Time Flies On!

Part One: Time for Clouds

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Show off a picture of some really interesting clouds. The only caveat: don't use pictures you've previously posted -- make them new, or at least new to the rest of us.

This hardly seems fair - it was already dark by the time I left work tonight, let alone when I read John's entry. So I'm just going to have to stick you with a few of the better cloud shots I've taken (but not posted) in the past two weeks. The first three were all taken in front of my house, give or take a driveway or two:

Taken January 23rd.



Taken January 31st.



Also taken January 31st, about six minutes later.

The last one is from my Mount Lemmon trip:



Taken Sunday, February 5th.

*****

Part Two: Time Remembered

Blogger is still down at the moment with a scheduled outage, probably part of an attempt to prevent reoccurance of several recent unscheduled ones. While I'm waiting, I may as well tell you what else I've been up to tonight. My brother Steve sent me digital copies of a couple old photos he came across. One was my grandfather's grave, which I've only seen once in real life, if ever. Another was of John, me, my mom and Steve in January 1985. I really appreciate getting this, because as you may recall, I have only a handful of photos with both me and my mom in the same shot. The third is of Dad, (stepmother) Ruth, me, and my college roommate Evelyn, taken circa 1978.

I cleaned up a bunch of speckles and stuff from the third photo, and this is the result:

Steve and I emailed back and forth for about an hour, him sending photos, me editing them and sending him the result, both of us trying to nail down when they were taken. It was fun and interesting. If the grave marker is to be believed, I've had my grandfather's birthdate wrong on his Find-A-Grave page and my tribute page to my mom. I was ten years off! I wonder where I got the 1901 date, when it was really 1891! The 1978 one I dated from my appearance in the picture and the presence of my roommate; and Steve agreed, based on his memory of the Middle East peace talks between Sadat and Begin(!). Steve thought the shot with Mom in it was from 1987, but I knew that was impossible. We soon decided early January 1985 was the most likely date. That was the trip during which John and Steve "invented" GPS dashboard mapping during the drive south to my Mom's place in Florida. They were just a little ahead of their time.

*****

Part Three: Time for a Winner!

Tonight's the night I'm supposed to announce the winner of the Peter Sellers Lifetime Achievement Award for Best Quirky Actor. I was a bit disappointed by the light turnout at the virtual polls, but I've made a neat little bar graph from the compiled results.

(doubleclick to see larger)

And the winner is...



Christopher Lloyd!

Who deserves the Sellers Award For Best Quirky Actor?
Actor	Votes	Percent
Peter O'Toole	0	0.0%
Tom Hanks	0	0.0%
John Lithgow	2	22.2%
Christopher Lloyd	4	44.4%
Robin Williams	0	0.0%
Johnny Depp	1	11.1%
Bill Murray	1	11.1
Steve Martin (write-in)	1	11.1%
total votes	9	100.0%

****

Part Four: Lost in Time

Back during high school and early college, I edited 2-5YM, the fanzine of the local Star Trek club in Syracuse. One of our members, Gordon, threatened for years to write an article for me called "The Rise and Fall of the Fiji Empire," on the theory that eventually Fiji would get its turn at being a superpower. He never did get around to writing it, but I still remember it as an idea, maybe more so than if he'd actually followed through.

I also remember that I've promised you a number of blog entries that haven't happened yet. There was supposed to be one called "But Is It Art?" I haven't done it because I'm not sure of the propriety and legality of posting pictures of art hung in a private building. Then there's "Burning Down the House, Part Two," about privacy and honesty and oversharing online. I'll get to it. And there's the Mount Lemmon entry. You'll see that too - in due time.

One reason I keep harping on the theme of Time here is that it seems that everything I do is strongly affected by it. I don't have enough time to work and blog and clean and write and sleep. I get behind, even as time rushes forward. I was looking at a McDonald's trayliner today, copyrighted 1993. I'm pretty sure some of the stuff on it goes back much farther than that, but even 1993 is 13 years ago. That doesn't seem possible. It was the year Quantum Leap was canceled. Didn't that just happen a couple of years ago? The contemporary scenes in Back to the Future were in 1985, and the "future" was 2015. We're now much closer to 2015 than 1985. And those photos! Why couldn't we have had better photo technology in the 1970s and 1980s? All the old photos I see seem to have spots on them. Fortunately, I can clean them up digitally, even with freeware. When did that happen? When did I get so spoiled that a physical photo became strictly second rate?

Yep. Time doesn't march on. It flies. And we're all racing to keep up.

Karen