Panegyric to Aprettypickle

A favorite new blog is aprettypickle. Just found it of recent. The author is a favorite too. Reading it over inspired an "adventure shopping" outing today with Miss Carmen, Little Toot and Aleve. We had coffee and took off for lunch in a new spot that turned out to be at La Perla La Pacifica out Preston Highway. Get the fried fish tacos if you go. They come five to a plate.

After lunch we hit the Viet Hoa Food Market (7100 Preston Hwy) inspired by aprettypickle. Captured the top five photos. Aleve went home with the pig.

Imp

A puckish little sprite.

Solstice Wish

Solstice wishes are a double edged sword. On the one edge your wish may not come true. On the other, it might. Either way the spin of the dice has a way of changing things around so what you thought you wanted isn't and vice versa. Carrie and Zac threw down another good one however the wish turns out. And for that... we are all indebted.

SHINE ON!

We have passed the Solstice point so it's time for a little winter shine. But due to a little wobble thing going on with the tilt of our planet and the sort of wiggle room that comes with Milankovitch cycles (you wouldn't really google something like that would you?) our planet doesn't reach perihelion until January third this year. So in between Solstice and perihelion I declare these days "of particular interest." And as such, they require our utmost attention. I shall ponder them over shine and radio.

Bathtime for Little Toot

I am thankful that Little Toot is beginning to have a neck. Baby necks are awful things. They get sour milk all down in the folds of fat and it starts smelling like someone didn't take out the garbage. Grunge neck. You'd be holding this little lass and looking around for what rotten garbage was on the floor. Nobody told us that. It's something you find out for yourself. So...all you expecting first time parents. Forewarned.

Hornbeam Replay

October 1, 2008
November 9, 2008
November 23, 2008

And incidentally...nobody prunes these.

Walnut Revisited

Back to the walnut. Probably won't blog about her again until she starts leafing out come spring. The top picture is just before she lost her last leaves and the bottom picture is from a few days ago. Love me some November skies. Now it's time for the grand darkness. I will bear it until mid February. But then I will begin yearning for that first spring thunderstorm when I can throw open my bedroom window and let the house breathe again.

Flag Therapy

Obviously you are on your computer. I would like to suggest it's time to relax a bit. Take a deep breath, relax your shoulders, clear your mind and click on this video. And if you have never spent a few minutes laying at the base of a flag pole watching a banner blow in the breeze, perhaps you should.

Nekkid Gingko

I wasn't there to witness it this year but the gingko leaves fell. She's nekkid and ready to bed down for the winter now. I'll try and keep you posted as she wakes up and gets dressed in spring.

The top photo was taken on October 29th and the bottom photo was taken on November 21st for those of you keeping track of seasonal changes. (Like Ketti for example.) Gives you an idea of the color shift that happens.

Hand Clicked Photos of Hand Clicked Video - A Review

Consider this my photographic review of an event that took place at the Green Building on Market Street last evening. Billed as an evening of "hand clicked video" what it actually turned out to be was one of the most interesting visual collages of 2008 and there's a good bit of that year behind us now. Bill Terry (I have a Montag cd. It's a favorite. Most people know Bill as a Wild and Woollyian.) was the jockey behind the hard driving list of 40+ videos stitched together into a YouTube list that "clicked" off in the new screening room of Gill Holland's Green Building on Market Street. Bill must spend a good bit of time pursuing things that lesser folk would dismiss as digital clutter. For me, seeing the video clips cobbled together through the Bill Terry lens was a like waking up from a 50 year nap on the couch with the tv on. Lots of half memory, a sore neck and vague recollections of plot lines and commercial pitches. The highlights for me were some old 7-up commercials, a wide-eyed bird animation from Sesame Street and a hillarious clip of Ed McMahon in his cups on the Johnny Carson show. A few of the clips dragged on. I caught myself watching the little white ball at the bottom of the screen march slowly toward the finish line more than once. But that's a small price to pay. The audience would fall silent during those passages but most of the time it was giggles, grins and commentary added by audience and nearby friends.

I think this is a concept with legs. Hope the Louisville Film Society can start this up as a regular showing. Perhaps they can bring back the community lecture series in conjunction. I would love to go to a lecture by one of our local creatures of creativity backed up by found video. Or maybe Bill Terry can just do this once a month. I get the feeling we didn't exhaust his bookmarked favorites list.

The Green Building was the other star of the evening. A newly renovated masterpiece without the "new building smell." This is Gill Holland's project to bring a LEED Platinum building to town and no matter what the US Green Building Council thinks the place is a new Louisville gem. The project used most of the wood removed from the project in early demolition work to create "new" flooring, supporting beams and columns and interior framework. I can't wait to go back to future events in this space. I do think that the smoking crowd should move a grander distance from the front door next time though. So much hard work went into making the indoor air quality of the building a top priority. Hope I can put up a photographic review of the building in a future blog.

The photos in this review were captured on an iPhone using the CameraBag application on lolo mode. Shooting video is potluck. You get what I got. No editing.

Waiting for the Fall

The gingkos at Bernheim on 11-7-08.

Farmers Market Haul - 11/8/08

More greens... mustard, kale, turnip greens. Sweet fall carrots. Turnips. Local cheese. Acorn squash. Sweet taters. Gonna have corn bread with this, roast a local chicken, and then sit around drinking good Kentucky bourbon on the porch.

Wanna come over for dinner?

More Fall Color

Here's some more fall color captured on an iPhone camera using that CameraBag application on Lolo mode that I blogged about earlier. Click on the photo and check out how cool the grainy image is. I love gritty little images like these way more than the clarity of the sharpest lenses. I want to see better than the cameras I use. That's not a problem with this equipment.

This is a gingko shot on November 6th. What I love about gingkos in the fall is not just the color. They lose all their leaves in a few short hours. The leaves literally rain down from these trees in two hours leaving a yellow puddle under the tree. If that happens on a day that isn't windy it looks like a yellow nightgown has slipped off its shoulders. Nature is so damn sexy.

Homemade Things

Our friends have made Ruby so many wonderful things and it's hard to say how much we appreciate that. Ruby's hat was knit by Janey Girl, one of my best friends from Tallahassee days. And the cute little hand sewn kitty was made for Ruby by Airy who lives just a few houses away. The purple underbelly was from one of her favorite shirts that wore out from loving it so. And this isn't all. We have a nice cedar chest that this will all be stored in after Ruby grows out of it or quits carrying it around so she'll have it for when she's a big girl and will appreciate such things in a brand new way. So... thanks to all of you that have been so kind.

Miss Ruby has tons of clothes and all of it, with one or two exceptions, is handed down. Not only is it soft and comfortable from use but it also lowers the carbon footprint of buying new things. This little pumpkin outfit was a fall favorite. We are gonna scoop her out and make a pie out of her.

Climate Change is Good for November Strolling

Strolling in shirt sleeves on November 2nd. This has been a lovely fall.

Maple Gingko Maple

For the record and in my opinion:
Peak fall color this year is/was November 4th through November 9th.
This is a revision of an earlier estimate.

Black Maple
Gingko
Sugar Maple

BINGO

Yes we did.

Ruby's Civic Duty

We consulted Ruby in our voting this morning. Our method:

Say "ehhhhh" if you want us to vote for Barak Obama.
Say "John McCain" if you want us to vote for him.

Two votes were cast.

Bamboo Wire and Wind

My friend Mike is making these really cool kinetic sculptures made out of wire and string and rope and rocks that hang from springs on bamboo poles. Very soothing movements as the wind moves them around. This one is made from old tomato cages. We went and got more bamboo poles this past weekend for future projects. Watch for them in Crow's Nest blog entries come spring or so.

Lake Nevin after a Drought

Messing about with stitched photos. Click on the image and you can see it better. This is where I was mucking around (literally) looking for great blue heron foot prints this morning.

Union Endorsements

The Professional Porch Sitters Union, Local 1339 endorses the following candidates:

John McCain for Senator of Arizona
Sarah Palin for Governor of Alaska
Joe the Plumber for Flash in the Pan
George Bush for Most Likely to Obscuriterization
Dick Cheney for Waterboarding Team Captain
Mitch McConnell for somebodys fishing buddy
Anne Northup for St. Matthews block-watch chairwoman

and...

Barak Obama for President of the United States of America
Joe Biden for Vice President of the United States of America
John Yarmuth for Congress, 3rd Kentucky District

Feel free to print this out and take it with you to the polls on Tuesday.

Makes Me Wanna Pee More Creatively

This is cool but I heard that someone had worked out a way for an ink jet printer to build human organs. Instead of ink in the cartridges they put a slurry of living cells. The printer spits out a layer of cells and then they pass it over the same "page" again and build a new layer of cells on top of the first layer. Keep doing that while changing the cell pattern with each layer and apparently they can build a heart, or a kidney or whatever chittlin you need. Do you think meat vending machines are in our future?

Bag O Cameras

People that know me would probably find it surprising that I take time to promote something technological but I found something so cool I'm gonna. First...two little facts as way of providing back story: My favorite camera is the cheap plastic Holga, and, before I got my iPhone all I had was an old school rotary dial phone.
Since iPhone opened up their platform for the development of new "applications" I have spent a little time looking for things that would make my phone more useful. There's not much out there that has really tweaked my interest but I recently found one called CameraBag. It allows you to apply effects to the photos you take with the iPhone so they end up looking like they were taken with different style cameras. The top photo is of a zennias taken with the 1974 option. It gives you those tweaky saturated colors like old postcards. The second one is of a black oak I took with the Lomo feature. Those photos print out with a nice white border around a square image. Love that. And the bottom photo is of a maple I took with the Holga option. You get the vigneting at the corners and the dirty square image the Holga is famous for. In the actual application they call them Lolo and Helga as a cheap ass attempt to avoid trade mark infringement I suspect. You are still limited to the camera capabilities of the iPhone but like all tools you begin to learn what they do well and what they do poorly. The other camera options with the application are cinema, Ansel Adams, 1962, and infrared. If you have an iPhone and like taking pictures you should check it out. You can also apply any of these camera options to your existing photos. It cost me less than two cups of coffee. You'll probably see more photos on this blog soon. Having fun with it.

Walnut Revisited

Here she is again. If you go back to earlier posts you can see this walnut before she started shedding leaves. Isn't this sexy? Keep posted and I will give her to you bare. Just trunk and branches and stems. Naked. Save for the miscellaneous leaflet. Just enough to tease.

Haunts of Billy Goat Hill

In our neighborhood folk really dig Halloween. A number of the families that have lived here for generations have been employed in the surrounding cemeteries as grave diggers. As All Hallows Eve draws nearer I'll capture and post a few more. My personal favorite is the home to Timmy Texas. Timmy owns a hearse. And unless he has a storage shed somewhere his house must be absolutely jam full of decorations all but one month of the year when they all get trotted out into the yard. Timmy Texas also has what has become my favorite business card of all times. It is plain white and all that is on it is... "Timmy Texas - Services" That's it. No number, no address, no explanation of exactly what services. He's a man that cuts to the bone.