has been making its way across Facebook today - and I thought I'd share it here for those who read me, (Who am I kidding, no one reads me, lol - but its still cool enough to warrant being posted.)
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
January 3rd - Tuesday Thoughts
We had our first snow squalls today - for all of five minutes it felt like a blizzard, but it passed quickly and all we are left with is COLD. Below freezing cold which wouldn't be a big deal except we had highs in the 50s just two days ago....in fact Times Square in NYC was 46 degrees at midnight when the ball dropped New Years Eve.
Had the thermometer slowly crept downward week after week, I think most of us wouldn't have noticed the cold nearly so much in the same way that we don't notice the extra minute of light we get each day that passes by.
Or the way that I didn't notice cardinals. Here in Maryland they are quite common, and my backyard is home to several pair year round. But a Canadian friend of mine was quite entranced with their bright red beauty because she doesn't have them in her neighborhood.
(not my picture - I couldn't get the camera out fast enough credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkunzephotos/5601386221/ )
So now I pay more attention and appreciate them more because not everyone is lucky enough to see them every day. And yesterday as I watched them flit about from branch to branch I had an odd thought.
Do birds have a memory? Do they know what they did yesterday and the day before - do they make plans for tomorrow? Or is their life like the movie 50 First Dates where every day stands alone with no memory of the past?
At first I thought it would be terrible to have no memory- to be unable to learn from past experiences, or to remember special moments again and again.
But then again - it means that every morning you would look at the world with fresh eyes, every experience new for the first time no matter how often it had happened before. You'd never take anything for granted.
I'm not sure that would be such a bad thing......
Sunday, January 1, 2012
1/1/12 Things I learned while painting my basement ceiling
Its kind of sad that this picture really doesn't show the amount of effort I've put into this ceiling painting project so far - and there's definitely a lot of work left to go.
Maybe if I put in the picture of what it looked like before I started priming the rafters....
The short version of the story is that the ceiling height to the rafters is only 6 ft 7 inches and I think putting any sort of finished ceiling in will make it feel claustrophobic. What I really didn't think through (or rather I thought it through but decided to ignore it) is that there's a lot of area to paint up there and it's going to take quite a while. It probably would have made sense to spend a few hundred dollars to hire someone to spray it all...but I'm a frugal sort who hates to pay others to do things that I am perfectly capable of.
But as usual I digress. I have a TV/DVD combo down there and since I had a few hours of rolling and brushing ahead of me, I decided to pop in a DVD.....going through my collection, I chose a Nat Geo series Worlds Last Great Places for background noise.
The first DVD was centered on Africa, and I was pretty busy painting so all I really noticed was that it focused quite a bit on Africa's first national park - Virunga and the mountain gorillas that live there. But I did learn that male lions often mate more than EIGHTY times a day. That said, their average copulation time is less than thirty seconds....so its really not as impressive as it sounds.
The second one was about the Galapagos....and again, it was just background noise until I heard this strange grunting sound. That turned out to be the sound of giant tortoises having sex......
Unlike lions, these guys go at it for as long as an hour. Can you imagine going to the Galapagos and hearing that sound all day long - it would drive me nuts.
Note to self - find out turtle mating season before making travel plans.....
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