More blue

Definitely no melt water today -- this was from last weekend.

I'm tired of winter, you know.

Actually, I'm just tired. It hasn't been a good sleep week.



Aaand... I'm done. Thought I might get blathery if I just started typing, but no luck. Better to quit before this gets whiny.

I'll try harder tomorrow.

Blue snow

I recently ordered a polarising filter for my new lens (from the internet home of ALL THINGS, yes. I had a gift certificate) and since the order arrived on Friday I thought I'd take the thing for a spin around my dad's yard.

I love having a polariser -- it was a regular thing for me to play with on my old Minolta film camera. For whatever reason I still haven't gotten around to buying any filters at all for my kit lens (I will. Eventually), but I figured that it might be nice to have at least a polariser for the wide angle.

So as I said, I took it out in the yard yesterday mid-afternoonish, and immediately realised a couple of things:

1. It's still January even though the weather hasn't been behaving that way, and the sun's starting to get low that time of day.

2. It's winter, and snow is boring.

Yep. Once you've used the filter to play around a little with the colour of the sky, all a person's left with in the winter is brown and white. No brightening the greens, no deepening the reds; it's all just stupid bloody white.

Hmm. Maybe bloody wasn't the best word to use there.

Anyway.

My solution? I rotated the filter until all the whites were blue.

Yep. The blue you see above is the way it came off the camera and I did it on purpose. I took a fair number of shots that way, actually. There's an awful lot of blue snow on my nerdstick, which means that there will be an awful lot of blue snow on the blog in the next while.

I'm sure you'll get used to it.

What you're seeing above is a drip off of the shed roof. Did I mention that it's January and things are melting all over the place? Sounds like we'll be paying for it with a couple of days of coldness soon, but even then they're predicting things to be back up to the minus single digits by next week. This has been such a weird winter. Tons of snow (there was yet another roof collapse yesterday. This time the curling rink at Drayton Valley), a warm January... why do I fear July now?

Incidentally, despite what early reports of the Sylvan Lake arena collapse said, it turns out that not only was the zamboni driver still in the building when it collapsed, he was still on the zamboni and had to duck under the steering wheel to avoid being hit. He thought he was going to die, but still managed to have the presence of mind to turn off the gas when he saw electrical sparking. Can you imagine? I definitely can't.

Anyway, again. Lunch time now. New doodle up on the other blog, for anyone interested. Yeah, I'm trying to get back into the swing of more regular posting, but you'll notice that the pens haven't come out yet in the new year. I still get shaky too quickly if I tense up. Stupid wrist. Heal already, would you?



Oh, on one other note there's probably no me on the internet for the next couple of days. I'm a bit high on my work hours as of last week, so I'll probably take a day off so I'm not over for the pay period.

Erm... you needed to know that.

Summary of my week, pointless photo style

Otherwise known as: I Guess I Talk About Some Weird Things on the Blog.

So here it is, then. Silver rolling ring, pewter and brass Aquitaine sundial ring, brass candle extinguisher (yeah, I found a couple more brass things around the apartment after that post. Not too many, though. I'm not exactly brasstactic), and Kinder Surprise Spiderman because he was there and adds a bit of colour to the composition.

I have no idea why he has ears.

Note that I said candle extinguisher, not snuffer. I read enough 18th century literature to be bugged by the way that North Americans tend to say snuffer when they mean extinguisher, actually. That thing in the photo is an extinguisher, for putting out candles. A snuffer is more like scissors with a little box attached to one blade to catch debris (picture!). They were used to trim the wicks of (usually) tallow candles to keep the flame from getting too large and melting the tallow into a puddle. If you were bad at snuffing candles you could accidentally snuff the flame out... which is where the extinguisher/snuffer mix-up comes in for our non-candle-dependent society today.

And there's your olf information moment of the week. Aren't you lucky.

Anyway, it's late, and since Google's weirdness killed my attempt to blog earlier in the day this is all you're getting (it wasn't just Gmail that was affected, folks). I'll give it a better go tomorrow. I've got some purposely blue photos I can talk about, after all. What's that, Dee? Oh, you'll find out one way or another.





And for anyone who actually wondered, yes, I'm still having fun with the rolling ring. It's there on my finger begging to be played with even as I type this. I think I'll go do that now.

Unexpected post of the day:

So the thing is, I'm at a school this afternoon and I didn't think I'd have time to post before I left. It turns out that I do.

I wish I'd thought of a blather now, but I hadn't. I wasn't supposed to have time, remember?

Sooo...

Picture, I guess. More things on snow. I'll try to think of something more substantial tomorrow.


Incidentally, do you think that it would be possible to take both Justin Bieber and Mayor Rob Ford and just leave them on an island somewhere? Maybe they could annoy each other into sobriety and we wouldn't have to hear about either of them anymore.

Just saying.

I hate it when...

... I had an idea for a blather, but somewhere in between work, lunch, and a bit more work it went away.

So, a brass mouse.

This particular brass mouse is also supposed to be a desk note holder, which is the reason that its tail is so lethal.

I kind of like brass. Not so much for the look -- the eighties sort of ruined that for all of us -- but the neat things that can be made out of brass. Trinket-type things, I mean, although plenty of things with actual importance can also be made out of brass.

I like pewter for the same reason, by the way. Search around the little independent shops on the internet, and you'll find all manner of interesting pewter things.

My mother (who collected a fair number of different things) had quite a collection of brass back in the day. Brass bells (cross collecting there. The bell collection in all its brass, porcelain, and whatever else glory is huge. We've never figured out what to do with it), brass vases, brass figurines, little brass working models... if it could be found in brass, my mom probably had it. I try my best to suppress my collecting gene these days because I already have enough stuff, but I have a few brass things that I've had for years. Let's see... the mouse, obviously. An abacus, which is cool. A music stand, which I used for performances when I still had the youth choir. A tiny elephant that was bought to commemorate a group paper in university. A potpourri holder.

You know, I think that's about it for brass. Shall I go on to pewter? Yeah, I'm laughing at myself but I still haven't remembered what I really wanted to blog about. Pewter's shorter anyway. A bit of jewellery, another potpourri holder, and a picture frame. The last two, I believe, came from Seagull Pewter, which is fun stuff as long as you stay away from the more cutesy items.

I don't do well with cutesy.

Anyway, since I'm obviously not going to remember the topic du jour (it might end up being demain's topic if I can figure out what it was supposed to be) and I really should get back to work, let's call it a post.

A very metallic post.





Maybe tomorrow's post should be silver versus silvertone, since I accidentally ended up on Avon's website yesterday and nearly died laughing at the things that get high customer ratings in that world...

Fidgety

Today's pointless photo is well and truly pointless. And not fidgety.

I, on the other hand, am pointless AND fidgety.

I play with things. I play with things on my desk. I play with my jewellery as I'm talking to people. I play with just about anything when I need a distraction.

My hands need to be busy or they'll get into trouble, I suppose.

Today I'm wearing a pendant that's also a sundial (hang on... let me see if I can find you a picture... here's the kind of thing I mean. And now I really want the stardial to go with it). I've had mine for long enough that I can't remember where it came from now, and if you can picture it on a silk cord around my neck you can imagine that it's a fun thing to fidget with. One of my favourite things to fidget with, actually.

No longer THE favourite thing in the jewellery category, however.

I went to the mall yesterday, you see. That's an odd thing in itself, since I haven't been to a mall in almost two years. I needed a couple of things that I could find at the mall, though. Happily for my fidgetiness but not so much for my bank account I also found...

A rolling ring!

Um, rolling ring photos, for anyone not familiar.

The rings are intertwined in such a way that they're able to roll over each other. A three band rolling ring is sometimes called a Celtic (or Russian) wedding band or a Trinity band, but my ring has five bands so you can forget all of the pseudosymbolism right now. As I mentioned the other day, I've been wanting one. I've been looking for a while, at least on the internet, but when I saw one in person (silver, nothing fancy, and considering the weight of it not terribly expensive. I'm too cheap for terribly expensive) I had to try it on. And of course once you've tried on the ultimate in fidgety jewellery you can't exactly walk away, can you?

Man, is it fun. It's really, really fun and tactile and did I mention fun?

I'm a five-year-old, yes. but you won't find any buyer's remorse here. No way. I'm enjoying it too much. and besides, it's dual purpose. If I don't feel like fidgeting with it on my finger, I could use it as a pendant and fidget with it on a chain instead.

You'll probably see a photo of it at some point (this is me, after all), but for now I'd better get back to playing with my ring work.



Ah, toys. I love me some toys...

On a more serious -- well, ish -- note, I've been itchy again lately which is a bit disheartening since my eczema had cleared up nicely. Here's hoping that a ring distraction will help keep me from idle scratching when I'm not paying attention. See, there's actually a reason for fidgety jewellery.

Pointless photo of things on snow of the day:

As promised.

And sorry, but I kind of forgot that I had this blog thing today, so I don't really have anything to post. Yep, this is all you get.

Later.