Chick chick chick
OKAY, I CAN’T BLOODY STAND WASTING ANY MORE SODDING TIME TONIGHT. WORDPRESS KEEPS EATING MY PHOTOS AND DESTROYING THE LAYOUT OF THE PAGE. THIS IS GOING TO HAVE TO DO TILL BLOGMOM CAN TELL ME WHAT TO DO. WHICH WILL BE TOMORROW. I HAVE TO GO TO BED.
I have this silly habit of saying ‘I want a night off’ and then posting photos. The thing is that photos are nearly as much of a time-ravenous hassle as text, it’s just the hassle is easier on the brain. I expend* a remarkable amount of time wading through the 1,000,000 photos I have taken of Subject X, whatever Subject X might be, nine-tenths of which will be frankly unusable or at least embarrassing, by which extremity I feel obliged to use a few of the last draggled tenth just because I’ve already frittered so much time on the frellers. Also, as tonight, I’m DETERMINED to get a post out of Penelope’s baby chicks—indeed, worse, I think I’m planning on getting two posts out of Penelope’s chicks—and if the photos aren’t good enough, well, that’s just too bad.** You may have to go cruise for edification elsewhere.***
AWWWWWWW
- I had to stay outside the pen so as not to upset Mum, who is taking her job very seriously.
And today I've come home with a fresh 1,000,000 blurry photos of fortnight-old chicks. There is no escape.
* * *
* She says, carefully not saying ‘waste’
** This applies particularly to certain categories of the population. Photographers, for example. Photographers should look away now. This tirelessly fancy camera is certainly capable of the old photo grail of tack-sharp photos, but I have yet to find that button, or that selection on the menu. The fact that the menu is about forty pages long on a microscopic camera screen and takes you several minutes to click through may have something to do with this^. Chicks are tiny, fuzzy, and move too fast. Arrgh. Second category: farmers and other people who raise chickens, who are going to find another clutch of nascent egg providers and poultry dinners about as enchanting as getting their shoes resoled. A bit like me when some poor misguided marketing person or librarian is trying to tempt me with a convention . . . tempt? Are you bloody joking?
Anyway, to us civilians, baby chicks are cute.
^ Also the fact that it gives you choices like ‘aspect bracket’ and ‘IRI Resolution’ and ‘AF Assist Lamp’, helpfully annotated with cryptic runes. Just what I’ve always wanted, an aspect bracket. Rather ominously there’s also a menu choice titled ‘conversion’. The cryptic rune with that one looks a trifle Cthulhian.
*** Here’s a suggestion, as tweeted by Colleen Lindsay today: “The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground & the survivors are frantically paddling toward the islands of genre.” http://bit.ly/nKuvMR
I was going to retweet, but I couldn’t decide whether to laugh in a good-natured sort of way—not my strong suit, as we know—or snarl, which is professionally incorrect, and probably politically too. But (*&^%$£”!!!!! Some of us have spent our entire long writing lives toiling away in the cootie-ridden swamp of genre, and I personally can do without hearing that maybe the posh literary elite have found something worthwhile in our dank and squalid backwater—even if it’s merely the chance to earn a living by appealing to the verminously low taste of the masses. Yes, I’m just a little allergic to being patronized.^
^ Speaking of being patronised, and I will not embarrass her by naming her here, but someone posted to the forum a little while ago: A wise old man used to tell me that PMS stands for Possible Murder Suspect, seeing that all women get that murderous gleam in their eyes when that time of the month comes around.
Any bloke tried that line on me, and he’d leave shorter than he arrived after I bit his head off. And I would not have had to be at my time of the month either.
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