Where the deer and the alligators play

    This time, I definitely saw the alligator, and not just the tail. At Congaree Creek this afternoon, I should have known it would be a good wildlife-viewing day because before I even hit the loop trail (or if you prefer, before I'd gone 0.2 miles or so) a couple of white-tail deer crashed by. They appeared to be on the loop trail, which might have been an illusion, but then at that size, they probably appreciated the extra space between trees. They fled; I blame my singing. (Everybody's a critic.)
    When I got to the swampy section where the nice fellow with the young family showed me an alligator that I couldn't actually see the other day, I looked in the same place and there was an entire alligator. Basking, not bothering anybody. Maybe eight feet long and a little bulky-looking. Well-fed, I was hoping. As it wasn't yet 60 degrees, I was reasonably confident s/he would continue basking for some time yet. I thought of throwing him/her my jacket, as I was suddenly feeling considerably warmer, but I thought s/he might misinterpret the gesture. Regardless, there are definitely alligators in there, 'cause I saw one. Some day I'm going to remember to bring the camera on the days when I need it!

I'm only happy when it rains

    OK, I'm only physically comfortable when it rains, but I don't know any songs with that title. I suppose a person with common sense would find a workaround. The problem, which I have no doubt blithered about before, is that the heat pump dries out the apartment abominably. ("Abominably" must be one of the oddest looking words in the English language.) I have two humidifiers, but using the highly chlorinated tap water in them leads to me making these weird air burps, which I can't help but think aren't healthy. Anyway, they don't feel healthy.
    I could just as easily go buy distilled water for the humidifiers, but this seems like overkill and is also something of a pain in the butt. So, I keep the place as chilly as I can stand and only run the humidifier when the kitty becomes a static electricity monster. I know I could come up with a better solution, but on the other hand, winter is nearly over and it's raining a lot these last days of it anyway. So the solution seems to be finding itself. And I really like that Garbage song, too (though googling indicates that "I'm" isn't actually part of the title).

Focus

    ...although I guess I could have been cute and called it "Focus on the Family." Yesterday I took brother Malcolm hiking at Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve. There was one especially lovely scenic vista that I hadn't noticed before. I tried to take a picture of both him and it, but just couldn't. He was gracious about letting me take yet another of my people-free nature shots. Later, I did succeed at taking a picture of him surrounded by nature and pinpointed the problem: modern cameras look for a focus and hone in. The rest of the picture becomes background. If the focus is lit differently than the rest, well, too bad for the rest. The picture of Malcolm turned out pretty neat, but really he's too dark and the world around him is all washed out.
    The point is, though, that I always thought that my predilection for pictures without people reflected some degree of sociopathy, and it worried me a little. But what it really reflects is that I just don't know what the hell I'm doing when I get a camera in my hand. I can shoot landscapes because they're easy, but putting a person in a landscape is hard so I long ago gave up. I'm perfectly happy to recognize that I can stand to work on technique and theory. I'm even happier to realize that I'm not really a sociopath. Or at least not in this instance.

This modern life

    Last night's gathering for Dad's 92d birthday was something of a fiasco, though fun in the end. We went to Outback Steakhouse, which is usually a pretty relaxed place of a Sunday evening, but not this time. Part of this may have been due to today being a national holiday; maybe some people treated it like a Saturday night. The main problem however was that at some point in the evening the computers at Outback had gone down, so nobody could pay, so nobody could leave, so nobody new could sit down. By the time we got there, the problem had been fixed, but the backlog was still having a little trouble clearing.
    As we were a party of 7, we had adventures getting seated anyway. They wanted to put us at a table for six with one chair on the side, but there was literally no room (less than a foot) for anyone to sit in such a chair. Then we talked our way into another table for 6 with a seat at the end which nephew James took, which pretty largely prevented anyone getting by in either direction. Then finally they gave us the table they showed us in the first place plus the one next to it (all told with room for maybe 12), so at least we were comfortable. Then we started waiting for our food.
    It was a long wait. It made us wonder how a giant corporation couldn't have procedures in place for handling transactions using pen, paper and arithmetic. At least some of those people must have been willing to pay in cash if computer failure meant no credit cards could be handled. But maybe the cash registers wouldn't work at all. On the whole, it was a very poor recommendation for the 21st century.
    It's also unclear why having no one able to pay for a long time would create a backlog for the kitchen, but I guess when we all did finally get seated, we all ordered at the same time, and thus a backlog followed a long lull. Anyway, that's the closest to making sense out of it that I can manage.
    When the food did arrive, it was mostly cold, though mine was fine. On the whole, we all agreed we didn't need to come back to Outback again ever. However, Dad was cheerful, and singing, and having a good time, and certainly felt a lot better than the previous evening when we went out after dialysis. And that's all that matters.

Alligator!

    I was strolling the loop trail at Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve when I encountered a young family at a very narrow place. Mom, Dad, three tiny little girls. I have no idea how the girls were getting around on this fairly tough trail, but I guess they were small enough to carry. Regardless, the reason they were stopped turned out to be that Dad was showing them an alligator sunning himself about 50 feet away. He was nice enough to show me to, though to be quite honest I couldn't really pick it out. (Only the tail was visible, he indicated.) Still, it was a much more exciting hike than I usually have. (As it was only 45 degrees or so, we weren't exactly in a lot of danger, though.)
    Today is also my dad's 92d birthday. Siblings Anne and Malcolm, Jr., and Anne's son James are down from Boston for the weekend to celebrate the day. We took Dad and Margaret out last night and are doing it again tonight, and Anne, James, William and I went out for brunch this afternoon. It's been a pleasant, fun weekend.

So nice to see you again

    Not you. Well, that's not true; it's perfectly nice to see you again as well. However, I was referring to my sense of humor, missing lately. It rolled in again, strangely enough, with the foul weather. I stress that a sense of humor has little to do with being funny; I was at my funniest when I was clinically depressed and had just enough sense of humor to keep from pulling a Virginia Woolf. Sense of humor is the ability to find the funny side in any situation. As my situation is anything but funny, this is a skill that I desperately need. And thus am very, very glad to see it again. And you, too. And with a sense of humor, I may find that other people are more glad to see me, too. Something to hope for in any case, but if they don't, I'll probably find something funny about that as well.

731

    No, it isn't Barry Bonds' adjusted home run total. It's how many days there are in two years, assuming that one of the two is a leap year. As it's also the number of consecutive daily blog entries that I reach with this one, apparently my blog is now two years old. Now at least there's an excuse for it being terrible.
    One doesn't want to blog about the weather two often, even on anniversaries that offer a ready-made excuse for mailing one in. However, today is as beautiful a day as can be imagined, with highs in the mid-60s. Tomorrow, on the other hand is expected to be cold and nasty; the payoff is that some weather forecasters are claiming that there will be snow. And no doubt, somewhere there will be. I would welcome a total strikeout by the forecasters and a complete rerun of today. Hey! It could happen!