Virginia Breeze

It’s time for a contest here at Virginia Breeze.

And this one will challenge your eye and not your brain. I hope.

Here are five photos containing images from this blog. They are each a part of a different photo and some of you who have been following along since we started here last summer should not find this too difficult.

So this contest starts now and it will end Sunday noon est.

The prize is a 25 dollar gift certificate from Amazon.com.

And all you have to do is be the first person to identify the five posts that contain these images. Then email me the answers (url’s) using the contact page under the header here at Virginia Breeze. Don’t give away the answers or anything else by putting any information here or in another post. We will have a consolation prize and we so don’t want to give the answers away before the contest ends and be disqualified. Here are the five images. . .

*

*

*

*

Well it doesn’t seem like very many readers have taken this contest seriously. So starting next week (Sunday) we are going to increase the first prize to fifty dollars. That’s a fifty dollar gift certificate to Amazon. com.

And each week that goes by we will just increase the prize money until I get someone’s attention. It will probably end up being my wife. But hey! She’s a reader too. She just gets to stick her pretty little fist in between my ribs when I am sleeping if she doesn’t like something I have written.

Update://  We have a winner!  It’s Jendrick Hosellmyer from somewhere out there in the tundras of northern Europe.  Thanks Jendrick!  And thank you everyone for playing.  It took quite awhile to get a winner but I’m sure Jendrick will agree that it was worth the wait as he drives his new Toyota Prius around the cracks in the ice while he’s looking for a place to recharge the battery!!

*

*

*

I have become pretty good at realizing when a Patience Exercise is coming down the pike. And this is when I start deep breathing at a very slow rate and thinking about the Himalayan Mountains. This time I started thinking about them around mid January. Because it was then that I realized the watch I had ordered on January third had not been shipped from Jomas Shop after I ordered it through Amazon.com

To be fair it was not their fault. There was a bug in the system and they didn’t know they should ship the watch. So I called Amazon.com and talked to someone about the situation. They said they would delete the order and I should go ahead and order the watch again. Which I did around the 20th of January.

From another vendor. It was then that Jomas Shop decided to ship the watch. They had gotten an earlier email from me asking about the watch and decided to go ahead and ship it. I guess. Because they never contacted me in a real email. I got one of those auto sent messages telling me to look out for incoming stuff.

Whoopee. Now I had two identical watches on their way. One for each wrist. It never rains but it does pour. So I called back my friends at Amazon and they were very nice again and upset I was having such a problem. They told me to send back the second watch. It had been coming down in price since I ordered the first one so they gave me a twenty dollar rebate. And they would pay shipping if I got a tracking number.

So both the watches arrived and I boxed the second one up with a paper grocery bag and lots of tape. I wrote some messages. I called the second vendor and got a RMA number.

And this morning I got in my car and headed for the UPS store. It’s cross town so I hit all the lights and they were usually long ones. And it seemed like every slow driver in Richmond was out there this morning practicing for the Slow Driving Olympics. We have those here on the spur of the moment when it snows. I was deeply into deep breathing at this point and doing a pretty good job.

So I went in the UPS store and the sweet young lady looked at the package and told me they couldn’t track it because it had a PO Box address. The US Postal Service were the only ones who could track it.

I got in my car and went back across town to the Post Office branch which is about ten minutes from our house. I didn’t know they could do tracking information. You learn something every day. All the slow drivers had decided to have their weekly meeting in the Post Office parking lot and it was nice seeing them all again so soon.

There was of course a long line in the Post Office but they have thoughtfully built a long counter that you can lean on while you wait. And of course when I went in there was a ninety two year old woman who was already inside the door. She had arrived there yesterday and was making her way to the counter. I could have gone around her too. But I was deep in my deep breathing exercise and we went to the counter together.

After awhile we got to the front of the line. And I was feeling good about my progress. If patience is a virtue I was feeling like a virgin “For the very first time”. And I heard the woman behind the counter call out “Sir, can I help you?”

My new friend was blissfully unaware that she had just been called “Sir” and I was busy ignoring this bit of confusion. But then she did it again only a little bit LOUDER. And I pointed at this dear, elderly person and said “SHE’s A LADY”!

And she looked down the row of machines right at me and said “That’s what I said!!” Everybody in line kind of moved uncomfortably like they do in lines when something threatens the progress of the line. And I remembered all the stories I had heard down the the years about postal employees who had lost sight of their reasons for living and demonstrated what it means to go over to the Dark Side.

At that point the other lady behind the counter called me and I left my friend to her destiny. My postal lady to be fair seemed to be someone who was very familiar with group therapy procedures and probably had worked as a nurse in a psychiatric ward at some point. She explained everything to me in great detail and very soon after that the package was on its way north while I headed home with my tracking information in hand.

And while I am still in love with Amazon.com I will be more careful about using associated vendors in the future. And I wish that I could tell you that when I approached home a giant sink hole was roped off down the street from my house and it would have opened up at the exact moment I rode over it if everything had gone smoothly.

No. It was just a little exercise in patience building. The universe is a school with many more than 16 grade levels. And we are its students. I am afraid it is going to take me a long time to get through the lower grades. And I should probably not even bother wearing a watch. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

If you have to ask “Are we there yet?” then you have already answered your own question.

Many of these in-series lists on each post are too long. They need to be much shorter. Probably five entries should be the limit so readers don’t have to look down so far to read the post. It’s going to take awhile to fix it. There are over seven hundred entries and most of them are attached to an in-series list.

But it will happen sometime soon. And then you will see nearly instant availability of nearly every post in this blog using the in-series plugin. I think this is a good way to structure a blog because it allows the reader to follow a train of thought without any difficulty. And that train of thought can go chugging through the blog in a way that is not dependent on months or dates. And it is not dependent on categories. I don’t look at things based on categories. Maybe I am missing something but I don’t think so. Or maybe there are just different ways of doing things once again.

A post should tell a story. And as in a book you should be able to “turn the page” and continue the story. This is what I am trying to do. And it is working very well so far. It needs to be further refined. But my stats tell me that readers are journeying much farther into Virginia Breeze once something is found that interests them. Maybe the word is “coherent”. The blog is more coherent than it was although it is still not focused enough. But we must blog awhile to find out where we are going must we not? At least some of us do not know when we start exactly where it is we want to go. It is an adventure.

The blogging adventure.

One other thing I am learning to to always have at least a short written passage with every photo. Don’t leave photos hanging.

Update: “Soon” may be a bit optimistic. It just took an hour to do the bird category. But there will be fewer subjects when things are done. The main topics will be: Poetry. Writing. Photos. Travels in Virginia. Travel outside Virginia. The Arts. Amazon.com.

If you are interested in this process you can follow along in the sidebar Pages. Look at Photos of Virginia. The subjects are going to be in alphabetical order. And so far today I have done Bird Photos and Richmond City Photos. It will go faster as time goes on but it is a bear now.

Oh wait. What did I do with the bear photo?

More Writing About Blogging

http://davidnotes.com/2008/02/03/why-didnt-he-stumble-my-post/

Update: Poetry is done and photos are done. So we are almost one third of the way home.

http://davidnotes.com/virginia-breeze-photos/

*

http://davidnotes.com/virginia-breeze-poety/

*

*

http://davidnotes.com/writing-under-construction/*

*

***

Patricia Kirkpatrick was gracious enough to let me reproduce her poem here. And I have been sitting here reading it many times.

I would have a difficult time letting someone I did not know publish one of my poems on their blog. My poems are like my children. I would not want to let one of them off just anywhere. So I will do my best to take care of the poem .

Why am I drawn to this poem? Possibly because it is about this object that lives in my head and yours. I call it a “bag of tricks” and give it medication so it will feel well. Many times I have not treated it well. And it lets me know when that is the case by giving me a migraine headache.

We have a difficult relationship. But this brain has never produced a tumor or allowed one to grow. At least I am not aware that this has happened. How difficult must it be to deal with something like this?

I really like the way the author sums up her experience. “We looked out the window…..”. These words are graceful and light. The poem is flying as it ends along with the snow flakes and “those white, fringed birds”.

We are all lifted up by this. It is a new season. It is a new year and a chance for a new beginning for all of us. And we should be grateful that we can look out into the world and see things that are beautiful. I cannot take this for granted.

How much blood have we left along the paths we have taken? And if we need more someone we don’t even know will give it to us. How wonderful that someone would do this! We are in this together like the patient and her nurse.

It is too easy to forget that this is the case.

http://davidnotes.com/2008/01/13/writing-a-note-to-someone-a-poem/

Reserve you copy of Century’s Roads Poems. My copy is on the way here.

http://www.amazon.com/Centurys-Road-Poems-Patricia-Kirkpatrick/dp/0930100123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200251864&sr=8-1

*

*

*

***