Virginia Is For Families

Katharine McPhee

Play Somewhere
07-somewhere-dvdlive

Beth and I had company this weekend but after everyone left we headed for the park to get some exercise and talk about our Spring vacation.  We have two weeks to relax and get out of town this time of year.  And for the second time in two years we have made plans to visit our nation’s capitol as well as Virginia Beach.

We talked about starting an exercise and dieting program because we have kind of let things go over the winter.  I realized that I need to do it not just for myself but for her as well.   And she’s probably not going to do it unless I do it.

It’s a strange circle and one we need to break up.  So it’s going to be a “working vacation” in a sense.  Of course, you can walk your buns off in Washington DC without any problem.  But going out to dinner every night and having the opportunity to dine on fabulous cuisine will offer some challenges.   We may have to start that part of the program after we get back.

So it was warm and breezy today and we walked all over Maymont Park.  They have a new exhibit area with some great birds on display.   The eagles are awesome.  The hawks have beautiful feathers.

And we spent some time enjoying three baby goats.  Beth said it was one of the cutest things she has ever seen.  They were having a great time and the crowd was enjoying them too.

So we walked and walked.  The bears were busy sleeping and I would never have seen them if Beth has not pointed them out up in the rocks.

Lots of folks were throwing balls and someone had set up the game with the little hoops and mallets.  What’s it called?  You hit a ball around the lawn and try to be the first one to get back to the beginning where there is a small pole driven into the ground.

Anyway there were people doing that and lots of cameras around.  Photography seems to be an ever more popular hobby from the number of SRL cameras I see in my travels.

Click on photos to enlarge

I was having trouble discovering a topic to write about today. I was even considering writing about Sparky and Malarky my two German Shepherds who guard the house while we are gone. They are downstairs at the moment imagining how great the trash man would taste and discussing who will get the more tender parts.

But that’s not going to happen. He’s a good guy. Still I don’t want to tell the dogs it won’t happen . In the first place they would be upset with me. And in the second place they might try to eat me. And I am not safely on the other side of the door like our neighborhood trash guy.

I left him a trash can full of woodworking trash today. Lots of little 2 X 4’s that add up to about half a ton. He’s probably not too happy about that right about now. He has to pay a whole lot more money for gas just to get here and then I am weighing down his truck with all this wood.

I’m a bad customer.

But on the other hand I could share some good news with him. This will make him happy enough to forget about a bunch of 2 X 4’s.

Oil slipped off a record high above $143 a barrel today as US crude rose 11 cents to 140.59 a barrel. I know that seems like not so good news. You have to dig deeper to find the pony as President Reagan used to like to say. Because the US Energy Information Administration revised down US April oil demand by 863,000 barrels per day. That’s nearly 4 percent below demand last year in April.

“This revision of the US oil demand for April has certainly put pressure on crude futures. This is demand destruction before our very eyes” said Phil Flynn of Alaron Trading. “This is a huge revision and it happened when fuel prices were still lower, so you can expect that there could be more future downgrades in demand data.

On the other hand we have the weak dollar and escalating tensions between Iran and Israel over Teheran’s nuclear program.

Those two are gonna have a showdown at some point. But what I interpret this guy saying is that there is probably a huge glut of oil out here and the traders have gone too far. Prices are going to start down in the very near future.

And we can all take our cars out on the road again! Who has cut back on their driving?

Just about everybody. We all make those little decisions that cut our fuel costs by five, ten or twenty percent. And it adds up! So I need to run down the street and catch my trash man before he turns the corner. And tell him the good news.

Maybe Sparky and Malarky would like to come? Would you guys? Great! Come on then. Let’s get some exercise and run down there to see the trash man!

One of the blogs in the blogroll here is Pumping Your Muse Prompts and it is a collection of photos and simple writing assignments.  I recommend it to those of you who are interested in writing more and exercising your imagination while you do it.

For example this morning I chose to do an exercise about a parked car and was asked to focus on emotion, smell and sound. In keeping with my present dark mood I set the scene before dawn in a rundown city area.  And here is what happened!

He sank down in the seat of his Chevrolet and waited for the morning light. He had spent most of the night in the bar up the street and only left because he felt uncomfortably close to an altercation with the stranger in the corner booth. Why had the man approached him as he was leaving? What did he want?

His car was strewn with empty Budweiser bottles and the smell of spilled beer and cigarettes mixed with the sharp odor of gasoline. The car wouldn’t start. He had flooded the feeble carburetor.

And suddenly his mind was flooded with fear as he saw the door of the bar swing open and the man burst through it and head down the sidewalk in his direction. The street was silent except for the sound of his purposeful walk.

“I need some help” he thought. But there was no one near and the hulking shadow under the street light continued in his direction.

“I am lost” he whispered to himself and he once again checked all the locks on the doors. But the sudden loud report of glass cracking into hundreds of tiny islands desperately hanging together came a second later.

“I should get out of the car” he said and suddenly rage filled him like a spark that threatened to turn the interior of the fume filled vehicle into a ball of flame.

He reached across his body with his violently shaking hand and released the lock. And with his left hand he pulled up on the handle. His feet hit the pavement and his weary frame suddenly weary no more stood up to meet his assailant.

He picked up the rock embedded in his windshield and thought about heaving it in the direction from which it had arrived. But a rock is a feeble weapon when pitted against a rather large handgun.

And this he could see as it was raised in his direction.

“What have I done?” he thought as light began to color the lonely street of this old and often violent city. “Why did I come here ?” and the answer came not in words but in the flash of the gun and a loud sound that somehow was all mixed up with a brief moment of pain as the street, his car and the shadowy figure now just a few feet away all exploded.

And suddenly he was looking down on a man lying in the street next to a green 1975 Chevrolet while another man turned and ran down the sidewalk.

He turned and looked in a window across the street because he heard a baby crying. And he suddenly knew that the small child was hungry and afraid and wanted his mother. Because he dreamed of ghosts in the night.

The child’s dream was disturbed as the light crept through the tattered shade of his bedroom window and he wanted to be held by his mother who was just coming out of the bar across the street.

She screamed as she saw the body of her friend lying on the pavement over a dark stream moving towards the gutter and the parked Chevrolet.

And slowly lights began to come on up and down the street as residents held their heads and turned their weary bodies towards a familiar sound and the beginning of another day.

***

You can start something like this and really not know where it is going for awhile. Just put yourself in the scene as an invisible  bystander or one of the characters.   Imagine somehow you dropped out of the sky and there is this unfortunate man sitting in his car.   What is he thinking?  What is going to happen?

I probably took this exercise somewhat far afield but no one is going to grade this thing.  We are not in school anymore.  Please let us not bring our teachers home with us!

Here is an interesting math exercise you can use to boost your blogging spirits. Go to Google Analytics and look up the average time readers spend on your blog(s). Then multiply it times the number of visitors you had in the last thirty days.

Now you have the total amount of time there were eyes on your blog. Sure they were lots of different eyes. But I find it encouraging to think that for 292 hours there was a brain connected to eyes that were connected to something I did here. That’s almost two weeks if my math is correct.

There are all different kinds of statistics associated with blogging. Sometimes you have to dig a little to find one that makes you happy.

Or I do at least. You may be happy all the time.

Do you think that Google Analytics gives an accurate picture of the stats of bloggers? Are there better stat programs out there?