Prospective things
Okay, WHEW. Blogmom, along with scraping me off the ceiling several times today after last night’s small epic of photographic disaster*, keeps reminding me that I still need to produce a bats in the belfry doodle so she can finish the auction-and-oddments list and hang the freller. Yes. Well. This has been one of the pebbles in my All Stars the last few weeks—the kind of pebble that you can’t frelling FIND when you take your shoe off**. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Bats in a belfry? All you need is a bell or two and some bats. The real problem has been my literal mind. Since this is, after all, an auction/sale to raise money for our Change-Ringing-Bells Restoration Fund I have felt compelled to make some indication that the bat-infested belfry in question is a change ringing belfry. Also, bells are frelling huge. And bats are . . . frelling tiny. I’ve been through more unsatisfactory compromises about all this than all the other doodles combined. I was getting ready to take a deep breath and pull it: no bats in the belfry doodle, it’s beyond me. But I’ve finally done it. It still needs tidying up and I pretty well guarantee it’s not what you had in mind . . . but it’s a belfry with bats in it. And given the amount of time I’ve spent figuring it out—including, don’t forget, that it’s something I can reproduce, supposing anyone (after all this) wants it—it may well be tomorrow’s post in its entirety.*** People who aren’t bell ringers are going to say, Huh? And people who are bell ringers are going to say . . . Huh?
Hey, it’s a free country. You can buy some other doodle.
Meanwhile, I have got to get this photo thing sorted with WordPress.† There is not only tomorrow’s reveal of a deeply underwhelming bats in the belfry doodle in your immediate future but Aaron a little while back demanded proof that I write in my books†† and so I was thoughtfully looking at a few of the more emphatically vandalised††† and wondering if I could get a blog post out of them . . . hmmmm . . . probably. . . .
But in the meantime it’s been a long day and I’m feeling too chicken to tackle more photos tonight. So I will leave you with a small harmless chick doodle.‡
Cheep cheep cheep
* * *
* Thanks to Blue Rose and a couple of emailers on the subject of making my over-my-head camera work better. I knew I was signing up for the Grand National when I could barely post to the trot^ by buying this hot-blooded steeplechaser disguised as a mild-mannered hybrid^^ point-and-shoot camera but I admit I was not expecting something that just looking at the instructional CD would make me lose the will to live, let alone trying to read some of what’s on it. I know the thing can do everything I could ever possibly want a camera to do and probably quite a lot more.^^^ It’s figuring out how to ask. But you’ve made some nice stupid-user-friendly specific suggestions and I will absolutely give them a try.^^^^
^ But hey, they’ve made the National easier
^^ That’s my problem. Too much of that frelling hybrid vigour.
^^^ I don’t suppose it can do my taxes?
^^^^Supposing I can figure out the cryptic runes.
** Probably standing in the middle of a field with dancing hellhounds. This happened to me recently and shortly before making the decision I was going to have to hop home finally discovered most of an inch of thorn that had driven up through the bottom of the shoe but only revealed itself on the inside when my weight was compressing the insole. Cheez. The countryside is dangerous.
*** Both the post and the doodle in their entireties.
† I’ve repeatedly suggested motherboards at dawn and WordPress doesn’t even bother to answer. A programme with no honour. No wonder civilisation is in decline.
†† A blog reader with no honour. No wonder civilisation, etc.
††† The ones most likely to feel the tip of my pencil—or, when necessary, red pen^—tend to fall in three broad categories: homeopathy, poetry^^, and All the Rest of Non Fiction. This last is a little overwhelming, but I want to try and find you something where I get into a really passionate argument with the writer.
^ Yes! Pen! RED pen! Sometimes nothing less will do! —Although I am entirely with those of you who feel there is a special circle in hell+ for people who write in library books.
+ The Dante’s INFERNO we get in college is insanely abridged. There are dozens—hundreds—of circles not in the standard university textbook. Given the behaviour of many undergraduates you’d think they might want to leave a few more in. Writing in library books and (say) leaving the dorm kitchen oven incapacitated with pizza-epoxy is only the beginning.
^^ I had a not very interesting adolescent go at the Grecian Urn,+ for example. The problem with Keats is that I fell in love with him way too young and the rarefied philosophy he inspired in me was pretty much on an intellectual par with the notorious gnomic revelations you write down when you’re stoned++ and the next morning they say things like ‘oxblood shoe polish’ and ‘fistiblet your glitches’—only more embarrassing.+++
+ I apologise, sort of, for the other night’s site. Personally I feel that blue type on black backgrounds should be a criminal offense, punished by being made to wear varifocals while riding up and down an escalator with those barred treads—like in the London tube—which make them look striped. The stripes are very important to the visual experience. The malfeasant is to ride the escalator till he/she staggers off one end or the other and falls down. This is life with varifocals—although in my case I do very well with them pretty much with the only exception of striped escalators—but it’s also how blue type on a black background has always made me feel, even when I was younger and still had excellent vision with my contact lenses.
I did, however, like the small frenzied prisoner in the upper right-hand corner, and the site is blessedly free of ads for ‘Earn gigantic truckloads of money at home in your spare time only by PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS’ and those really awful¸ speaking of being kind to your eyes, flashing banners that say YOU HAVE WON SOMETHING! YES YOU HAVE! CROSS OUR HEARTS AND HOPE TO DIE! JUST CLICK HERE! Noooooo I don’t think so. But I’ve left sites early because I can feel myself about to manifest my latent epilepsy and go off in fits.~ I suppose the internet police have better things to do with their time but . . .
~ They thought I had epilepsy when I was a kid. I grew out of it, whatever it was. But that sense that something is about to leap out of the shadows of your own body/mind and get you lingers in the memory, and flashing lights make me nervous as well as irritated.
++ Not that I have any direct experience of this. Of course not. Old people were always old, you knew that, right?
+++ Most of us were young once. No, really.
‡ Crossing my fingers now.
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