Spill on Aisle Seven

No, the spill was on my keyboard, which now only types ;p really! meanwhile all the email in my box is kind of stuck there, because all I can tell anyone is: ;p
, or ;p;p;p;p;p;p;p;p

So I use Jon's laptop while he drives to Placerville to the post office with Molly. So if you haven't heard from me, I'll be back in communication next Monday. (We're driving back Sunday.)




The hail was pearl sized and pretty, though Molly found it unsettling, until she started eating it. I've been looking for the elusive bear, who wanders around turning over rocks and pulling apart old wood but is never seen. We thought about buying old jelly doughnuts and leaving them in the woods, but it might attract a certain over weight neighbor instead. Then our friend Rick told us a bull MOOSE was seen around here earlier this year, so now I have two elusive friends to search for! Ranger Sal on the lookout.

I remembered Wuthering Heights as being such a romantic book, but this time around it seems quite rough and peculiar. Generally I'm discovering it's not such a great idea to re-read old favorites. Even Barbara Comyns seemed a little bland on second time around. But Streets of Laredo was definitely exciting.

All for now on this silly dial-up. I can't even look at the post after I post it.

Reckless Rodeo

The Norwood rodeo was great fun-- a circuit rodeo, so they weren't just backyard riders. It opened with sheep riding by kids three years and younger, who of course got bucked off, and will be lucky if they don't go through life with extreme fear of sheep or of anything white and fluffy. These sheep had already discharged their riders.



The bucking broncs were great fun to watch, and I especially enjoyed watching steer wrestling, where the rider gallop out and leaps upon the steer to wrestle it to the ground. The finale of the rodeo was bull riding, and it was grim to watch. A big thunderstorm was crashing all around the metal grandstand, and two bull riders in succession got their hands caught in the tack and were just thrashed and trashed by the bulls before help finally came and they were untangled. It was not fun to watch. And the ambulance didn't budge, no paramedics came to help, which seemed awful.



This farmer and his family fascinated me. He was dressed in a tawny shirt and matching overalls, so fat he couldn't button the sides of the overalls, but with the red beard with beads it was a kind of fashion statement. He and his boys each ate two burgers with chips, two plates of nacho cheese chips, one ear of corn, a bratwurst and two snow cones. Lots of people at the rodeo came up to speak to him.

Bob Dylan the Frog

Put a white hat on it, back it with an intense band, scowl, and sound like the last days of Louis Armsfrog in a big cave, and you begin to get the sound of Bob Dylan at 66 on a rainy night in Telluride.

It was nuts! At first it was so nuts that I got totally hysterical and couldn't stop laughing. He totally rephrases all the old songs so you only know what you're hearing if you pick up a line, like "It's all right Mom," or "Don't think twice", but he delivers the lyrics at double speed in this immensely gravelly voice with his big white hat sort of covering his face, and the music almost sounds like an incantation. We enjoyed it, bewildered, but left early as we had a long drive back on a dark and stormy night, and Nervous Nellie me was driving.

The weather wasn't as bad as predicted-- no winds, and it was a lovely crowd of old Telluriders, baby boomers who'd owned most of the lps. We saw a lot of people we hadn't seen in a long time, and everywhere, it was as if the veil of time had draped over everyone.

off to the rodeo today.

In Colorado for awhile

We're having a great time up here, Hiking and reading. I just finished JANE EYRE, which I hadn't read since high school. Lots good about it, but also some silly aspects to it all. The internet connection is unbelievably slow. I click on cnn in the morning then go downstairs, make cocoa, come back upstairs and it's heaving into a web page. Just attempting to post this is a bit absurd.

Anyway, it's Jon's birthday, and we're going to see Bob Dylan tonight outdoors at the town park, a rain or shine concert. Actually it's a hazardous weather forecast, as in the following:

ISOLATED SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS WILL INCREASE TO SCATTERED
THUNDERSTORMS MAINLY OVER THE HIGHER TERRAIN BY THIS AFTERNOON.
NUMEROUS SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS ARE EXPECTED OVER THE SAN JUAN
MOUNTAINS THIS AFTERNOON AND EVENING. IN ADDITION TO CLOUD TO GROUND
LIGHTNING...MANY OF THESE STORMS WILL PRODUCE GUSTY WINDS UP TO 35
MPH...AND SOME STORMS WILL PRODUCE LOCALLY HEAVY RAIN AND SMALL HAIL.
ISOLATE SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS WILL LIKELY PERSIST AFTER
MIDNIGHT TONIGHT.

Should be an interesting evening! Did they say "A Hard Rain's Going to Fall?" I've never seen him before. Hope he's planning to play the acoustic guitar, considering the weather.

Hope you're all having a happy July. Sally

Leaving L.A. all of a sudden

We decided to leave a day early-- so long till August 5. I may be able to post but it's strictly dial-up, so don't count on it. We're taking the I-15 to I-70, which is right by the Milford Flats fire in Utah. This picture is from the same area burning on our trip two years ago.

We're going to Southwest Colorado, near Placerville, 9,000 feet up.

Looking for old stomping grounds

Click to play!
Linda Davick created these lovely characters: Whinsey and me, and I popped them into my google search of Snazelle Films. I like this improvised Flash way of blogging, though it's not as quick and easy as typing, trust me!

1998 Promo still on line- yikes

After discovering the street views google maps now offer, I took a stroll down memory lane to 155 Fell St., where Snazelle Films used to be. It looked so different that I did a search on google images for an image of the place. I couldn't find one, but along the way I discovered that awn still has a ten year old set of gifs I did to promote the vhs cassettes I was selling through them and my early Charbucks story, all told as gifs.

Anyway, I pulled the images into Flash and more or less rebuilt it because it's too hot to do anything outside. Click on the image to see it-- there's a delayed music track too.

Linda D made this for me!

Click on the sky to see! (Relates to my saucer document below) What a wondrous thing! Thanks, Linda!

fun on mars

I just put fun on mars up on youtube. It's not that it was such a signifigant film, but when I first started using the internet I chose it as my email address, then my whole site name. At one time I bought "makemepsychic.com" as a saved internet address thinking it was sheer brilliance and downright psychic of me. It's available again...

I took three courses at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971. I had graduated from Smith early. One course was taught by Larry Jordan, who made lovely fantasy animation from old cut-outs, and he was a very fine teacher. In lithography the teacher was Victor Moscoso, and he was very involved with his own Zap comix celebrity and possibly a drug of choice. A poor teacher. Also took a class with Lenny Lipton, who actually wrote "Puff the Magic Dragon" and let students smoke dope in class. (I didn't-- I was appalled-- near innocent) A far far distance from Smith College in Northampton.

Saucer sighting day I was born! And only a hundred miles or so away!

Info from this great site: www.footnote.com --mind boggling for anyone interested in U.S. history. You can access documents from the 17th century.

made me laugh

Nice to be home again... can't seem to post titles in the blog tonight... who cares... heard so many details of other peoples' lives at the airport... like: "are the POlice still there?" "yer sure?", "that was the right thing to say, thas good." "and they're not coming back?" "I love ya baby." (paraphrased alas)

I had a nice visit with my mother. We laughed a lot, and I helped her get her banking set up within her main building. The gorgeous old bank where she used to take her deposits closed unexpectedly. It had marble floors and columns, and classic teller cages. The signs on the door that said closed looked like they were written by someone in junior high. I felt as if I'd stepped into the Depression for a beat and a half.

On the 4th of July we drove up to the hometown of Chatham. We were trying to get to the next town in Madison, to visit my nephew John, whom we love very much. He's married with a baby, and suffering the strains of a massive remodel to the house he grew up in. My sister died in 1992.

When we got off the highway at the Chatham exit, there was a police car blocking the entrance to Chatham. With my mother in the car, I really felt as if I was in a dream. Chatham still goes ape for the 4th, which is why he was blocking the bridge, and I managed to get quite lost in the detour, which I don't like at all. I love maps, and have a decent sense of direction, so the google/mapquest recipe style of navigation makes me unhappy. If anything blocks your way, you're toast.

But not to blather on. (yeah, right.) The Philadelphia airport is a cruel place.

• I stand in a very long line (20+ minutes) for the identity/off with your shoes supervision. A young woman looks at my ticket and my driver's license. "Who's Sarah?" "That's me- Sally is the nickname for Sarah. It's like James and Jim. I can show you on my credit card." "Credit cards mean nothing to me." I say, "It's in the dictionary--" OOH BAD THING TO SAY, she gives me a snakey look and says, "Careful, it's been a long day. I'm sending you downstairs." "yes, mam, thank you," says me the lowly worm.

Down escalator not working so I heave down the stairs with my luggage, eventually get the boarding pass. On Southwest. I'm now in group C.

• Now I'm ready to take my shoes off. I wear no metal at all so usually cruise through this part. But the Matron of the Machine stops the belt and looks closely at the screen. Nobody's moving. Then she lets my suitcase chug out and starts unzipping. She practically does an "AH HAH" when she uncovers the tiny tube of toothpaste and small bottle of makeup which Dinah gave me. She tells me I can keep them if I go back and buy a plastic bag, otherwise, that's it. I surrender my dangerous goods, and am not feeling happy. (The whole scary toothpaste business is based on such shoddy intelligence-- the British folks who first freaked everyone out were kids who didn't even have passports.)
  

• Time to buy the lunch for the plane. Ooh, this plastic plate with salami and french bread and lettuce looks good. Haven't had salami in about seventeen years. The French bread was baked about seventeen years ago too. And a Perrier, to be pure and bright, and French! Yes! Ooh and one of those black and white cookies that other people think are so tasty and always disappoint. Now to find my flight.... I can't believe it I'm in the wrong corridor, and this friggin airport makes you go through the whole shoes off shoes on thing again. And I have to guzzle the Perrier.

The flight was okay, just massive turbulence over Arizona, though I confess I was alarmed when a man sat next to me wearing a white Gandhi wrap. It appeared he was wearing just the white gauze and sandals. "I hope he doesn't cross his legs and come unwrapped", I thought. But a language problem with the flight attendant made him move somewhere down the aisle.

Flying is not fun I know it's obvious but it's true for me. Jon picked up a ventilation bug while visiting his father in Florida, and it seems to be just what I got when I went with him to Florida two months ago.

off to New Jersey at 3:30 am

digging around for a small notebook, I found this picture of Froggy riding a horse.
Happy 4th all.

I'll be back Friday, no laptop, not posting till then.

Molly learns to herd

and now on iphone...

Thanks to Sally Govan and Pat.

The technical aspect of this is complicated. As I understand it now, via Pat and Sally and a link to appleinfo, youtube is in the process of converting all its videos to another format.

That's a signifigant blow to Adobe's Flash, I'd think, because up till now, all youtube videos are actually Flash videos, or flvs. You could save any of them to your hard drive by searching them out in your temp files and renaming the extensions .flv. (Applies to PCs of course.) But this was a workaround-- you were supposed to just be viewing them streaming, and streaming sort of implied the video never existed on your hard drive.

Brightcove, which I use for personal videos, is still definitely using flvs. In fact you can do the conversion of your video yourself, in Flash, or upload a video in another format and they convert it to Flash video format.

I'm surprised youtube would make such a big change. I'm guessing the new format is for podcasts, but that also changes things. Before this, you could put your videos on youtube and assume no one could actually save them, just view them. If they are switching to the podcast format, then essentially they are giving them away, which makes me resent youtube, and I imagine others may feel the same way.

I need to follow this closely.