New photo!

Yes, as the fake excitement above indicates, I actually got around to taking a few new shots yesterday. Don't get too excited yourselves, though; the fact that most of them have the word dead somewhere in their file name should tell you that there's not a whole lot of excitement to be found in the yard at this time of year.

The cat's not dead, though.

And incidentally, was I the only one who didn't know that Black & Decker made cats?

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I don't have a whole lot today because I got yet another late start (must be something about this particular weekend) and have been spending my time with other things rather than thinking about blog posts. I'd never be able to do this for a living, thank goodness.

Why thank goodness?

Well, just imagine the pressure of having to think of things on a regular basis. Having to. It'd take any sort of fun out of it pretty darned quickly for me. I don't do well when my hobbies become necessities. I know I've said that before, but for those new to the program (and yes, I know that I've said that before, too. Many, many times. In case you haven't noticed, repeating stupid phrases tends to be my lazy attempt at having any kind of style here. Again, good thing I don't do this for a living), I work very hard to keep my hobbies as hobbies, because they seem to stop being fun as soon as they show any sign of being taken seriously. My piano hardly gets touched now because of too many years of teaching singing (that needs to change, though. I'm kind of missing playing piano now. I need to get back in the habit), my doodles will always stay doodles even if some people get sniffy at the term because I never want to take the chance of thinking about them as art, and my writing?

Is silly.

I can write better than this. I do write better than this. Heck, if you want to get all technical about it, I can say that I've written professionally. I've redesigned poorly-written text for a permanent exhibit at work because the "professional" they'd engaged buggered off and refused to do anything more about it when his work was deemed unsatisfactory. I edit our newsletter. I've won poetry competitions, believe it or not. I'm more than capable of stringing words together in ways that are readable, and can make people want to read them.

I'd sooner stay silly, I guess. I'd sooner put words that don't really matter on a blog that doesn't really matter in combination with pictures that don't really matter (and rarely have anything to do with the text). It's disposable. It's absurd, and I like absurd.

It's a hobby, and I want it to stay fun. I want it not to matter.

I suppose you would say that I lack passion, and you'd be right. I don't think I could ever claim to be truly passionate about anything. I like a lot of things, and there are a lot of things that have been able to keep me interested for a long time, but I've never discovered the one thing that made me say THAT'S what I want to do with my life.

Just as an aside, I accidentally ended up in the perfect career for someone like me. It's one of the few areas left where you have to be a jack-of-all-trades. Oh sure, there are naturalists out there who are absolute expert birders or trackers or survivalists or whatever, but for those of us in the day-to-day business of dealing with people in a more urban setting it's more important to have a little knowledge about a whole lot of things, and a lot of knowledge about where to find the information on what you don't know. That's me, right there.

Anyway. For not having anything to say I've managed to type out quite the diatribe here. I could tell you what's been going on in the back of my brain that brought this on, but at this point I think I'll save it for another time and then reexamine whether I even really want to talk about it.

And then I'll probably talk about play-doh or something instead.





Must keep the blog pointless, after all. Other wise it turns into a pumpkin. That's the rules.