(no subject)

Despite being sick this past weekend, Moira got me up and about to accompany her on a (slow) walk through the thrift stores of the Milwaukee burbs. Not to mention a trip to American Science and Surplus for their tent sale! Woo! Thanks sweetie; though I know you probably couldn't tell through the coughing and wheezing, I had a really great time!

Now, I have lots of pictures of the creepy-scary Vault of the Barbies of Kristallnacht, but prior to that, here's a pictures of a prosthetic leg from a whole other thrift store.





I was a little weirded out by that. Even apart from the fact that, in my admittedly limited understanding, these need to be carefully sized, formed, and adjusted for any individual user to be able to use them with any grace and efficiency....

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On an unrelated note, the reason I often ignore problems that relate to systems from the legacy $company-we-merged-with side of things is that, when I do take them and email everyone asking for at least a pointer on where to go with them, I don't hear back. Ever. Gah.

Hello? Anybody out there? System X that the user wants access to actually exists, right? It's not vaporware? Certainly somebody must know how to set it up....

(no subject)

The first time I read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, I was enamored with Wonko the Sane and the dwelling he named "Outside the Asylum".

But one of my favorite tertiary characters was the rain god who hates rain. He has pains-takingly categorized rain into scores upon scores of numbered types and variants simply because through the entire course of his life it was always and unceasingly raining. He hates rain. But being an actual rain god, though he doesn't know it, those storm clouds just adore him, and follow him everywhere to shower him with their love.

I was fascinated with this character mainly because I love rain and used to think I'd enjoy being in his position. I'm not so sure about that anymore. I still love the rain, and happily go outside to frolic in it, but after a few months, it might just get monotonous. So I would like to see more rain. Just not constant unending rain. If it never started and ended, I'd never get to see the incomparable radiance that a breaking storm paints across the landscape. And for all the talk about the golden hours of dawn and dusk for landscape photography, I've never seen a more awe-inspiring sight then some beautiful space, be it urban skyscrapers or winding natural canyons, awash in golden beams of sunlight dashing in through the dark clouds dispersing overhead.





Maybe I should be a photographer for a storm-chasing crew.

This was far from the perfect moment for this photo. I think I missed that while I was driving in toward Utica, where I made this picture. I better time would have been about when I made this, while I was still on the road there. And there's a lot that could have been better about it, both in composition and in lighting. But still, I love the cloud bank, boiling up over these elevator silos. I need to manage to get into downtown Chicago during a good hard storm, and get some images of the sky over the Chicago River as the storm clears.