Pointless photo of the day:

Today's photo is a protest.

I suppose by rights I should have posted a photo of the trees this morning. They were all covered in hoarfrost from the fog we'd had, and I had (and have) the new camera right beside me so it wouldn't have been hard to take a few shots.

BUT IT WAS -25C.

Gah. I shouldn't have even been outside at -25C, let alone scraping the car windows. Or, for that matter, taking pictures of pretty, frosty trees.

Stupid winter.

So... here. Have an iris, with a special guest appearance by my foot and pant leg. Nothing but quality pointless photos here, folks. Nothing but the best.

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Sorry that this little rant is going to be all there is to this post, but I had to give a building tour this morning so I'm a little behind on the things I need to get done if I want to leave here before school gets out and the traffic builds. Enjoy the irises.

And the pant leg, if that's your thing.

Pointless path photo of the day:

Today's photo? Well, I have mentioned a time or two that I work at a nature centre at the entrance to a wildlife sanctuary. We have a few deer.

And I need to get out and take some newer photos, what with the new camera and all. This was from a couple of weekends ago now. I'd say maybe I'd take a walk tomorrow (one of the weirder things about working at a nature centre is that going for a walk is sometimes part of the job), but it's supposed to get colder again so no promises there.

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Aaand about half an hour later...

Well, that's the hazard of blogging at work. Sometimes you're interrupted by, you know, work. I'd say it's interrupted my train of thought as well, but I don't remember if I even had a train of thought when I started typing. Typing, by the way, is kind of a weird feeling at the moment since I'm sort of on ring overload. I don't normally wear more than two rings at a time (and usually only on my right hand, since things that end up on my left hand tend to get banged up an awful lot), but today I decided to wear two different rings than I generally do. And, of course, then went on to automatically put on the little silver pinkie ring that gets worn almost every day. Just one ring too many, and it's funny how much I notice it.

Ah well, likely no rings at all tomorrow. I'm sure I've mentioned before how the cold allergy thing makes my fingers swell, and if it's meant to be colder tomorrow it's just smarter to avoid any problems right from the start.

And with that, I should get back to the interruption of work. My work days can be entirely filled with interruptions, really. Blame this total lack of post on that, if you like. I'm sure planning to.

Why, hello, Mr Oreo

Mr Oreo usually lives on my fridge, but he fell off of it at about ten last night and by that means earned himself a guest role on Weird Things in my Apartment.

Seriously. If it would just stop being winter (in January in Alberta. Yeah, that'll happen)  and there were flowers or at least spiders to take photos of, my two fans wouldn't be blessed with Mr Oreo. Be that as it may...

Mr Oreo's been with me long enough now that I really can't remember where he came from. I'm going to assume that it was from a package of Oreos, though. I know I had him in Edmonton, so he's getting up there in years. Especially for a plastic bendy man. He doesn't have the most effective suction cup anymore, which is why he periodically takes a tumble. It usually takes a couple of tries to get him stuck back on. One of these days I just won't even bother -- the garbage can's awfully close to the fridge, after all -- but for now I guess he'll just keep looking happy to be stationed beside the magnet a friend sent me a long time ago. Nine lives and I had to choose this one, it says. It naturally features a picture of a donkey.



Juuust checking to make sure you were paying attention there. It's the same thing I do when I'm teaching kindergarten kids about senses, you know. They think it's hilarious when I say that I use my ears to smell with.

Incidentally, is anyone else enjoying the Ikea upholstery background in these photos? I don't exactly have a lot of neutral places to take pictures in my apartment, so ottoman it is. I think it's kind of suitable for this blog, actually.

Geez. A quick search tells me that Mr Oreo is a collectible. Not an expensive collectible, but a collectible all the same.



People collect weird things, is all I can say. Back to work for me, now. Tomorrow maybe I'll take a walk and see if there's anything worthwhile pointing the camera at out there. There won't be, though. It's winter.





Something tells me that the Weird Things series may become a very long one.

Merry Christmas

No, I'm not kidding. Merry Christmas to all of my two fans who are Ukrainian, Greek, or belong to any other church that follows the Julian calendar.

I've never celebrated Ukrainian Christmas, but I make note of it every year because my paternal grandfather was Ukrainian-Canadian. Yep, one quarter Ukrainian, me. It breaks up the English, English, Welsh, English, Irish, and English in my background, at least.

One of my (surprise! English!) ancestors is apparently listed in the Domesday Book, at least according to family tradition. He was a swineherd for Cedric the Saxon. Let's just say I'm not going to find out that I'm the long-lost heir to the British throne with the people in my family tree. And since I'm at work and don't really have time to get into all the genealogy stuff just at the moment, let's just say that there are bits of my history that amuse me for reasons that are probably a little immature. But seriously -- doesn't anyone else out there find it odd that a family named Drinkall (NOT my last name, if you're out to look for me. One of my ancestors, though) was Primitive Methodist?

I'll leave you to look up the Primitive Methodists on your own, if you're interested. Let's just say that there was a reason they were known as the Ranters.

Aaanyway. It's been that kind of a day that hasn't left me much time for blathering, so I'm going to have to leave it at that. Merry Christmas to those who are celebrating.



Take down your Christmas lights to those who aren't...

Blast from the (pointless?) past

Oh, you're in luck today. Out of an odd mood this morning and a general apathy towards taking pictures of winter even with a new camera, Yours Pointlessly now presents the first installment of:

Weird Things in my Apartment

Read that in the voice that announces Pigs In Spaaace... well, if you like. I did. I'm not sure why.

Yes, boys and girls, it's weird things in my apartment, of which there are a few, and where better to start than with a scorpion brooch? Not so weird, you think? What if I said it was a real, live (well, dead at this point) scorpion dipped in gold? Or gold paint, more likely, because I didn't pay very much for it.

Are we qualifying for weird yet?

This particular scorpion, which is... oh, about four or five centimetres long, to give an idea of scale, actually has a bit of a history. I've had it for a fairly long time, and I got it at a trade show at Klondike Days, which used to be Edmonton's annual summer fair. I say used to be, because a few years ago they changed the name to Capital Ex for no apparent reason. I suppose it made sense to them, but nobody else really liked it so recently they put the name up to a vote. Edmontonians decided on K Days, I understand, which used to be the nickname of Klondike Days but now will be the official title. I wonder what they'll vote for next? They've had X and K. Maybe it's time for Q to have a turn.

Anyway, one of the non-midway selling points of Alphabet Days used to be -- and may be still, but I haven't been in a long time so I wouldn't know -- an international trade fair. Every year they'd invite vendors from a selected country to display and sell their wares. Some countries went for prestige items to show off what the nation was capable of. Stupid move at a fair, where people usually just want cheap souvenirs. The more successful countries were the ones that went for interesting inexpensive stuff that a person wasn't likely to find in Edmonton otherwise.

The scorpion's fair featured one of those countries. Thailand. Lots of neat little trinkets, and I looked at a lot of them until I got to the Infamous Booth of Gold-Dipping. It had gold-dipped just about everything. Flowers, leaves, scorpions...

Scorpions. Ohhh yeah.

I was drawn to them instantly. The lady at the booth, who by then had been working for a few days, looked at me oggling them and said "You must be a scorpio". Why yes, yes I am. How did you know? Unsurprisingly, I guess, it turned out that the only people in Edmonton (at the trade show, anyway) who weren't instantly disgusted by the thought of a small, gold-dipped invertebrate were the ones born between October 23rd and November 21st.

I bought one, of course. And it didn't just sit.

It was a pain to wear it as a pin, so I used the loop you can see under the head and wore it on a chain instead. I didn't get too many stares, oddly enough, because at that time I was working on my degree and in a zoology department  no one really bats an eye at people wearing or collecting various animal parts.

Not as ghoulish as it sounds, honestly. You just need to see it in context.

The scorpion also went to all of my exams with me and sat on my desk. I don't believe in good luck charms so it wouldn't have been a disaster if I'd forgot it or anything. It was just habit. Good company, too. It never knew any answers, though, being dead and all. And gold-dipped. And a scorpion.

Sharp-eyed viewers may notice that the left arm (not the correct technical term, but shut up. I'm a mammalogist, not a scorpionologist) is glued on. The joint got flexible fairly early on, and the whole thing eventually fell off. Yay, superglue. Sharp-eyed viewers may also notice a cameo appearance by one of my hairs, which I didn't notice at the time I took the photo. If this silly series continues, you'll notice loads of guest hair appearances, unfortunately. My hair has a knack for guest photo appearances, kind of like the butt-end of the chihuahua we had growing up.

For those of my two fans who know my brother, see if he remembers all the half-a dog pictures we have...

I so need to get back to work at this point. No computer time for me tomorrow, but I'll see if I can't make a habit of posting a little more regularly next week. Of course, the last time I promised that I disappeared for even longer than usual, so grain of salt and all that. Posting silliness... now.

Well, that's odd

No, not the pointless photo. Well, the photo is odd, I suppose. And somewhat out of focus. I let the camera choose what it was focusing on, you see. Might not have been my choice, but by that point on my walk I was getting cold and didn't feel like taking my mitts off to focus the camera myself.

At least there's some interesting shapes to look at. And, of course, the knowledge that the pointless photography on this blog will continue being pointless, no matter how nice the equipment used is.

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Ok, now on to the real oddity. My two fans will know that I have a long-running problem with insomnia, and like I said yesterday the past couple of days hadn't been great. Or... great for insomnia, maybe, but not great for sleep or general functioning. When I left work yesterday I left with a plan of attack to solve the problem. I even detailed it to Wheat. Go home, do my best to eat a proper meal (I don't know about any of you out there, but when I don't sleep properly my stomach decides that it's not all that into food. It's kind of inconvenient, really), do absolutely nothing that might get my brain engaged (that's right -- no books, no art, and the stupidest television programming possible. Sadly, that last part isn't too hard), have a warm bath with the aromatherapy products (helpfully -- or hopefully? -- labelled SLEEP) that I was given for Christmas, and go to bed. The same kind of thing I've tried in the past when this has happened, you understand. Now here's the weird part.

It worked.

I damned near fell asleep in the bathtub, but that's not surprising. Warm bath, nice bubbles, tired person. It'd be surprising if I wasn't drowsy at that point. What was surprising is that I went to be at about 11 pm and the next thing I knew it was 5:30 am. That part? Almost never happens. Too often, by the time I get to bed my brain's all fired up for round two (or round whatever, depending on how the day went) and I'll either be up until stupid o'clock or wake up at stupid o'clock. 11 - 5:30 might not sound great to some of you out there, but to me it was fantastic to the point of being disorienting.

I'm going to try it again tonight.

Maybe I'll allow myself a BIT of reading, though.

But just a little bit.

What do you suppose would happen if I got used to this sleep thing? Interesting thought, anyway.





Don't worry, though. I'm pretty sure that the blog would still be pointless. Sleep can't change everything.

So, maybe this not disappearing thing isn't quite working out yet.

Yeah, sorry about that.

On the plus side, though, you are getting the joy of a completely pointless photo from the new camera. May as well start as I mean to go on, after all.

I have to be honest -- I've had very little sleep in the past couple of days (as in, VERY little. As in kind of feel a little bit queasy very little), so this probably won't be much of a post even now. Ah well, what can you do besides ramble on in this kind of case, right?

Well, I suppose you could stop typing, Dee.

Oh, but I can't do that until I say thanks for the Christmas gifts, especially since my enablers yearly suppliers of gift card to get art supplies with have no idea what they bought me yet. They bought me a lot this year, actually, since I got in on a 30% off sale. It was pencil year, I guess, since there were no pens in the haul. Ok, maybe a few pens. Less than ten, anyway, and some of those were clearance items so I saved a bit on them even without the discount. Other than that? Tinted charcoal, water-soluble tinted graphite, water-soluble metallics, and some verithin pencil crayons so maybe I can not use the Laurentiens quite so much in the future. I always try to pick up at least one thing that I wouldn't get otherwise so that I can experiment, and this year's experiments might be... interesting. As in, my first attempt didn't scan worth crap.

Maybe I should take a photo of it with my new camera?

Yeah, that might work.

I'm going to stop typing now, ok?



Ok then.