Chainbloging: "a sky full of stars"

I grew up in Denver, Colorado not thinking about how the sky looked. It was just there, blue in the daytime and black at night. People from out of state would always talk about the sky. They would marvel at how bright the sunlight was and how blue the sky. At night they would stare in wonder at the heavens and say something about how the stars looked close enough to touch. It wasn't until my husband and I moved to Florida that I understood what people were talking about.

My husband got a job in Tampa and we made the trip to our new home by car. We were almost at the end of our long drive when we stopped at a restaurant in Jacksonville for a late dinner. As I got out of the car I looked up at the night sky and froze. Something was wrong with it. It wasn't black enough and it wasn't deep enough. I also noticed there weren't enough stars in this strange sky and the stars that were there were farther away than they should have been. Also, they didn't look right, they looked as if they were underwater. Then I understood.

I was looking at stars that were now a mile farther away from me than they had been in Denver. I was also looking at them through an atmosphere that was more dense and humid that skies above Denver. "My" stars looked like flicks of white paint on a board painted jet black. These stars were smaller flicks of white paint on black velvet.

I never did get used to that velvet night sky. When we moved back to Denver a year later I was happy. That first night back in Denver I looked up at a sky full of stars close enough to touch and I knew I was home.

This is part of a chain of posts linked together by word association. The previous link in the chain was here. If you want to write another link here's what to do: Find a word, phrase or theme from this post to inspire your own and go and write it. It's that simple. Try not to write something that's similar to this post. That way the subject of the posts along the chain will vary. E.g. if I write about going to the doctor's, then don't talk about the last time you were ill, instead describe how you used to play Doctors and Nurses with the girl next door. Get the idea? Your post can be in any style you want. Copy this paragraph and tack it onto the end of your post, updating the link to point here, then leave a comment here that points to your new post.

Chainbloging: "colour tone and hue"

Chainbloging started over at Dave's and we thank him.

I love black and white photography. It speaks to me in a way that color photography does not. Now, I am not saying that I don't like color photography, just that black and white touches me in a different way. My brain sees a black and white photo differently than it does a color one.

Color photos explode in my face and take my breath away, color photos demand to be looked at, color photos vibrate. Color photos make me take a mental step back as I look at them. When I look at a color photo some of the colors looks as if I touched them my fingers, well, my fingers would sink into photo and then come away dripping that color off the tips.

Black and white photos are different. Black and white photos are soothing, black and white photos draw me in, black and white photos whisper. Black and white photos make me take a mental step closer to examine them carefully. With a black and white photo my brain can see deeper because is not distracted by the colors the way it is with a color photo.

For me, if color photography was music it would be Rock And Roll and black and white photography would be Classical. Neither one better that the other just different.

This is part of a chain of posts linked together by word association. The previous link in the chain was here. If you want to write another link here's what to do: Find a word, phrase or theme from this post to inspire your own and go and write it. It's that simple. Try not to write something that's similar to this post. That way the subject of the posts along the chain will vary. E.g. if I write about going to the doctor's, then don't talk about the last time you were ill, instead describe how you used to play Doctors and Nurses with the girl next door. Get the idea? Your post can be in any style you want. Copy this paragraph and tack it onto the end of your post, updating the link to point here, then leave a comment here that points to your new post.

Update: Link five in this chain is here.

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
-Carl Sandburg

The town was covered in fog this morning. Joke-What is fog? Answer-A cloud that knows someone. I love walking in fog. I took the dogs out west of town to run, walking in the middle of the dirt road that climbs up the hill there. A wind was blowing the small drops of cloud condensation in my face, making the tiny drops sting as the hit me. I walked up and out of the fog as I climbed the hill. When I got to the top I looked back at the town and could only make out the tree tops peeking through the mist. The clouds spread across the sky above me looked as if a giant wet hand had smoothed the undersides of them, blending them all together in one great smear of grey. The sunlight had been diffused by this mass, causing the underside of the clouds glow.

I turned and watched my dogs as they hunted for the scent of bird or rabbit in the field to my right. Today Kate was in the lead with Emma right on her tail. Whenever Kate stopped to sniff at something Emma would rush up to thrust her nose right at the spot were Kate's nose was holding. Somedays when they hunt Kate lets Emma do all the work. When Emma takes off on a run Kate stands still watching her. She lets Emma run around searching for a scent. When Emma finally stops, because she thinks has found something, Kate races over to see if anything is there. If there is a scent, Kate follows it, if not, she just watches Emma again as she runs off searching for another scent.

I start walking again and pass a field that has had it's wheat crop plowed under. Last Friday night the temperatures dropped below freezing killing any wheat that was at the flowering stage. Last week this field was covered in a thick blanket of green wheat. Today its covered with a brown blanket of dirt that has a swirling pattern of green and yellow lines running through it. The green and yellow lines are dead, uprooted wheat plants. I swear if farmers weren't farmers they would be professional gamblers and living in Las Vegas.

By the time we head back to the truck the dogs look like they have been sprayed with an undercoating of wet dirt. Their legs, chest, belly and butts are covered in mud. When I call they run up to me panting, with big smiles on their faces. They have had a productive morning and I take them home and reward them with breakfast.

Sleep

Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark.
-Mary Stewart

[Sleep is] the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
-Thomas Dekker

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.
-Homer

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
-Walt Whitman

...our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
-William Shakespeare

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
-Fran Lebowitz

To Sleep: Perchance To Dream

To sleep: perchance to sleep.
-Me


Finally. Finally. Finally. Today I took the Continuous Passive Resistance machine back to Apria. Since the day I brought it home I have not had one restful night. I have been operating sleep deprived for about four weeks.

My husband sleeps better when I am lying beside him-which is great because I feel the same way. So, for 28 nights I have been sharing a bed with him and that damn machine. The thing took up one-quarter of the bed and made this low noise when it was on. A kind of noise that would wake me up at least four times a night because it was the same sound the refrigerator started making just before we replaced it. Add to that my husband's snoring-something he does when he sleeps on his back. Add his need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night; which I normally sleep through but since he had to untangle himself from the machine, the bedsheets, the blanket, and then scoot himself down to the end of the bed to get out of it, his leaving would wake me up. So, I've been walking around in a kind of zombie state for the last two weeks. My mind is operating on a two seconds delay in processing information.

My husband is almost as glad as me to see that machine go. The last week of lying with his leg in that machine was torure for him. He is not a back sleeper so being forced to lie in that postion for eight hours was almost unbearable for him. But he did it because he knew it would help his knee heal faster.

We are both looking forward to tonight. Tonight we get to sleep in a bed that now looks five times larger without that machine in it. A bed in which we both can stretch out. A bed in which we can both get a good night's sleep.

WAR

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
-Robert E. Lee

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
-Carl Sandburg

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
-Jeannette Rankin

War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.
-Georges Clemenceau

Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.
-W. L. George

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
-Mao Tse-Tung

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
-Will Rogers

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
-Jimmy Carter

War is not the answer.
-Marvin Gaye (What's Going On?)

This Is Broken

What we have here is failure to communicate.
-Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke


Found an amusing website called This is Broken. People send in examples of places, things, and websites that have had a serious break down in communication. My two favorite so far are this sign and this audio clip.

Subject: Breasts

(o)(o) Perfect breasts


(+)(+) Fake silicone breasts


(*)(*) High nipple breasts


oo A cup


(O)(O) D cup


(oYo) Wonder Bra breasts


(^)(^) Cold breasts


(Q)(O) Pierced breasts


(p)(p) Hanging tassels breasts


\o/\o/ Grandma's breasts


(-)(-) Flat against the shower door breasts


|o||o| Android breasts


($)($) Pamela Anderson's breasts

(from Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Other Women by BJ Gallagher)

How I Feel Today

There was a hot desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On a night like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of a carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.
- Raymond Chandler's opening paragraph in his short story "Red Wind."

Temperatures in the upper 80F's/20C's with winds gusting between 40-44 mph. The National Weather Service has issued the following advisories:
Tornado Watch
High Wind Warning
Wind Advisory
Hazardous Weather Outlook

Two days of this now. My husband's neck is begining to look very interesting.

I Met A Dog Who Wasn't There And A Dove Who Was.

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away.
-Hughes Mearns

Got to write these two things down or I will never get them out of my head.

I had a strange experience early yesterday morning when I took my dogs for a run. It happened when I was heading back to my truck. While I was walking I looked around to see where my dogs were and saw Kate to the right of me out of the corner of my eye. I then looked down the road toward where my truck was parked. The road was empty- no cars, no people, no animals. Then about 40 feet in front of me a dog appeared in the middle of the road.

At first I was confused because I thought what I was seeing was Kate and could not understand how she got down there so fast. I was looking straight at the dog when it disappeared. I mean, one second it was there and the next it was gone. As my mind was trying to grasp what I had just seen Kate ran across the road about five feet in front of me. I wondered if what I had seen had been Emma and looked around for her. She was behind me, far out in a CRP field. What ever I saw, it wasn't one of my dogs.

The whole thing spooked me. One second I was looking down an empty road and the next instant there was a dog trotting down the middle of it and then, click, the dog was gone. When I replayed what I had seen in my mind I realized the dog I had seen was larger than both my dogs. It had a long tail, a coat like a collie, and it was kind of dirty white and brownish in color. My dogs are small, have very short tails, a uncollie like coat, and they are white with brown cow markings.

What had I seen, a ghost dog?

Later that morning I was sitting outside in the shade of my garage reading the Sunday Denver Post when I became conscious of the fact that a dove had just flown over my head for the third time. It came from somewhere behind me right over the garage roof and straight above my head. It landed on the top of a telephone pole in the alley.

The reason I noticed it was because each time it flew over my head it would coo very loudly. The third time I heard the bird I looked straight up and watched as it soared over the roof of the garage, dropped down a bit right above me, and then swooped up as it came in for a landing on top of the telephone pole. This happened three or four more time.

Each time I heard the loud cooing over my head I would look up and watch as the bird swooped over me and up to the top of the pole. Each time, after he landed he would turn around and look down at me. Well, after the sixth or seventh time I got up and walk around to the side of my house to see if the bird bath had water in it. It didn't. I looked up at where the dove had been sitting but he was gone. I looked up at the telephone pole that is placed right on the other side of the wall between my yard and the alley. This telephone pole is directly across from the birdbath. At the top sat the dove. I filled the birdbath and then went inside the house and brought out a slice of bread. I crumpled it up into little pieces and lay the pieces on top of the wall. The dove watched all of this very closely.

After I finished I stood in the driveway waiting for the dove to fly down to eat or drink but he didn't move. He just stared down at me from the top of the pole. I figured he wasn't going to come down until I left so I went back into the house. I was going to watch him from the kitchen window but got distracted and forgot about him. Later I noticed the bread crumbs were gone.

Was all of this a coincidence or was the dove trying to get my attention with all those flyovers?