suddenly he'll say something, and for a second I'll think he's talking to me, until I realize he's just said "when are we going to get a new map?" or "I'm going to come around from the left this time". It's like he's become The King of Nonsequitors, but what I think will probably happen is we'll get used to him talking to invisible people all the time and won't pay attention when he's actually addressing us. That would seem about right. Other things I did this weekend include reading, knitting, taking pictures, and ..... that's about it. When I uploaded pictures from the camera on Saturday, there was one on there I took last week that I thought hadn't turned out, but I was wrong and I love that picture! I'm looking forward to Francisco taking some pictures of Boy (to send to relatives, in lieu of the bad ones taken at school) because when we order the Boy pictures from iPhoto (or whatever the hell the Mac photo place is called) I'm going to get prints of some Scotland pictures and others I've taken that I like (including the one from last week). I will then frame them inexpensively and put them in my office at work and it will be like my own mini art gallery. See, for me and this job, it has to be about the small things--the things I can do to distract myself from the inherent badness of my work. A mini art gallery will do just fine. Not feeling too inspired today; I have done my best. Love,
come over some time & see me - 2011-02-25 |
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