View allAll Photos Tagged UNCONTROLLABLE
My friend Jin just translated what the sign on the light says, it is amazing.
Jin says,
"translation of the lighted advertisement in the photo: NEW! First on the earth! Professor Beef Tripe. Toilet bowl to be destroyed! Skin to glow! Body to recharge! The collaboration between octopus and beef tripe. Whole Octopus & Assorted Beef Tripe. Caution: Add to it the leeks & Raspberry Wine, for uncontrollable impacts!"
Pic By Pammy
Black n White
Reflecting upon history, things of the past that cannot change.
Self-inflicted torture, the everlasting pain of revisited experiences of yesterday.
Walking backwards through life ever dwelling on the uncontrollable.
Perception of hope withers to bitter disillusionment.
Ahead lies an unbeaten path, a road yet un-traveled, free from the wreckage of the trail behind.
A choice at hand, freedom or chains?
Embrace the hope of a new day.
Cast off the shackles of haunted memories.
Embrace the Beauty of healing love and redemption.
Embrace a new beginning.
Leave behind all fear and trembling.
Embrace the glory that overshadows remembrance-borne misery.
Memories that once tore the soul apart, sealed away in a whitewashed history.
No longer strangled by a hopeless outlook.
Embrace the beauty of a new beginning.
Embrace the gift of grace and mercy.
If you are interested in my works, they are available on Getty Images.
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I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.
- Richard Avedon
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● Non-HDR-processed / Non-GND/ND-filtered
● Black Card Technique 黑卡作品
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One of the most obnoxious, invasive, uncontrollable aquatic pests in fresh water bodies all over the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the world.
Remains in the Top 100 list of the Global Invasive Species Database;
www.issg.org/database/species/List.asp
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Water Hyacinth Flower
Eichhornia crassipes
Family Pontederiaceae
The Ghosh Grove, Rockledge, Florida, USA.
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The back of this print is stamped "week ending Sep 10, 1955" -- but I think it was taken a week or two earlier than that, probably when cousins Sherry and Ricky were visiting Omaha before the beginning of their school year back in the Washington, DC area...
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted.
11. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
This is Dad's father Ike, and the two girls are obviously Patrice and Aleda. I think the little kid in the middle is Douglas, son of Dad's brother Marvin. We were in Jensen, Utah, nor far from Vernal -- staying with the grandparents while Ray and Marion went off uranium prospecting in the hills of the Utah/Colorado border.
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
Click here to read my first post about her and see the photos of us getting her from her horrible previous "home": www.flickr.com/photos/dogislove/1795544836/
And here's the MOST RECENT UPDATED THREAD!!!: www.flickr.com/photos/dogislove/2250902536/
An update regarding donations being made directly to the veterinarian have been added below!
We have met our minimum target of $3000, which is wonderful!!! That is the low end quote of Amelia's expected treatment, so we're realistically expecting to need much more than that. And if spinal surgery is deemed necessary in the end, this number could go WAYYY up. We're hoping that does not happen, but we'll have to cross that bridge IF we get there. Thank you all who have donated so far. Every penny is appreciated!!!
************************************************************************************
CONDENSED VERSION (this page was & still is getting LONG!!! - lol)
Amelia left NCARES in November to go to Great Dane rescue to be subsequently placed in the home waiting for her. Amelia's GI problems worsened again, and we felt it best to wait until she was healthy before her adoption. This just hasn't happened, unfortunately.
Amelia goes from extreme diarrhea where she has uncontrollable leakage, to being impacted...and she is currently having he bladder & bowels expressed several times per day, and every few days she returns to the vet to have it done more completely. Since battling a horrible UTI, and finding blood & yeast in her stool, a herniation was found in her colon, which may explain the reason she is not able to strain to have a bowel movement, and may also be putting pressure on her urethra, preventing her from urinating normally. Another possible factor in her not being able to relieve herself normally could be the severe fractures from physical abuse that were seen on her radiographs, which have resulted in severe spondylosis & degenerative joint disease in her spine as they have healed. Despite such abuse and neglect, she still remains sweet and loving and trusting of humans. Truly amazing and inspirational.
Gloria, the rescuer who has been taking such wonderful care of Amelia, called me in tears last week, sobbing as Amelia licked her face. We had discussed that if Amelia required very expensive vet care to fix her problem, we just wouldn't be able to help her financially and we would have to have her euthanized. Our worst fears were actually facing us as she sat there with Amelia at the vet's office and she was told of the various tests & surgeries that lay in Amelia's future to diagnose & treat her.
Here's a breakdown of the complex coordination of events that will be coming together over the course of Amelia's treatment so everyone can sort of know "the game plan".
**Amelia's regular vet, Westbury Veterinary Clinic (WVC), is still waiting for some pancreatic test results to come back (in about a week).
**There are two separate offices in the same clinic...Veterinary Surgical Care (VSC) for surgeries and Veterinary Medical Care (VMC) for internal medicine. These two offices are run as two separate business in the same office. They do not overlap their billing at all.
**VMC (Dr. Nicastro & Dr. Jameson) will be responsible for doing Amelia's MRI, Echocardiogram if needed, CAT Scan if needed, and any other skilled diagnostic tests that may be necessary. Amelia has been referred here for her MRI which will be scheduled on 1/30/08 with Dr. Nicastro. This is the soonest open appointment. (Amelia was taken to WVC on 1/21, for another thorough bowel & bladder expression - this will be done probably several times by WVC to keep her comfortable until her surgery can be scheduled.)
**VSC (Dr. Bianucci) will be responsible for repairing Amelia's herniated colon, and at the same time any biopsies if necessary based on the pancreatic bloodwork which will be back to VSC by then. This surgery will happen hopefully the day after her referral appt on 1/30 to VSC-Internal Medicine.
**Once she recovers from the hernia repair, since it is the most urgent, we'll get her referred again to VSC-Surgery, who will do Amelia's myelogram to evaluate the damage to her spine to see if spinal surgery is necessary to improve the spondylosis & degenerative joint disease. If so, they would also do the actual spinal surgery if deemed necessary once those tests are in.
Phew!!! Amelia could have her own planning committee!!! lol For now we have the vet listed as VSC-Surgical for donations b/c we KNOW she will be having her hernia repaired and that's where the most expensive procedures will be done. Luckily, a lot of donations have been sent via Fundable.com and PayPal and checks mailed to NCARES in her name, so those funds can be sent directly where they are needed when they are needed.
Amelia is only about 2 years old, so she has lots of life left to live, and she's spent all of it except a few months being beaten and starved. She deserves this chance that all of you are making possible.
So, send this to anyone & everyone you know...if everyone who heard about this donated $1, it would be a miracle.
Donations can be made in several ways:
1. Donate via PayPal on Amelia's "Fundables" page at:
www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2008-01-20.5964....
We set the goal lower than we really need b/c if the goal is not met, all pledges are lost. But the goal has been met, so we're good to go there!
2. Donate via PayPal to North Carolina Animal Resource Education Services by using the email address MATTNELIZABETH@aol.com (the invoice will tell you it is going to the NCARES organization), or mail to NCARES, 741 Old Marshall Hwy, Asheville, NC 28804. Just put "Amelia" in the subject line/message somewhere.
3. THE VET'S OFFICE WILL NOT ACCEPT CREDIT CARD PAYMENTS BY PHONE. TO DONATE DIRECTLY TO THE VET'S OFFICE, YOU MAY SEND A CHECK MADE OUT TO THEM (SEE BELOW)...BE SURE IT HAS YOUR PHONE NUMBER, ADDRESS, AND DRIVERS LICENSE # PRINTED/WRITTEN ON IT OR THEY WILL NOT ACCEPT IT.
MAIL THE CHECK TO NCARES AT 741 OLD MARSHALL HWY, ASHEVILLE, NC 28804. WE WILL TAKE ALL THE CHECKS WE RECIEVE WITH US TO PAY THE BILL ONCE THE ACCOUNT IS CLOSED OUT.
If any extra is recieved by check, we will either return your check to you, or you may give us permission to make it out to either NCARES or to one of the other two vets who will be treating Amelia. Remember, checks made out to NCARES are tax-deductible, while those made out to the vet are not.
Vet's info:
veterinarymedicalcare.com/Home.html
Veterinary Surgical Care
Dr. Henri Bianucci, DVM
Mt. Pleasant, SC
843-884-2441
Gosh, I soooo hate asking for money, but it is not for me, it is for this sweet girl, so I have to do it. Thank you in advance to anyone and everyone who can give any amount at all! And if you can't donate, send prayers, well-wishes, & healing thoughts :)
Mirit Ben-Nun’s art exists within and beyond reality. She moves away from reality with aggressive and dense colorfulness which reveals an inner testimony of a threatened existence of women. The lines, points and shapes do not reproduce facts but emphasize the special charge of emotional coping.
Mirit Ben-Nun shows a rebellious spirit and tries to reach out to things not through wholeness but via searching for their expression and manifestation.
She explores personal identity and through it tries to define a complementary art, thereby illustrating the world and the nature of human culture. She focuses on the expressive dimension because of the exposure afforded by the uncontrollable moment that so much affects life in a rapidly changing global world.
The discourse between the inner world and the emerging reality is hyperactive and generates in Ben - Nun an endless sequence of works.
From the depths of feelings, dreams, anxieties and expressions arise rigid and exciting meanings of existence whose essence expresses adaptation difficulties and restlessness.
Dora Woda
I can't leave. If this gem has some importance, this could be my key back home.
What will I come back as? I have no idea, but I can't fear the future when my present is in dire need of help.
How does the gem work though? I can't just swing it at Ron and hope it does something.
Ron: "So, you've found the gem."
I quickly turn to where I assume his voice came from, the gem pointed ahead of myself.
Ron: "And you don't know how to use it."
Ron points his gun at me but I begin to scramble away. He's right, I have absolutely no idea how to use this and he has the upper hand unless I find something to defend myself.
Ron: "Running is smart, but your mind is failing with everyone else in here dead. Wasting more time gives me more power you see?"
I trip and fall to the floor; I try to get up but cannot. It's almost like I've gone numb.
Ron quickly gets to me while I'm on the floor, motionless.
Ron: "I've really played with your mind here, Victor. This is your body and you've let your own fear and disgust take control?"
I try moving my arm but it is of no use.
Victor "Do it. Kill me."
Ron: "And waste the perfect time to make you suffer?"
I begin to shake uncontrollably, my mind is almost rebooted, all of my fears and mistakes flash before me. I begin to sweat as I try and take my mind off of them but I can't.
Ron: "Afraid of Orr? That old man? He's as useless as you."
He's right. I'm afraid of a lot of things. What am I to do? I can't simply deny what is blatantly obvious to myself.
Ron: "Afraid of not being smart? To impress who? Your father who you also hate for no reason? Do you hate him because you know you're inferior, or is it because you think he hates you? Oh wait, I am you, I know it's both. It must hurt having no confidence in yourself. Luckily, I feed off of it."
A tear rolls down my cheek and onto the floor.
Ron: "Now you're crying? This really was easy. You were just made into a cyborg, y'know. I don't know why Silas kept your brain in here but I thank him. You're unfortunately not going to see me ruin your life, but maybe you will. There are ways around death in here, not that you'll be smart enough to find them."
Ron's right. I am afraid, I'm also afraid of myself. I begin to remember, I begin to remember something profound; an accomplishment. I suddenly stop shaking, I stop remembering, and my arms feel free.
I begin to think about more; I need to overpower whatever is holding me down. I begin to remember touchdowns, parties with my friends, pre-game rituals with my friends, until I reach a soft spot in my mind. My family. Though our situation was never the best, I found comfort in what little I remember of us all being together.
I find the strength. I quickly turn to Ron and extend my arm ahead of me, pointing the gem as precisely as I can. Nothing happens as Ron bursts out in laughter.
Ron: "I could plant one insignificant thing in your mind and make it significant to give you some sort of hope."
Ron grabs me as I go numb again.
Ron: "You want a view? Your dad had a view when I killed him. Maybe I can land you two near one another."
Ron pulls me towards the bridge in the middle of STAR Labs laughing.
Ron: "I hate making an event of this but your humiliation makes my day. Or in this case, my whole life."
He places me on the side of the railing. I look to the ground to see bodies strewn throughout the grounds.
Ron: "Want to play a game of 'I Spy'?"
Victor: "Just... kill me."
Ron grabs the back of my skull and tilts it down to the ground again.
Ron: "I said, we're playing a game! I spy, someone in a blue suit, dark brown pants and red blood all over."
Victor: "Stop."
Ron: "You see your father? You see what you will look like in a few seconds?"
Ron releases his grip from my head and begins to laugh again.
Ron: "I am so close but I just can't kill you. So. Close."
My sadness turns into rage; He's taunted me more than enough. That's when I remember, in the story with the Re-Gou Ruby. This is the Re-Gou Ruby. The pharaoh got power from it due to being vengeful.
I clench my fist as the Re-Gou begins to glow. My right arm turns silver, as I raise it, a blue bolt blasts into the bridge. I look to see Ron hold onto the bridge as his arm begins to vanish. He screams in pain as his eye begins to glow too.
Ron: "Oh god please no, I don't want to die, I don't want to die! Help me!"
I consider helping him, as he is myself, though the worst version of myself.
Ron: "Help me, Victor! Everything hurts! Please oh god!"
I fall to my knees as I begin to cry again. I wanted out but Ron's in pain, but who knows the consequences if I save him this time?
Ron: "I'm not ready to go. Please... Please!"
Ron begins to cry as I get to my feet. I inch forward trying to steady my arm.
Victor: "Ron, I'm sorry bu-"
Ron chokes as he pleas for his life.
Ron: "Don't kill me-please..."
He begins to sob as I inch forward.
Ron: "D-do it. I understand. Just tell mom one thing for me."
I can't handle it. This isn't real. He would've killed me with no hesitation. But he didn't. In the midst of my thoughts, the cannon fires right through Ron's head and a side of the bridge.
His decapitated body falls; its slow descent makes me fall to my knees again. I didn't kill him. I didn't. I begin to shake uncontrollably as I look over the edge. There, Ron is on the ground residing right next to my father. I look away as I feel nothing but pain, I look to the moon as I curl up in a ball. The light emitted from the moon grows stronger until I am almost blinded by it.
==================================================
*beep*
*beep-beep*
*beep-beep-beep*
Silas: "Victor? Victor! I have a pulse!"
So this is victory, or maybe even natural selection? This world is where just surviving means taking the hardest hits, what sacrifices must we make to just survive? A thought lingers in the back of my mind that maybe I shouldn't have been so lucky to be alive now, or maybe I didn't want to be...
Sitting on my deck today I watched this thunderhead grow with uncontrollable speed. An impressive power of what a mix of water, heat and wind can do.
I remember, when in my 20s, then an avid rock climber, when such a cloud buildup caused serious anxiety. Being in the process of scaling a mountain face and seeing a thunderstorm coming was not a good sign. More than once I was stuck on a cliff face while lightning, thunder and rain made my life miserable and occasionally dangerous.
See the younger me: www.flickr.com/photos/dragonflyhunter/2799820544/in/album...
Those days are long past. I watched this thunderhead rise skyward as if Thor himself was coming. Its belly eventually flattened and grew dark forming an anvil shaped cloud that started pushing lightning and rain groundward. The storm cloud passed south of my house. All I got was a couple drops of rain from it. I took a few steps to safely take shelter in the house before I got wet.
Boulder, Colorado, VERY Cold and windy, shaking uncontrollably so used high shutter speed, sky kept getting better.
I shot this on Saturday evening, after Scotch came home from his Friday morning throat surgery on his almost completely paralyzed larynx. He's going to have to tolerate his portrait being taken a bit longer now, though I'm fairly certain he won't have any objections.
He's had health issues since arriving in Los Angeles at the very end of December and while some were just symptoms of aging, the most prominent issue was Laryngeal Paralysis which ultimately seemed to be what would cut his long life short. It was manageable last Fall when it first came up and the cool weather suppressed a lot of the associated problems. The move here began in mid december and was in part a chance photograph my way across the country but also to take a seasoned canine roadtripper on the ultimate 4,000+ mile late in life car ride and eventually his first chance to see the ocean.
Out here, the condition began to worsen pretty quickly, even with the cooler, breezy winter conditions and once the temperatures began to rise again, I started to worry he wouldn't survive the summer. He stayed in most of the spring and summer in the air conditioning and his activities became very limited, despite his best efforts to continue doing the things he loved. Trip after trip to the vet for things including getting a urinary tract infection, contracting ecoli, and losing his hearing caused him to be terrified of the car since that seemed to be the only time he was forced to go anywhere. When he finally hit 13 at the end of October, I was extremely relieved because I thought maybe he'd be able to stick around through the fall and winter, however his conditions worsened dramatically after, with his terribly labored breathing switching to silent, very strained gasps for air. Even 5 minutes out and back in for the bathroom would cause either 45 minutes of uncontrollable panting or this fish out of water type gasping until he'd wear himself out enough to fall asleep.
About a week ago, I realized that he was dying and even though he was happy, his body wouldn't allow him to function properly. I tried everything I could to keep him calm and comfortable, while figuring out how to deal with all this myself. When it finally seemed like he may only have a few days left, I began to panic and decided the only chance he had would be to see if the surgery was still an option. When I called Thursday morning, they asked if a visit on Monday would work and I told them I didn't think he'd survive until then so he went in first thing Friday. If he was still a candidate for the surgery, he would have it later that morning and sure enough, I got the call around noon that the surgery was a success and "textbook" and that he'd be ready to come home with a new lease on life after this last minute reprieve of sorts.
I've never had to deal with a senior dog before Scotch entered that phase of life and for the first 3 years of his life, thinking he'd make it to old age seemed entirely unlikely as he dealt with numerous issues including seizures, extreme nervousness and anxiety and the inability to productively socialize with other dogs as a result. As he got older and healthier, I still sort of expected those seizures to return or some byproduct of those conditions to affect his health but overall he stayed very healthy. However, this past week, I finally realized I would have to make a decision very soon on whether or not his suffering was too much for him to endure.
I'm sure if you've read my descriptions about him over the last year or so, it may seem like I'm obsessed with him or too emotional about his outlook and to some degree that's true but really, he's more than just a dog to me. He represents a time period in my life that I've tried to hold onto for a long time. After my baseball career ended and I struggled to figure out my purpose, Scotch entered my life during a time when life was starting to look up. Over the last 13 years, nearly every aspect from that segment of my life have slowly disappeared: friendships ended, relationships came and went, all my belongings and reminders got lost or simply fell apart from age and he somehow became the very last link I had to all that. Through all the good times and bad, the one constant has been Scotch and I appreciate that more each day.
So anyway, extremely relieved Scotch is still around and I imagine as a result, the descriptions with his portraits will slowly become much more positive and optimistic. It sort of started to feel like I was writing an obituary with each posted portrait and sometimes I'd end up deleting the shot since what I wrote up was so depressing to read. I don't know how much time he will ultimately have but hopefully he can live out the rest of his life without much pain and discomfort and enjoy each day to the fullest :)
SCOTCH
Age 13
Hollywood, California
November 5th, 2016
SETTINGS
Canon T4i
EF40mm f/2.8 STM
ISO 200
f/2.8
1/13th second
The KF-38-2 robotic unit was meant to work as a maintenance robot in one of Octan Corporation factory. But a malfunction in his IA program turned it into a violent and uncontrollable unit. Before the security could disable it, it destroyed half of the factory it was assigned to.
Instead of recycling it, an Octan officer registered it on the Mech Wrestling Federation, where it became one of the most feared combatants. Despite its small size, it's powerful legs allows it to move fast and jump high, accessing its opponent electronics and weak points and tearing them apart.
My entry for the Mech Wrestling category for Andromeda's Gates Space Olympic Games
This was taken in the spring of 1956, after my parents had moved back to New York, and left me behind in Omaha to finish the school year. I stayed with a family down the street from us; this kid (Rudy Duda) was a classmate of mine in school.
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted.
11. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
The Hunter in the Red PVC Cap is still giving an impromptu rock and roll guitar rendition on his knee. Don't miss that.
the situation on the Tiger front has been grim for quite sometime. The Planet Earth is slowly relinquising its flora and fauna as humankind expands in uncontrollable numbers and fritters away Nature and its resources in a headlong dive to extinction for almost all.
Continuing the series
Tiger Tiger, Fading Bright !
The tigers in India are facing the toughest odds and are on the brink of being wiped out. There is a big industry based on tiger claws and bones etc that drives up the demand for the killing of this beautiful beast.
Men will buy a enlargement (is enhancement the right choice of word ?) of libido anytime anywhere but Chinese men will pay top dollars for tiger remains to increase theirs.
If you wonder why all the grand conservation efforts to save the tiger are failing, go no further then the politics of funding tiger conservation. It has been known for years that it is allegedly a big sham with mega bucks and mega publicity but almost nil results.
If you have the time it would be interesting to read some interesting thoughts and the current day reality on the tigers in an exchange between Thatzme and Aditya Singh from Rajasthan.
One can only hope that one sees a tiger in the wild in one's life time as the future generation may not have that privilege anytime soon. So if you are young and in India, head out and go see the elusive tiger before it is too late.
India has only 1150 - 1600 tigers that are available in the wild as per the Minister of Environment Jairam Ramesh.
Will Viagra be the Saviour of the Indian Tiger ?
This is an enactment of the situation at a Kerala street show during Onam in Thrippunithra near Cochin on the Atthachamayam day.
DSC_0841 jpeg via ACR
The house where we all lived in Omaha, from 1955 until the spring of 1956
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted.
11. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
*U* Yaaay, more pictures of Rift!
xD Haha, yeah, I was cleaning my room and organizing my dolly things today and when I opened the box that has my floating heads I was just so happy to see Rift that I had to dress her up and take some more photos. She's still so unfinished and a huge WIP that isn't at the forefront of my main thoughts/dolly plans, but gosh I do love having her around! xD Of course, she's stealing Eui's Fairyline body (since I only have one white skin minifee body at the moment) so when I have her all put together that means I can't have Eui out too which is a bummer but I'm finally at the point where I don't mind swapping them around as much and it isn't nearly as painful not having Eui around 24/7.
;w; Anyways, swapped out her eyes for these simple green glass ones and while they are a bit simple for my tastes I do reaaaaally love the color in her! I don't know, they really just go so well with her color scheme, so methinks green will be her permanent eye color from now on. xD Which I'm alright with since while I do have a ton of OCs with green eyes, I only have one other doll with green eyes at the moment and they are a completely different shade so that's good. I hate having too many dolls/characters with very similar hair/eye colors because then its just boring and repetitive, you know? TwT Anyways, I also stuck one of two wigs I have left that aren't already being used by dolls (I got rid of most all of my synthetic and fur wigs in favor of my handmade alpaca ones) and it actually looks super cute on her! xD Its the default Unoa Sist wig. Even though I don't really like fur wigs usually and I have no use for it I can't bring myself to get rid of it since I like it so much. Glad Rift can get some use out of it until I can make her a proper wig in the future which will be an awesome pastel blue/pink/yellow ombre methinks.
TwT Like I said, she isn't at the forefront of my dolly plans so I don't think she'll be getting a body of her own or many things of her own besides the wig soon, but I am very happy to have her around and am excited to work on her more in the far off future once my main Unicorn and Egyptian characters are shelled or better fleshed out.
T3T Anyways, i've been still been having a rough time of things lately as OF COURSE some IRL things have come up out of nowhere to once again rain on my parade but i'm still alive and doing my best, taking things one day at a time.
Also pretty bummed that because there is a new doll that was released that I reaaaaaaaly would love to get but because of these IRL issues idk if that'll happen. Really crossing my fingers though!
xD Honestly i'm positive I wouldn't even have to say what doll it is since i'm sure its incredibly obvious but yes, its Fairyland Momo. Because of course it is. SHES A BUNNY HELLOOOOO
;______; I was hardcore dying of excitement when I saw they were making Fairyline bunny parts because that would be PERFECT for my OC Petra, who is based of the Al-Mi'raj; the unicorn horned rabbit.
//Character ramble blah//
Canonically she has difficulty controlling her powers and similarly to how Euclid can transform their body to have more animal-like/fantasy features Petra can do the same, as all my Unicorn characters have the potential to do. Typically my unicorn characters, the Unitrios, do not transform themselves (either partially with kemonomimi features or in full beast forms) unless there is a strong purpose as it takes much more energy to maintain and is therefore not practical to do all the time. Its a sort of "right of passage" that all young Unitrios learn to control their energies and are able to transform themselves at will, once they are able to do so they are considered competent and mature enough to survive on their own. Petra, however, is different in that she was actually not raised by her own species and thus never knew about her powers or the potential she had until much later in life and subsequently has a much more difficult time controlling her powers. xD Well...its also very much her own fault since after discovering just who and what she is, she over-zealously tries to learn and master every aspect of what it means to be a Unitrios to make up for the time that was lost. She lived for many years believing that she was a frail and powerless one of a kind creature that must hide herself from the world so as to not be preyed upon by those who would certainly covet her majesty. After living a life of fear and powerlessness the realization that she has power enough to single-handedly build or destroy entire cities (xD Literally, her energy is that of earth and she can cause terrible earthquakes and fissures but she becomes a master architect/stonemason and can build entire cities by her self), she becomes a bit of a megalomaniac. Instead of building up and honing her powers gradually she tried to unleash it all at once before she was ready and becomes uncontrollable to the point that she can no longer temper her energy and revert back to her original "human-like" state. So canonically she is always partially transformed in the kemonomimi-like state with her bunny ears and tail always visible. Since she cannot properly control her energy, changes in her emotions, environment, or situation can cause her to further exude energy and become progressively more and more animalistic looking until she completely transforms into her origin form ("beast" form).
//End character ramble blah//
Anyway, In doll form I planned on her having her bunny ears and tail, but also having bunny legs for her too is PERFECT since she has so much difficulty controlling her energy and takes on a more animalistic appearance at all times.
Unlike with Euclid who has both human legs and their seahorse tail, I wouldn't really need both human and bunny legs for Petra since she's in her kemonomimi-like form at all times. Plus....Petra is kind of notorious for not wanting to wear clothes (she mostly hates to wear shirts and pants of any kind lol) soooo if she has those awesome bunny legs it'll look less awkward when she's not wearing clothes xD //shot.
;____; And like i'm dying because she was next on my list and I was hoping to order her in the next month or so but THIS IS SO PERFECT FOR HER ASDFGHJKL
Of course, she was going to be a tan skin Moe-line Mio but now with this happening I want her to be on the Fairyline bunny body in full tan (I think...maybe white so I could dye it idk) but still as the Mio sculpt. The only thing i'm kind of not sure about is that she'll be much taller with the Fairyline body and the bunny legs then I was thinking for her on the M-line body...but honestly i've been thinking canonically it might suit her better to be taller anyways so idk. ;___; It wouldn't even be that much more expensive to get her with the bunny legs AHHHH I'M DYING PLEASE HELP ASDFGHJKL
TAT Anyway, sorry for rambling, I'm just happy and sad and excited all at the same time since this is so perfect for her but I don't think i'll be able to get it ;_____; BUT I LOVE IT SO MUCH AND WANT HER SO BAD AND I JUST WANT TO SHARE MY GROSS DOLLY FEELINGS WITH OTHER DOLLY PEOPLE WHO FEEL MY PAIN SO FORGIVEMEEEEEEE
If by some miracle it does work out i'll be sure to let you all know though, especially since I won't be needing the Momo head so i'd want to find a new owner for that~
---
Rift (girl) is a modded Fairyland Minifee FLAM event head in Beautiful White skin. Faceup, mods, tattoo and flower crown by me.
Today's story and sketch "by me", you may recall the story awhile back of the uninhabited hard water Planet Z-D20 discovered by Rescue Randy, he discovered it when it broke his fall, while traveling at four thousand miles per hour, just after almost being sucked into a black hole when his experimental (DJNS), Dimension Jumper Navigation System, sent his Galaxy Glider somewhere midway through the Tachyon Two, faster than light wormhole, hurling through the Cosmos into the direction of a very large nasty black hole, how nasty no one knows, and lucky for Rescue Randy the most interesting living tissue crash test dummy in the Cosmos. He avoided the black hole only because of his lighting fast reflexes, he slammed the gliders controls into full (PMS), Plasma Matter Splatter, reversing the gliders trajectory away from the gaping black hole, known as the really big sucker near the Octane Star Cluster. But unfortunately without power and hurling uncontrollably until it could strike something solid like the Planet Z-D20, which it did, but if you have been following this Blog, you know he was saved by a school of intelligent sharks that live on Z-D20. Today I have traveled through the mancave Stargate in the 56 F-100, to search for Randy, he left the mancave a week ago to visit his shark friends on Z-D20, he took the Galaxy Skiff you see on the beach he loaded with twelve cases of Anchovy Moon Pies, and has been missing eversense. Above you see JB with two of his gal pals who are helping in the search for Randy, until next time taa ta the Rod Blog.
chaie time on my studio's roof top !
sorry folks for not being able to drop by your streams, I'm stuck with uncontrollable amount of work which pretty much seems to have become part of me till June !
thank you Allah jii for the weekends ....... my recharging source !
E X P L O R E D
This print has "Sep 55" stamped on the front, but it was taken during a Colorado camping trip, on the way back from Utah in the summer of 1955. I'm guessing it was about the third week in August.
(I have no idea why I have a bandage on my lower face. A cut? I was too young for acne at that point :) )
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Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted.
11. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
Drew, Ken and Christie
"be a little inappropriate
'cause I know that everybody’s thinkin' it
when the light's out
shame on me
to need release
uncontrollably
I Wanna Go all the way
takin' out my freak tonight"
[...was feeling creative so I made this set inspired by Britney's Femme Fatale album (March 29)]
Mirit Ben-Nun’s art exists within and beyond reality. She moves away from reality with aggressive and dense colorfulness which reveals an inner testimony of a threatened existence of women. The lines, points and shapes do not reproduce facts but emphasize the special charge of emotional coping.
Mirit Ben-Nun shows a rebellious spirit and tries to reach out to things not through wholeness but via searching for their expression and manifestation.
She explores personal identity and through it tries to define a complementary art, thereby illustrating the world and the nature of human culture. She focuses on the expressive dimension because of the exposure afforded by the uncontrollable moment that so much affects life in a rapidly changing global world.
The discourse between the inner world and the emerging reality is hyperactive and generates in Ben - Nun an endless sequence of works.
From the depths of feelings, dreams, anxieties and expressions arise rigid and exciting meanings of existence whose essence expresses adaptation difficulties and restlessness.
Dora Woda
What wouldn't I give to have a Moroccon in his 'jilaba', looking like one of those Carthusian monks in the mountains of Chartreuse France, trundling up that street, an old woman in her head scarf coming up her walking stick firmly clenched . . . what wouldn't I give to have a mother walking there, on the left, with a couple of almost uncontrollable young children and her shopping . . .
That would have been a picture with a story. This is merely a chronicle of my travels . . .
. . . and that is the tragedy of my 28 day trip to Morocco
. . . I am distraught :(
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3 February at 13.00 - 16.00 Rasmussen Quinteto feat. Leo Minax
Sophisticated jazzy folklore based on the highlands of Brazil! Steen Rasmussen has once again invited Leo Minax, one of Brazil's great vocalists, to Denmark. Together they deliver contemporary Brazilian music as we know it from Gilberto Gil, among others. Sophisticated jazzy folklore based on Brazil's highlands,
Minas Gerais, where Leo Minax has his roots. In addition, they delve into the songs of the bossanova's first man, Antonio Carlos Jobim, which Leo Minax interprets uncontrollably beautifully. Line-up: Leo Minax (BR, voc, g), Steen Rasmussen (p), Lis Wessberg (tb), Bastian Sjelberg (b), Martin Andersen (dm) 10 February at 13.00 - 16.00
Quickly, Mirror Master jumps out of the Mirror World into our world. He grabs a large metal bar and gets ready to swing it at the mirror so that Barry cannot leave the Mirror World. Inside the Mirror World, Barry jumps from mirror to mirror quickly to get to the portal before Mirror Master can break the mirror.
“Run, Barry, run!” Iris yells out
Barry gets to the last mirror and launches himself into the air.
Mirror Master begins to swing the metal bar.
The bar crashes into the mirror, but not until the Flash gets his head out of the mirror. Barry jumps into our world as the mirror shatters into a thousand pieces. A large shard lodges itself into Barry’s neck and thus causes him to drop to the ground quickly.
“Barry!” Iris yells as she runs to Barry’s side. She grabs him and lifts his back up into the air. “Barry, it’ll be alright! Wally! Hurry!”
As Wally approaches, Mirror Master aims his gun at another mirror and quickly shoots it so that he can leave quickly. He brings the pipe with him so that he can break the mirror behind him. He successfully does this before Wally can arrive next to Barry and Iris.
“Barry! What happened, Iris?”
“He got hit by the mirror.”
“I’ve got to get him to the hospital!”
”D-d-don’t… Iris... I…”
“Barry! Don’t leave me. Barry, you can’t do this.”
”Iris, I-I can’t feel my legs…”
“Don’t worry, Barry, I’ll get you help.”
”Don’t b-bother…”
“What?”
”It’ll be too… t-too late.”
“No, Barry, don’t leave me!”
”I can feel it… My heart is slowing… By the time I get there, I’ll be gone…”
”Stop that, Barry! Let me take you to the hospital!”
“Barry, I love you. I don’t want you to go.”
”Let me take you to Bruce, he has to have some kind of device that will help you.”
”No, he can’t help. No one can.”
“Barry, I love you.”
”I love you too, Iris… I always have…”
”Barry! Let me take you.”
“We were supposed to grow old together.”
”I’m so sorry.”
“No I am… It’s my fault…”
”No it’s not. I-I… should’ve st-stopped him when I-I had the chance… (COUGH)(COUGH)”
“Barry, don’t do this.”
”I love you, Iris.”
”Barry…”
”Take over here, Wally. I trust you.”
Barry Allen’s heart beat begins to stutter. Wally tries to check it, but he cannot feel it any longer. Wally jumps to his feet and grabs a metal chair. He throws it into a wall. The chair flies through the wall and into the next room. Iris begins crying uncontrollably as Barry’s eyes close.
“I love you, Barry.” Iris says as Wally takes Barry into his arms and begins to run him to the nearest hospital. He barges into the building and sets him onto a gurney. He yells for help and a nurse runs to his side.
“What happened?”
”He has a glass shard lodged in his neck. You need to help him.”
“He has no pulse.”
”Can’t you help him?”
“I can try. I need a doctor over here!” A doctor runs over to the gurney that Barry is laying on. The nurse rolls him into an operating room and closes the door behind her. Wally slumps down onto a nearby bench and waits for results.
Moments later the nurse slowly comes out of the room and sits next to Wally.
“We… We got the glass shard out of his spine, but unfortunately…” Wally doesn’t let her finish. He wraps his arms around her and begins crying on her shoulder. The shocked nurse wraps her arms around Wally to comfort him. The two sit there in silence as the nurse comforts Wally. “It’ll be okay…”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, yeah... Almost (if not more than) two years have gone by since I began writing Flash stories for the DCSG. When I first started I was promised to write Wally, as well he's my favorite, but we had to somehow kill off Barry to make way for Wally. This led to one of the main things that was supposed to happen in the group wide event "DOOM." If you remember about a year ago, me and Chris, SupremeDalekDunn, had began kicking off this event with the small Batman&Flash and Superman&Flash stories entitled "Countdown to Doom" and well... the countdown seemingly never stopped.
So here we are today, I asked Chris just a few weeks ago if it would be alright if I went ahead and did this myself, and he surprisingly (at least to me) said yes. So, I got to writing and building to make this volume one of the best things I've written, and while I'm not 100% sure if I accomplished this, I really had fun writing this and cannot wait to write Wally in the near future.
Oh, one more thing, there are still a couple issues left in this volume, so stay tuned for those. :D
February 14, 2011
A-Z through the DSM IVr
H: Histrionic Personality Disorder
People with this disorder are usually able to function at a high level and can be successful socially and professionally. People with histrionic personality disorder usually have good social skills, but they tend to use these skills to manipulate other people and become the center of attention. Furthermore, histrionic personality disorder may affect a person's social or romantic relationships or their ability to cope with losses or failures.
People with this disorder lack genuine empathy. They start relationships well but tend to falter when depth and durability are needed, alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. They may seek treatment for depression when romantic relationships end, although this is by no means a feature exclusive to this disorder.
They often fail to see their own personal situation realistically, instead tending to dramatize and exaggerate their difficulties. They may go through frequent job changes, as they become easily bored and have trouble dealing with frustration. Because they tend to crave novelty and excitement, they may place themselves in risky situations. All of these factors may lead to greater risk of developing depression.
Additional symptoms include:
-Exhibitionist behavior.
-Constant seeking of reassurance or approval.
-Excessive dramatics with exaggerated displays of emotions, such as hugging someone they have just met or crying uncontrollably during a sad movie (Svrakie & Cloninger, 2005).
-Excessive sensitivity to criticism or disapproval.
-Inappropriately seductive appearance or behavior.
-Excessive concern with physical appearance.
-Somatic symptoms, and using these symptoms as a means of garnering attention.
-A need to be the center of attention.
-Low tolerance for frustration or delayed gratification.
-Rapidly shifting emotional states that may appear superficial or exaggerated to others.
-Tendency to believe that relationships are more intimate than they actually are.
-Making rash decisions.
Well I'm full of mixed emotions right now...
On one hand Valentines Day sucked big time...but I knew it would. But I only cried once today so far...so I'm doing better than I expected. I'm guessing all the chocolate consumption helped too...but yeah, it's been a really, really rough day. I'm just glad it's almost over...
On the other hand I really am proud of this picture and like how it came out...hopefully I can redeem myself after my HORRIBLE attempt at a picture yesterday. ugh...if I could take it down I totally would. It was a disgrace....
One more thing: I'm trying to figure out how to make some money so I can move to California and be with Garry. I dunno if anyone would be interested in a book of my pics or of editing techniques I use or if anyone would take part in some kind of photo auction of some sort...please let me know what you guys think. I'm desperate for money...I can't be here anymore I NEED to get to Garry...at this point I'd rather be homeless with him than here with all the riches in the world but without him.
So for all you that haven't found out via email, Facebook or Instagram my son was admitted to urgent care early Monday morning.
My husband and I woke up to my son coughing uncontrollably at 4:30 am. We took his temperature and he was at 104. We put cool towels on him and gave him Motrin to bring down the fever. I also put some vicks vapor rub on chest and back to help him with the cough. We managed to it down to 101 in about an hour. Shortly after that he was vomiting so right away I rushed to urgent care.
My son has been going through a lot of health issues the past two months. My son has always had terrible sinuses, sometimes snores when he sleeps, has has a cough for over a month and he also get's ear infections a lot.
We recently saw an ent specialist last week Wednesday the doctor sent us to have an X-ray done of his ears, nose and throat. It was a chaotic week last week so I had planned to take him Monday to have it all done and then Sunday night happened.
While driving to urgent care my son was literally vomiting on him self as I'm trying to rush to urgent care and drive safely and try and not loose it. He was crying, I was crying. I only wished I had asked my husband to come with me cause when everything was going on I just said I could handle it go to work I will keep you updated. My son was a champ through it all. He got an antibiotic shot on his butt and from what the nurse and doctor said he did better than most of the kids they see there. The doctor sent me to get an X-ray done of his chest and it wasn't till Tuesday that we got the results which revealed that Troy was in the first stage of phenomena on his right lung. This was the worst of my fears. I was not expecting anything like this. And as a mother all you wish is that it could be you not your baby.
He's a fighter though. The first two nights were the hardest. I forgot what it's like only getting 4 hours of sleep and taking shifts with the husband so we both could get "some" sleep. Last night he did much better though he didn't cough as much and had no fever.
He's going to be on some strong antibiotics for 10 days. He hasn't been eating much and I'm pretty sure he's already lost a few lbs :( I know he will make it through this. I am so proud of him, he has inspired me so much. I know if it was me I wouldn't be as strong and brave as him. He's my pride and joy and make's me sooo proud.
Thank you all sooo much for your emails and prayers.
+more in comments
We took these last week I know the one I posted he kind of looks sad but he was actually smiling in most of them I just really loved how tender his eyes looked in this one. My beautiful baby boy. :)
My boy is napping right now so I will be making it to your beautiful streams :)
" Steer your thoughts towards a better direction. It's your time to refresh and elevate." ✨
Meva: M&M Gillian Blouse / Exclusive @ 13th Stree Event (Sept)
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Springgate/179/161/24
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5 Signs Your Aura Attracts the Wrong Crowd 🚫
www.flickr.com/photos/161478161@N05/53217283562
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After you change some personalities
1. You prioritize the quality of their hearts.
2. You don't love animals.
3. You choose yourself.
4. You have your boundaries.
5. You stand up for yourself.
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1. You prioritize the quality of their hearts.
☑ You're not afraid to assess their sincerity early on.
☑ You don't believe matters of the good heart require extended time.
You'd not give them 3-6 months or 1-2 years to change and demonstrate sincerity and a good heart so, you'll check at that point. Because you recognize that sincerity and a good heart don't need time, they should be assessed here and now, whether someone possesses them or not.
2. You don't love animals.
☑ You don't tolerate inhumanity. Anything deserving of a unique love, time, and attention must inherently possess a sense of humanity.
☑ You'll establish boundaries for your pet's demands, ensuring it doesn't expect more than its status permits.
For instance, you won't find yourself constantly changing your pet's food. Take the scenario where you initially bought liver-flavored kibble. When your pet refused it, the next day, you switched to lamb-flavored kibble, giving up on the liver flavor. After consuming only a 1/3 of the box, your pet became bored and started eating less. So, you purchased chicken-flavored kibble. Even after consuming of the half of chicken box, your pet still didn't eat much, leading you to try chicken and rice flavor, then chicken and spinach, and even chicken mixed with pumpkin. You kept changing the food out of fear that your pet wasn't eating enough, wasn't staying healthy, and you were concerned about its well-being, all without considering the cost and what you should reasonably expect in return.
You may eventually give up on pellet food altogether, choosing wet food instead. If that didn't work, you switched to raw meat. You even upgraded to premium raw meat, fueled by concerns that your pet might not enjoy it or that it wouldn't provide enough nutrition.
" Love and kindness should always be balanced with reasonableness, and it's important to set limits and boundaries to prevent them from becoming uncontrollable."
Establish boundaries. If the animal doesn't respond positively to your care, expresses dissatisfaction, or fails to appreciate your efforts, consider releasing it back into its natural habitat. Don't worry about how it will survive without your assistance. In this world, there are always people who cherish and care for animals, they will soon find themselves in a new place. Instead of feeling sorry and pitying them for letting go, prioritize your compassion and empathy toward yourself first.
3. You choose yourself.
☑ Respect yourself and your own needs before others.
4. You have your boundaries.
☑ Set boundaries and be strict about them.
☑ Don't let anyone cross the line.
☑ Don't give space to things that are unfair.
" Always remember that people may take advantage of you or treat you poorly only if you allow them to. Bad people engage in harmful and unfair behavior because good people appear weak and discouraged. Therefore, strive to remain strong and maintain firm boundaries."
5. You stand up for yourself.
☑ You have to be fearless and have the ability to deal with conflict, dislike, and hate from people who disagree with you or won't let you stand up for yourself.
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" What might you lose in this process to embrace these five personas?
You'll find yourself surrounded by positive influences because those with negative intentions will be less likely to be drawn to you and exploit you unfairly. Gradually, they will fade from your life, and you won't encounter new ones with similar intentions.
While you may initially perceive this as a significant loss, remember that there are still good and kind-hearted people in the world waiting to be discovered ."
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The most perfect and satisfactory reason to shape the hips, is that one can wear whatever women wear AND most important of all, what ever tranny´s dare. This is especially the case where the infamous ”too short skirt” is in consideration and especially as we witness above, when no skirt at all is used and is replaced by, what is known among women as a sweater/cardigan, but is WAY long enough to function as a dress in the T-girl universe.
It is only fair to say in defense of women that this sweater practically IS too short to function as a dress, resulting in potentially embarrassing situations plus one has to constantly pull it down. But what is considered annoying and even embarrassing among women, is considered QUITE sexy and attractive among trannys.
To day I really boosted the hips to the max. - Don't know why really, just felt like trying. But dear spirits what a result. Personally I am a ”leg man” (and woman... I guess...) but I really find hips is almost.. ”part” of that leg attraction.
Feast my eyes on a pair of beautiful legs and if the hips are just as perfect and harmoniously feminine.. trust me, looking further up the body I have VERY little critic what so ever to the rest.
But truly.. if such perfect legs are wearing sexy high heels, invitingly shining soft nylon stockings and a tight short skirt... my mind becomes VERY uncontrollable in its direction and focus, and my heart holds it breath so long, I need to forcefully tell it to breath again.
If women truly knew the power of these things and dared harness it's magic. They would not only hold men enchanted in their grasp, they would rule the world. *LOL* If women united world wide and denied men sex for some demand or reason, men would come crawling, begging within a week, bringing presents along with promises (though empty as they would be) of fulfilling any wish women wanted.
If any hypocrites ever claim that ”men are the strong sex”, know that in truth men are by far the most pitiful and pathetic. It IS no mere coincidence that far more than 9 out of 10 prostitutes on this entire planet are women. Further more if men denied WOMEN sex, demanding something in return, the world would never have heard such magnitudes, volumes and cheerful laughter from women, as women would most likely consider it a an invigorating experience, along side which treat it like a blissful vacation knowing very well men them self would crack up like puddle, before women themselves even get close to the state of being ”spontaneous desperate”.
Mirit Ben-Nun’s art exists within and beyond reality. She moves away from reality with aggressive and dense colorfulness which reveals an inner testimony of a threatened existence of women. The lines, points and shapes do not reproduce facts but emphasize the special charge of emotional coping.
Mirit Ben-Nun shows a rebellious spirit and tries to reach out to things not through wholeness but via searching for their expression and manifestation.
She explores personal identity and through it tries to define a complementary art, thereby illustrating the world and the nature of human culture. She focuses on the expressive dimension because of the exposure afforded by the uncontrollable moment that so much affects life in a rapidly changing global world.
The discourse between the inner world and the emerging reality is hyperactive and generates in Ben - Nun an endless sequence of works.
From the depths of feelings, dreams, anxieties and expressions arise rigid and exciting meanings of existence whose essence expresses adaptation difficulties and restlessness.
Dora Woda
I was just walking around in Lavender Canyon and came across this little fellow. The wind was blowing pretty hard that day, certainly hard enough to blow this butterfly away uncontrollably, and discovered it on this flower with its head into the wind and its wings folded back for streamlining. He was smart though. The flower was on the sheltered side of a large sage bush that created a shelter from the storm.
As I approached I was cautious to not scare him, but as I snapped and moved closer, he was more afraid of the wind than he was of me. I was able to get a few nice shots before I moved on to let him weather the storm in peace.
Lavender Canyon is locate in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
*****To join Blythe a Day March 2020, go to: www.flickr.com/groups/blythe_march_2020/
Ava as young Miss Havisham, who, in "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens, is an old woman who has never taken off her wedding dress or removed the wedding breakfast after being jilted decades earlier by her fiancé, Mr. Compeyson, on the day they were to be married.
19th Century England:
"That's no pup; it's a little fox," said Miss Havisham's cousin Matthew.
The words shocked her--though she did believe them...
It only took a day or so for Miss Havisham to realize what she perceived to be a "little pup," whom she had named Jack after saving him when she saw him laying injured on a hillside, was too uncontrollable to be kept indoors. First, Miss Havisham wondered, though he was so irresistibly cute, why did he nip at her fingers when she tried to pet and hold him? Next, he had pillaged the kitchen, eating whatever he could and knocking dishes and pans hither and thither, leaving the room in a chaotic mess.
Wondering what to do with him, Miss Havisham asked her cousin Matthew to visit and offer advice.
"I can't just abandon him," she said as she thought of the little fox. "And he is still recovering. Plus, I love him. What shall I do?"
Matthew convinced Miss Havisham that it would be unkind to keep a wild animal indoors and to make him dependent on her.
Hence, she decided to try to find a middle ground between putting the little fox out into a wilderness he could not yet survive and treating him as if he were her own. She asked Matthew to put together a crate where Jack could rest that they could put in the garden and thus to let him recover outside and decide for himself when he was strong enough to return to the wilderness once again. In the meantime, Miss Havisham decided that she would bring him food.
Thus, Miss Havisham's misadventure with the little fox was solved...
Or was it?
TO BE CONTINUED.
We all know about Boris the Bonker, but who would have thought all the rest of em` were all so uncontrollable rampant.
Yet again I`m not sure what Loretto the artist is getting at, other than they are all a complete shambles & also Corbyn rides a bike.
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------------🍊RED-HAIRED GIRL🍊:
HEAD:
Hair: .EscalateD. Robyn
Creator: 562b1bf6-d7d1-4629-817e-b787e464f1db Dolphin Ayres www.flickr.com/photos/145948990@N02/
❗Hat: Grasshopper Street Tudor Cap
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Tights BoM: EstyssEon -Eon- White (100%) gift
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Gloves: *OAL* Gem (Size for: Maitreya, Slink) Shown on Maitreya. www.flickr.com/photos/127853456@N06/50135342377/in/pool-2...
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BOM Shirt: from -foolish- Set (Shirt3) (P.S tint inemerald color)
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==============
------------------------📜LITTLE STORY📜
🍊Red-haired Girl🍊: - Wow! You have so much jewellery and make-up, can I try some on?
=
🙋Snow Elf🙋: - Of course you can, but don't paint your face too much or your mum will kill me for it.
=
🍊Red-haired Girl🍊: - I didn't know somebody could kill elves. My mum said you were immortal. How did you two meet? I remember you from birth, but you don't look like our blood relative.
=
🙋Snow Elf🙋: - We're immortal in terms of aging. However, things like: poison, physical abuse, etc. can cause us mortal harm just like humans. I met your mum when she was very ill. She was very young then, and her grandmother, unlike many of your contemporaries, was a very religious and superstitious woman, but not an opponent of magical creatures. Moreover, her grandmother had once received help from me during an attack by wild beasts. She had seen my magical abilities. Somehow the information reached her that I was in the forest nearby and she brought your mum to me asking for help in healing. I realised what the illness was and asked her to leave the girl with me for a while. But my forest conditions did not please this woman and she asked me to live in the house with her granddaughter as a nanny. I nursed the girl for a year until she was completely healed. But she got so used to me that she didn't want to let me go. Eventually I was asked to stay with her indefinitely. And so I have stayed by her side to this day.
=
🍊Red-haired Girl🍊: - How exciting! And you will continue to be with us? Don't you feel sorry for your time?
=
🙋Snow Elf🙋: - As long as my presence pleases the lady, I will stay by her side. But your human life is a moment to me. And I'm not 100% against the human world like many of my kin. I love watching you again rebuild your world, cities, high-rise buildings and metal machinery.
=
🍊Red-haired Girl🍊: - What do you mean when you say the word - again rebuild?
=
🙋Snow Elf🙋: - Long ago, before the last Flood, you humans already lived in a similar world. Only most of your means of transport and tools were made of copper, and you were very big.
=
🍊Red-haired Girl🍊: - You can't have lived so long! You don't look your age at all! And why did the flood hit the people?
=
🙋Snow Elf🙋: - Our elven organisms reach a certain level of development and then stop there. Our age you can see probably only in our speech and in our eyes. Many of us have very old eyes. Your biblical books attribute the flood to the hands of the creator... but it's not quite so clear-cut. You happen to be very unpeaceful creatures. You have a spirit of competition, division and aggression. As a result, in all versions of your existence, you are endlessly at war. Initially we thought that all your squabbles were due to hunger, cold or the small size of your lands. But then we noticed that even when you are well-fed and comfortable, you still try to divide and kill each other. Then we realised it was in your nature. Apparently, this is how your creator has instilled in you the control of your own numbers on Earth. But I digress, before the flood, you had an incredibly high level of technology. You had big space machines that you could use to do agricultural work on other planets. You had machines to replicate food, you had machines to teleport... but you also had machines to change the earth's climate and many explosive mechanisms. But you used them all against each other and the Earth's strata shifted, causing water to fill the land uncontrollably. All the cities went underwater. And only a small unreasonable percentage of the working class population was able to escape and found new tribes on the heights of the mountains. However, they were no longer able to pass on all the knowledge that their civilisation had, and what they could - was primitive and could not contribute in any way to rapid growth to the same level.
=
🍊Red-haired Girl🍊: - How interesting! Will we really come to the same point as the people of the past?
=
🙋Snow Elf🙋: - It's quite possible that we will. Only now you are being led to it consciously by certain minorities, who fancy themselves as the dark elite. Having taken all resources and knowledge under themselves, they will try to develop you to a certain level, and then create a catastrophe as a result of which you all will perceive them as new priests or Gods on earth. But they will be only people who have stolen all the resources of other people. This is human nature and this is the only thing you all really have to fight against. And if you can overcome it, you will reach the level that the creator has marked for you Paradise.
=
🍊Red-haired Girl🍊: - You say such complicated things, I'm not sure I can understand everything...
=
*For a long time the Red-haired Girl pestered the Snow Elf with questions and could not believe that such an ancient and intelligent creature lived near them.*
The back of this print is stamped "week ending Sep 10, 1955" -- but I think it was taken a week or two earlier than that, probably when cousins Sherry and Ricky were visiting Omaha before the beginning of their school year back in the Washington, DC area...
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted.
11. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
......the Fox River
I finally took a hike into this abandoned railroad abyss that once was the Chicago and Great Western line through St. Charles, Illinois. Thanks to Duane for suggesting this and being with me because I would have never done this alone.
Behind us is Route 25, the first of three overpasses we walked under as we headed west towards the Fox River. The next overpass is 3rd Street and then 2nd Street.
After a very cloudy morning, the sun found its way out from behind the clouds for the last 90 minutes of daylight. The 12F degree temp was enough to make my eyes water and my nose run uncontrollably but the wind was knocked down a bit due to the sloped land on either side.
We tromped through loads of dead weeds, stepped over large fallen trees, checked out graffiti on the concrete overpasses, made note of the beer of choice from discarded beer cans, wondered why there was a boat in there, tires and a couch, not to mention we froze our tooshes looking for photo opps.
As we approched the opening where the tracks actaully cross the Fox River and being 2 or 3 stories above ground, the winds picked up and the cold just ripped through our winter gear. I felt a bit uneasy for some reason and couldnt deal with the windchill but Duane went ahead several yards to get the shot of the tracks going over the bridge. I just stayed back and admired the view of the police department down below to the left.....lol.
None the less, what a fun adventure, a bit eerie, and rediculously cold but totally worth it to explore the abandoned tracks of what used to be one of the great railroads of it's time.
p.s. Duane ~ I finally got all those prickly weed things off my coat.....lol.
AI Future Worlds Oracle Series - Copper Blue Goddesses - Albha Cypreas Azure by Daniel Arrhakis (2023)
Since the time when Artificial Intelligence emerged, fears have grown among humanity about whether it could supplant man himself and radically transform society.
Despite all governmental and planetary regulations, its development became uncontrollable from the moment large multinational companies became omnipotent.
One of the series that became the most controversial, Oracle, was developed by one of the most influential and powerful Tycoons and consisted of the integration of hybrid quantum computing systems with the power of artificial intelligence associated with bionic robotic models.
If the use of these technologies in War was already controversial, the Oracle series proved to be even more dangerous, as these supposed Intelligent Artificial Goddesses could predict future events, the possibilities of revolutions or even political transformations within society itself.
But if this seemed like it could be an added value, over time it was realized that they ended up dictating their own future events, which led to suspicions that after all, it was the big companies that were directing the future of governments and their own people, as in fact always they had done so.
But worse, the direction seemed to be heading in the direction in which the majority of human society would truly be expendable in the hands of a powerful and untouchable elite.
After major protests and regulations worldwide, the Oracle series was discontinued, until it was eventually terminated.
Some of those models produced in that era became the object of great demand by museums and private collectors and they are the subject of these series that I present to you now.
As for the Oracle series, it continued to be produced in secret by large multinationals and secret government programs, but that's another story...
___________________________________________________
Desde a época em que a Inteligência Artificial surgiu, cresceram os receios entre a humanidade sobre se ela poderia suplantar o próprio homem e transformar radicalmente a sociedade.
Apesar de todas as regulamentações governamentais e planetárias, o seu desenvolvimento tornou-se incontrolável a partir do momento em que as grandes empresas multinacionais se tornaram onipotentes.
Uma das séries que se tornou mais polêmica, Oracle, foi desenvolvida por um dos mais influentes e poderosos Tycoons e consistia na integração de sistemas híbridos de computação quântica com o poder da inteligência artificial associada a modelos robóticos biônicos.
Se o uso dessas tecnologias na Guerra já era polêmico, a série Oráculo se mostrou ainda mais perigosa, pois essas supostas Deusas Artificiais Inteligentes poderiam prever eventos futuros, possibilidades de revoluções ou mesmo transformações políticas dentro da própria sociedade.
Mas se isso parecia poder ser uma mais-valia, com o tempo percebeu-se que acabavam por ditar os seus próprios acontecimentos futuros, o que levou a suspeitas de que afinal eram as grandes empresas que estavam a dirigir o futuro dos governos e dos seus próprios povos, como de facto sempre fizeram.
Mas pior, a direção parecia estar a caminhar num sentido em que a maior parte da sociedade humana seria verdadeiramente dispensável nas mãos de uma elite poderosa e intocável.
Após grandes protestos e regulamentações em todo o mundo, a série Oracle foi descontinuada, até ser finalmente encerrada.
Alguns desses modelos produzidos naquela época tornaram-se objeto de grande procura por museus e colecionadores particulares e são o motivo principal desta serie que agora vos apresento.
Quanto à série Oracle, ela continuou a ser produzida em segredo por grandes multinacionais e programas governamentais secretos, mas isso é outra história...
____________________________________________________
A new Series "Ai - Future Worlds" created by Daniel Arrhakis with a Futuristic Surrealistic Sci-Fi intriguing mood based in the role of Artificial Intelligence in our future society.
Stories imagined by Daniel Arrhakis with images created with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Art techniques.
'Boggart...' - on the Pendle Sculpture Trail, Aitken Wood, Barley, Lancashire UK
Boggart is one of numerous related terms used in English folklore for either a household spirit or a malevolent spirit inhabiting fields, marshes or other topographical features. In Northern England, at least, there was the belief that the boggart should never be named, for when the boggart was given a name, it would not be reasoned with nor persuaded, but would become uncontrollable and destructive. Within the folklore of North-West England, boggarts can cause mischief in homes but tend to live outdoors, in marshland, holes in the ground, under bridges and on dangerous sharp bends on roads.
Seeing the sculpture put me in mind of Gollum (taken April 2019)
©SWJuk (2020)
All rights reserved
Pictured is the device to measure radiation. Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in early 1985 was the greatest technological catastrophe in the USSR. An uncontrollable fire at the powerplant caused a collapse of the protective roof and escape of an enormous amount of radioactive material. Chernobyl was located next to Kyiv, and by a sheer luck the wind blew it in the direction opposite of the city. This catastrophe affected thousands of lives, left many children orphans or sick for life, demonstrated heroism of common soldiers and firefighters who stopped the spread without the benefit of protective equipment. The Chernobyl museum is located in the building that in 1985 housed the regional fire department and served as the headquarters of the operation to contain the fallout.
На фото - аппаратура по измерению радиации. Авария на Чернобыльской АЭС в начале 1985 г. был самой страшной техногенной катастрофой в истории СССР. Вышедший из под контроля пожар разрушил крышу и привёл к выбросу громадного количества радиоактивного материала в воздух. По счастливой случайности ветер дул в сторону от многомиллионнового Киева. Катастрофа затронула напрямую тысячи жизней, оставила много детей сиротами или больными на всю жизнь, продемонстрировала героизм простых солдат и пожарных работавших без какого-либо защитного оборудования. Музей находится в здании, где в 1985 году располагалось киевское областное управление пожарной охраны и ставшим штабом ликвидации последствий аварии.
Welcome to Sirmione, a picture perfect town on Lake Garda...This image was taken on the day I thought I was quite literally going to die! We had hopped on the ferry across from our resort (Garda) it had been already been raining that morning, but had seemed to have cleared up until half way across the lake the sky got blacker and blacker and the storm kicked off! For those of you that don't know I have a chronic phobia of storms and spiders, both turn me into an uncontrollable wreck. When I saw fork lightening coming down, hitting not only buildings but the water near our boat I was terrified, poor hubby didn't know what to do with me. When we reached Sirmione it was no better, and I tried to hide under the seat of the ferry instead of getting off, hubby eventually pulled me kicking and screaming off the boat and into the town, all the while begging me to stop screaming as onlookers would think he had beaten me up. In the relative safety of the lanes between the narrow buildings in town center and amongst crowds other people (that the lightening might target instead of me) I calmed down (slightly) but I can safely say that my fear since this day is even worse than before! Trust me when I say you would never want to be out with me in a similar situation. This image is definitely the calm after the storm!
Sirmione is a comune in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy (northern Italy). It is bounded by other communes of Desenzano del Garda and Peschiera del Garda in the province of Verona and the region of Veneto. It has a historical centre which is located on a small peninsula that separates the lower part of Lake Garda.
Explored 08.05.09 - #428
In this photo, it is obvious that the raw bull power has over come the fine art of guidance and control by the bull racers. The hapless team of 3 has given up the race and and are trying desperately to control the run away bulls as they seem to be jumping over the embankment in one fine move.
The racer in the red cloth is the one who should have controlled the bull on his side to turn him around to do a 360 degree turnaround.
The dark spot of splashing water in the middle is the jockey who rides a thin plank of wood and he is the only one still going strong but now he seems to have gathered the futility of his jockeyship and seems about to abandon the the platform in the face of imminent danger of running on to the embankment.
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Adoor in Kerala holds its famous Bull Races every year around the time of Onam. It is a celebration of agrarian existence and is carried on without any grants or aid from the Government. This is a spectacular fiesta of rural Kerala. There are 2-3 other such events that are held in Kerala.
Two racing bulls are hitched together and three men come into action. Two racers with lead ropes on either side of the bulls who try to control the direction and speed if possible and one often obscured by sprays of mud and water, a jockey who rides on a small flat strip of wood.
The bulls race ahead with the men keeping desperately abreast of the thundering hooves. At the end of the racing track there is a 4-6 feet embankment of earth which acts as a protection and a marker for the bulls. The embankment gets totally crowded with onlookers. The bull racers need to turn the bull around and do a 360 degree here but most times that effort fails as the bulls in their racing frenzy would be uncontrollable.
I have no idea on the current status of the bull races. There are enough organisations howling to stop such races but the Supreme Court of India in a judgement a few months ago allowed bull/bullock cart races to go on in Punjab. So chances are that the tradition may still live on.
Dates
Taken on August 15, 2007 at 1.16pm IST (edit)
Posted to Flickr September 22, 2012 at 9.32PM IST (edit)
Exif data
Camera Nikon D70
Exposure 0.001 sec (1/1000)
Aperture f/4.0
Focal Length 70 mm
ISO Speed 200
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Flash Off, Did not fire
DSC_0381 via ACr redone
“It was a pit stop, not a destination. I had my whole life mapped out.”
“So what happened?”
“I guess that map didn’t turn out to be mine after all”
- Sarah Dessen, Along for the ride
This book, as lame as it sounds managed to change my life. And that quote was something I had been needing to hear for a long time.
OKAY, no depressing obnoxious huge rants today. Time for something … fun. Like TAGGED FACTS.
1) At the hospital, some guy told me he liked brushing his teeth so much because it makes him feel like hes making out with his truth brush…I’m traumatized.
2) I have this fear of intersections. I hate crossing them and how the people watch you. So of course today I get a rock in my sandal right before one and pretty much limped across…I think I knew the person in the car. Fml
3) My niece (the little thing you’ve seen in pictures) turned to me yesterday and said, when im in the bath I wash my eyebrows…then I sliiiiiiiick em back. Hand gestures were included. Ive never laughed so hard in my life.
4) I feel like my addiction to shoe shopping is kind of like herpes. Once you get it (or buy a pair of shoes) you just can’t give it back to that person (or salesperson) and you just HAVE to sport it (or them).
5) Id really really like to live in Ikea. I mean who wouldn’t want to live in the coolest Home Furnishing store ever?
6) If you’re ever looking for a very good looking guy who’s smart and non Tech retarded I’d suggest Best Buy. If you don’t have one of those , you’re local electronic store. Trust me…they’re all babes. I just about died. And they’re FORCED to be nice and say hello to you. It’s great.
7) I have this disorder…some type of OCD I swear. Say you’re colouring in a picture…I can’t colour two sections that are beside each other the same colour. Like red beside red. It bothers me uncontrollably.
8) My online shopping has become a problem. I don’t even notice im searching up sites until I’ve already made a wish list and finished making a plan as to how im going to afford them…have I mentioned im broke?
9) I’ve come to the conclusion that since I can’t afford actual therapy for my spending compulsions and addictions im going to go buy that “hairapy” shampoo and pray to god it just soaks through my skull and fixes me. My friends say that most likely wont happen.
10) im very confused by something. The fact that the Irish’s mascot is a leprechaun (mascot not being the right word) but the irish are also known for their drinking…so I have a hard time understanding that…because as a leprechaun wouldn’t it be a bitch to get on the bar stool?
And oh hey flickr. I love you all. For those who take the time to read my crazy long descriptions…it means the world : )
Ps. The background of this are maps I drew. It was only a concept but I found it really cool when its done and…kind of calming. As lame as I sound oh goodness. Im leaving now.
so I got some new bricks (bricklink order finnaly :) and using new camera
in the year 2020 tention between the NAC (north american coalition ) and the sp (shanghi pact) we're high because the mobalization of NAC forces along the northern border of China to comabat the Russian and Mongolian advances causing war zones on Chinese land with high civilian casualtys , conferences were held to settle the tention but NAC officials would not prevail so they ordered the officials back to America because the very possible declaration of war but he Chinese saw this as the Americans gearing up to attack there homeland so riots were uncontrollable and they killed many officials so the NAC dispatched spec ops drone units to exfill high value officials
so this is my new series tell me your thoughts because I really like the idea and I have made some units already
The school that I attended in Omaha, 1955-56.
**********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
11. Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
This is a picture from the rear of our house; from the way everyone was dressed, I'm guessing that the photo was taken sometime in the summer of 1955.
Almost everywhere we lived, Dad planted a garden in the back yard; and although I belonged to the local school 4H club (having taken a school aptitude test that said I would never be competent at anything other than farming), I had no interest at all in the garden. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Bubbles.
But it did produce a lot of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and other vegetables that we had for dinner every night, all summer long.
*********************************
Some of the photos in this album are “originals” from the year that my family spent in Omaha in 1955-56. But the final 10 color photos were taken nearly 40 years later, as part of some research that I was doing for a novel called Do-Overs, the beginning of which can be found here on my website
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/index.html
and the relevant chapter (concerning Omaha) can be found here:
www.yourdon.com/personal/fiction/doovers/chapters/ch9.html
Before I get into the details, let me make a strong request — if you’re looking at these photos, and if you are getting any enjoyment at all of this brief look at some mundane Americana from 60+ years ago: find a similar episode in your own life, and write it down. Gather the pictures, clean them up, and upload them somewhere on the Internet where they can be found. Trust me: there will come a day when the only person on the planet who actually experienced those events is you. Your own memories may be fuzzy and incomplete; but they will be invaluable to your friends and family members, and to many generations of your descendants.
So, what do I remember about the year that I spent in Omaha? Not much at the moment, though I’m sure more details will occur to me in the days to come — and I’ll add them to these notes, along with additional photos that I’m tweaking and editing now.
For now, here is a random list of things I remember:
1. I attended the last couple months of 6th grade, and all of 7th grade, in one school. My parents moved from Omaha to Long Island, NY in the spring of my 7th grade school year; but unlike previous years, they made arrangements for me to stay with a neighbor’s family, so that I could finish the school year before joining them in New York.
2. Our dog, Blackie, traveled with us from our previous home in Riverside, and was with us until my parents left Omaha for New York; at that point, they gave him to some other family. For some reason, this had almost no impact on me. It was a case of “out of sight, out of mind” — when Blackie was gone, I spent my final three months in Omaha without ever thinking about him again.
3. Most days, I rode my bike to school; but Omaha was the place where one of my sisters first started attending first grade — in the same school where I was attending 6th grade. I remember walking her to school along Bellevue Avenue on the first morning, which seemed to take forever: it was about a mile away.
4. As noted in a previous Flickr album about my year in Riverside, I was a year younger than my classmates; but I was tall for my age, and thus looked “normal” at a quick glance. But because I was a year younger, I was incredibly shy and awkward in the presence of girls. Omaha was certainly not “sin city,” but by 6th grade and 7th grade, puberty was beginning to hit, and the girls had grown to the point where they were occasionally interested in boys. The school tried to accommodate this social development by teaching us the square dance (and forbidding the playing of songs by Elvis Presley, whose music was just beginning to be heard on the radio). I was an awful dancer, and even more of a shy misfit than my classmates; I continue to be an awful dancer today.
5. My bike ride to school was uneventful most days; but the final part of the ride was a steep downhill stretch on Avery Road, lasting three or four blocks. My friends and I usually raced downhill as fast as we could; but one day, my front bicycle wheel began to wobble on the downhill run, and my bike drifted uncontrollably to the side of the road and then off into a ditch. I got banged up pretty badly.
6. But this accident was nothing compared to my worst mishap: a neighborhood friend and I enjoyed playing “cowboys and Indians” in the woods near his home (and his younger brother usually tagged along). I had a bow and a few arrows for our adventure, and we often shot at trees a hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the arrows often disappeared into the underbrush (because we were lousy shots) and were difficult to find. Consequently, one of us came up with the clever idea of standing behind the “target” tree, so that we could see where the randomly-shot arrows landed. Through a series of miscommunications, I poked my head out from behind the tree just as my friend shot one of the arrows … and it skipped off the side of the tree and into my face, impaling itself into my cheek bone about an inch below my eye. An inch higher, and I would not be typing these words … (meanwhile, my friend's younger brother grew up to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and he tracked me down on the Internet, decades later).
7. In the summer of 1956, my parents decided to spend their summer vacation prospecting for uranium (seriously!) in the remote hills of eastern Utah, where my dad had grown up on the Utah-Colorado border. This entailed a long, long drive from Omaha; and it involved leaving me and my two sisters with my grandparents near Vernal, UT. My grandparents lived in a very small mining village outside of Vernal; and while they had electricity and various other modern conveniences, they also had an outhouse in the back yard. Trips to the “bathroom” in the middle of the night were quite an adventure. On the way back to Omaha at the end of this vacation trip (with no uranium ore having been found), we stopped for a couple of days of camping somewhere in the mountains of Colorado; you’ll see a couple of photos from that camping trip in this album.
8. There were no lizards in Omaha, and thus no opportunity for lizard-hunting with my slingshot—which had been a significant hobby in my previous homes in Riverside and Roswell. Indeed, there was almost nothing to shoot at … and I couldn’t find anyone with whom I could play (and hopefully win) marbles, to use as slingshot ammunition. But for reasons I never questioned or investigated (but about which I’m very curious now), there was a small vineyard in the field behind our house, and I was able to climb over the fence and retrieve dozens of small, hard, green grapes. They turned out to be excellent ammunition … but I never did find any lizards.
9. A few months before my parents left for New York, I told them about the latest craze sweeping the neighborhood: “English bikes,” with three speeds, thin tires, and hand-brakes. I desperately wanted one, but Dad said it was far too expensive for him to buy as a frivolous gift for me: at the time, English bikes had an outrageous price tag of $25. I was told that I would have to earn the money myself if I wanted one … and the going rate for young, scrawny kids who shoveled sidewalks, pulled weeds from gardens, and did babysitting chores, was 25 cents per hour. That works out to 100 hours of work … but I did it, over the course of the next few months, and when I got to New York, the first thing I did was buy my English bike.
10. Toward the end of my 7th-grade school year, everyone in my class was subjected to a vision test: we were lined up in alphabetical order, and one-by-one read off a series of letters that we could barely see on a large placard taped onto the classroom blackboard. Because my surname starts with a “Y,” I was usually near the end of the line … and by the time I got to the front, I had usually memorized the letters (because they never bothered to change them, from one student to the next) without even realizing it consciously. But on this particular occasion in 7th grade, for some reason, they decided to line us up in reverse alphabetical order … and I was the first in line. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could not see anything of the letters, and that I was woefully near-sighted. When I got to New York, my parents took me to an optometrist to get my first set of glasses (and, yes, all of the neighborhood kids did begin taunting me immediately: “Four eyes! Four eyes!”) … and I’ve worn glasses ever since.
Three years after I arrived in New York, the glasses saved my vision when a home-brewed mix of gunpowder and powdered aluminum blew up in my face in the school chemistry lab (where I had an after-school volunteer job as a “lab assistant”). I suffered 2nd-degree burns on my face from the explosion, but the glasses protected my eyes. That, however, is a different story for a different time.
" "…September 11 is still part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking the imagination. One day it might be said: 'September 11' – those were the ('good') old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous!
…(however) nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it knows it, and that's what's scary."
Jacques Derrida