#ThrowbackThursdays - #ROW80 - Artwork For Sale (Ha Ha)

I posted this four years ago today and when it popped up in my Facebook feed I was delighted, because I remember how damned silly it was and I'm all for silly. I've done nothing but brood and carp over Trump and it ends NOW. I'm getting back to my fun, 100% fact-free posts and getting in shape for the A-to-Z Challenge that begins April 1, 2017 and in keeping with last year's theme, I'm going to continue to write about all of the hoo-ha that goes on around here on the Avenue. Nebraska Avenue, that is. There's just too much “specialness” going on to not take advantage of the human condition or the everyday idiocies I see, and boy howdy, there are a butt-ton of 'em, whatever a butt-ton is.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my little journey into the Visual Arts. My dear friend, YumaBev, or Bev Mittan-Ribaudo, who has Parkinson's Disease, is an actual, real-live, award-winning photographer, along with her Wonderful Husband. Just think of me as the anti-Bev. And, oh, yeah, I got those e. t. blues treated and am playing up a storm on the viola.

The trip to Japan was a smashing success in that I came back alive and Japan is still standing! I'll have more posts and tons of pictures to write about; I've just been busy unsnarling my life, since my phone never left Florida, along with my mind, apparently. I've been spending the time getting playing, practicing and caught up with doctor's appointments and untangling the fine mess that my bank made when they canceled my card 3 weeks early, because it wasn't a “chip” card. All is well and my financial status is good. Sheesh! Anyway, enjoy this little post that I originally wrote for #ROW80, four years ago today!

This is not just any artwork. This is artwork of the finest photography taken by my ever-shaking hand. Call me the anti-YumaBev. In terms of clarity, form and content. This here is some murky stuff. Just take a ramble through some of my fine pictures:

Jim and cat napping. If you look in the left 1/3 of the picture, you can imagine two white paws, very restful. Price: free.

See, I helpfully pointed them out. This is free also, should you wish to possess it. Actually, just copy the damn thing.

Animals make cute subjects for photographers, since I am not one, I find them to be a singular pain in the ass to try and take pictures of, yet I persist. This is what happened, when I was testing my new camcorder one night, which also has no night filter, and lent that extra-special dimension of creepiness we all hope for when we're taking pictures of the family doing family things about the house. . . alone. . . and in the dark.

I think I had some artsy-fartsy idea of seeing the cat through a victorian era lamp, but what I've appeared to have captured is some Lovecraftian "Colour Out of Space" horror that resides in our living room. Best call out Chthulu from under the kitchen sink. He's been napping far too long anyway. He needs to go on va-cay. Price: I give you Skittles to take this off my hands.

Before I took the famous picture of Mama kitty napping with Jim, I had to test the camcorder to see if it was photo-graphing or if it was taking moving pictures. Since I don't see well in the dark (or the light for that matter) it was highly necessary to stand in the kitchen and press several buttons at once on a device about which I knew nothing. (Gee, Mary, couldya have gone in the bathroom, shut the door and turned on a light? What? And ruin all this fine art and fun!) This is what we referred to as "learning" when I went to school to become a computer engineer. We had these things called "books" but hardly ever read them. This was a much more fun way to learn and also un-learn the messes we made that were referred to as "programs."

Anyway, I discovered the proper sequence for producing still photographs after many stops and starts and some amazingly amazing non-action sequences of my stove-top. Of course, I couldn't be bothered to turn on the light, because, eyes and I didn't want to wake the little darlings snuggling in the next room.

Bonus points for my finger in the lower right. Price: Let's haggle.

I haven't even gotten around to the videos yet. YouTube pisses me off. Every time I upload one, they say, "this seems a bit shaky, do you want us to fix it?" What, and ruin my great art? How do you know that's not part of my artistic statement on the world, YouTube?

Here's a picture I took of Mama and then I kind of morphed it with Pic Monkey. She was all sprawled out on the bed, happy as a clam.

It was too blurred, so I filtered it, and removed most of the shadows. She loves to sleep like this.

The only other pictures I've ever taken that were worth a damn was the one down below of her on my blog and some of my viola and the one I took of the house down the street. I'm no photographer, but it sure is fun taking pictures and I'll have more of my "artwork" on display during the A-to-Z Challenge, 2017!

#A­TO­Z CHALLENGE ­- LETTER "K" ­- KITTEHS

This is the first of my last batch of posts that will be written and produced on my old, old friend, and IBM Thinkpad, that I salvaged from my landlord, who works best with a hammer and is 80 years old. Out of nostalgia, after I repaired the thing, I offered him 50 bucks. He took 10. Okay, I'm a hell of a negotiator.

courtesy:oldcomputer.net   

My landlord salvaged this out of some junk heap. All I did was load an OS onto it, and tried to give it back to him. He looked around at my "computer lab". I said, I'll give ya 50.00 bucks for it." He said, "10.00. okies?" Okies. You can't kill these things.

Anyway, (like you're in the edge of your seat for this riveting story), I'm trying something with C++ on my souped-up septa-core. Corrupted heap at fal-de-rol blah blah blah. Blargle. I overclocked the CPU, which is no sweat for this puppy, but I have to back up, and go step-by-step to fix. All of this is for a gaming site, which I am apparently going to have a real job doing, so this requires Knowledge (which would actually work for #AtoZ and got a "K" letter out of it, but is dry as sand for no one who gives two farts for heaps, corruption, stack overflows, and sector). Since I'm batting 1.0000 in these types of things, it will be fixed.

courtesy:synapsessynergygroup.com   

I wish Miguel would find these in some junkyard. Introducing the IBM Glue gene Mainframe; puts the Cray to shame. I stood up against the side of one of similar style once, and the power flowing through them is amazing!

The other reason I'm doing this, is I'm going to be splitting Tampa, Nebraska and my environs for a week or so, and want to take this puppy on the road, thus want to make sure it's serviceable and that I'll be able to post something besides colorful crap that I can create and upload all day in PAINT. No one wants to see my horrible drawing; it's worse than my photography, which Lee McAulay over at #ROW80 insisted would get me hired for Paranormal TV. It's THAT bad and apparently genetic. 

I have not clue one as to what I was taking pictures of, why or when, but it was probably at night, because I am up mostly at night. Suffice it to say, they exist, and they were in my camera, so I must have taken them. The fool camera is one of these little cheap knock-offs that says it does everything. It does, but not well and it's a bitch to figure out. I couldn't find the really good one that I took of the stove in the dead of night, with no lights on and no flash. That one there is one hum-dinger of a photo!

I don't believe that I ever saw my dad pick up a camera, but my mother had no qualms about picking up a camera and taking a picutre of any old damn thing. Her favorites were meaningless pictures of the sky, with no landscape, so you didn't know if it was sunrisee or sunset and you were left with that timeless quality of just . . . clouds, in varying shades, close-ups of just. . . rocks because they were "interesting"; they weren't. Pretty much every rock is just like another, and people from the neck down, so she was either finding friends in Witness Protection Programs, or she was just too damn short to realize she was beheading all of her subjects. 

Of course, we all waited with baited breath, everytime she came home with a new batch of abominations, so that we all had something to have a good howl and screech over. She wasn't exactly thrilled when I went to Japan and came home with 11 rolls of film, that were just. . . bridges. I got a few people in shots, by accident, but I told her, "Well, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree." She thought a moment, when went "True. . ." Just because we knew our limitations was no reason to put down the camera.

courtesly:mymom   

I have seventy-billion pictures of stuff like this in my mom's effects. Cats doing various amounts of nothing. The ginger cat, named "Dwayne" actually looked like a stoner and sat like that all the time. I'm not sure who the other cat is, but he/she looks to be in mid-stroke; I'm guessing it's some form of playing. I am equally bad, if not worse when it comes to taking pictures of felines.

Of course, we always had cats, kittens, or kittehs. I have some of the most random shots ever of cats that she photographed. They always look drunk. I'm not sure how one pulls that off, but she was damn good at it. I can't get my cat, Mama, to do all those cute little things that she does and get any kind of decent picture. I must have 147 pictures of the back of her head. Most of the time she wants to lie on my mouse hand and grab my arm and go to sleep. This is all fine; I put a towel over my arms, because she does grab on.

Alex and I speculated about the kitteh population in and around Nebraska Ave. Before I moved here, I had never seen cats with the types of markings that these cats have. It's like they were all designed by a committee of exterior decorators. They're all part calico-tortoise-shell-tabby, with patches of solid color and/or white thrown in and there are about a zillion of them.

I do think that Mama is the Matriarch, or at least one of them. She has been spayed. We saw to that after we adopted her and her very last kitten was killed by a motorcycle, but she has two sons from previous litters who show up to visit and they have very similar marking akin to hers. 

A picture of Mama when she's actually looking at ME. I've since taken 83,749 pictures of her ass, her feet, the back of her head, but I've yet to get another head shot.

If you go on an evening stroll on some of the more secluded streets in V. M. Ybor, there are entire streets, where mini-Mamas are just lolling about on the streets. If you try to approach them, they run off to their owners' houses. The people have made a very good effort at controlling the cat population and adopting the strays, but the gene pool here is singular.

A bit farther to the east, in Ybor City, there is a lovely breed of cat that originated there, called the Havana Brown. These cats are so, so dark chocolate, that you cannot tell they are brown unless they are in direct sunlight. They are rather small and the few that I have known are feisty little cats, but wonderful to behold.

These are some of my more recent attempts. We're either getting ready to pass into an alternate universe, ala "Fringe", or I was having a really bad day with my essential tremor. In truth, she just KNOWS when that damn camera is coming out!

Mama kind of rules the places around here, and she can be a little con artist. For several weeks, she was letting me know that she didn't care for her dry food and that she really wasn't all that crazy about the wet food I was feeding her. I was pulling my hair out, trying to find something this elderly, cranky cat would eat. I would give her some bits of rotisserie turkey that I got from the deli; bits of cheese from my sandwich. I made some home-made meatballs; she liked those. Then, last Sunday, I walked into the kitchen, and caught her chowing down on her dry food. She looked up at me, with a look that said "I am sooooo busted!" As my friend Jeremy says, "That's cats for ya!" Indeed.

#ROW80 1ST QTR POST 18 - WEDNESDAY CHECK IN – ARTWORK FOR SALE (HA-HA)

And this is not just any artwork. This is artwork of the finest photography taken by my ever-shaking hand. Call me the anti-YumaBev. In terms of clarity, form and content. This here is some murky stuff. Just take a ramble through some of my fine pictures:

JC and cat napping. If you look in the left 1/3 of the picture, you can imagine two white paws, very restful. Price: free.

See, I helpfully pointed them out. This is free also, should you wish to possess it. Actually, just copy the damn thing.

Animals make cute subjects for photographers, since I am not one, I find them to be a singular pain in the ass to try and take pictures of, yet I persist. This is what happened, when I was testing my new camcorder one night, which also has no night filter, and lent that extra-special dimension of creepiness we all hope for when we're taking pictures of the family doing family things about the house.

I think I had some artsy-fartsy idea of seeing the cat through a victorian era lamp, but what I've appeared to have captured is some Lovecraftian "Colour Out of Space" horror that resides in our living room. Best call out Chthulu from under the kitchen sink. He's been napping far too long anyway. Price: I give you Skittles to take this off my hands.

Before I took the famous picture of Mama kitty napping with JC, I had to test the camcorder to see if it was recording or if it was taking moving pictures. Since I don't see well in the dark (or the light for that matter) it was necessary to stand in the kitchen and press several buttons at once on a device about which I knew nothing. This is what we referred to as "learning" when I went to school to become a computer engineer. We had these things called "books" but hardly ever read them. This was a much more fun way to learn and also un-learn the messes we made that were referred to as "programs."

Anyway, I discovered the proper sequence for producing still photographs after many stops and starts and some amazingly amazing non-action sequences of my stove-top. Of course, I couldn't be bothered to turn on the light, because, eyes and I didn't want to wake the little darlings snuggling in the next room. 

Bonus points for my finger in the lower right. Price: Let's haggle.

I haven't even gotten around to the videos yet. YouTube pisses me off. Every time I upload one, they say, "this seems a bit shaky, do you want us to fix it?" What, and ruin my great art? How do you know that's not part of my artistic statement on the world, YouTube?

Here's a picture I took of Mama and then I kind of morphed it with Pic Monkey. She was all sprawled out on the bed, happy as a clam.

It was too blurred, so I filtered it. She loves to sleep like this.

The only other pictures I've ever taken that were worth a damn was the one down below of her and the ones of my viola and the one I took of the house down the street. I'm no photographer, but it sure is fun taking pictures.