West Virginia: New River Gorge Preserve
Hello, hello. So, yeah, the vacay got busy, which made it fun. Sadly, it’s over and I am now home again and it’s back to the grind stone, or will be as soon as I get sorted out. You know how it goes.
I took a lot of photos the second week and was whining to myself about getting them copied from Instagram to here, but it turns out I can just embed them. Yeehaw! Not only saves time, but storage space, as I am approaching my limit – again – and this time just resizing won’t do anything since I already resized everything before.
Anyway, I figured that waiting until November to go to West Virginia would mean I missed all the fall colors (they were gone here, already), but it did not! In fact, it seems like I was just in time for a lot of it. So, be warned, lots of pics of fall colors.
I was originally going to put them all in one post, but I guess it’s too many, so I’m breaking it up. If the embedding works, you should be able to click the little arrows for a slideshow on each embedded image.
If it works.
First, we have some random photos of West Virginia roads. These are all in the Beckley area and/or New River Gorge Preserve.
The New River Gorge Preserve is HUGE. Look it up on google maps. It’s also gorgeous. Apparently the river was too rocky and wild for early settlers to do anything with, so it was mostly left alone. Or something like that. It’s smack dab in…um, is it the Appalachian Mountains, or is it something else? I did a quick google, but couldn’t find it, so I’m going to call them super big hills for right now. Feel free to correct me in the comments.
Anyway, here we walked down to a little beach area. I’d like to think I took a photo of a sign or something so I could tell you what little area, but if I did, I haven’t copied it off yet (plus, I admit, my instagram postings are a little muddled because of their ten photo limits). It’s labeled as being the bridge, but you can see it isn’t…
There are a few more of that little beach area (including a coupe of repeats – sorry), and some more of an area up the road from it. Still not at the bridge, despite Instagram’s tagging.
More of the little beach and the river view from it – and though it’s tagged as the New Gorge River Bridge, it still isn’t. There’s a shot of some very interesting grass we found growing along the river – it’s triangle shaped! However, we were assured by a local that it is just boring old “river grass”. Yeah, I still thought it was pretty cool.
Okay, more tomorrow. Have an awesome triangle grass kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #15: Crunchy Leaves
Today I am grateful for crunchy fall leaves!
The city cleaned out the storm drains or something today (I forget – we got a notice about it) and so they went around town and scooped all the leaves out of the gutters and left them in fantastic crispy piles all along the edge of the street:
As a leaf crunching addict, I was quite delighted to stomp through their lovely piles and crunch my way all around the block while walking the dog. It was not only fun, but also therapeutic as well.
Crunch. Crunch.
Other than that I worked on book covers today. Here’s the lineup of rough drafts:
No doubt they will change greatly before you see them again. Or maybe not. Who can say?
I didn’t do much writing today because instead I concentrated on reworking the plot – I think it will be better to have them there sooner after the action happens rather than coming in cold the next day, but it means moving some things around and I had to refigure times, and do travel calculations and… anyway, tomorrow I should get to work on the rewriting. I’m not deleting words from my NaNo count, though. I’ll cut and paste them at the end of the document, and then write the new ones in their place. I wrote them during NaNo, FOR NaNo, and I’m not dismissing that work.
Dad and I also finished Season 2 of Dark Matter and – AHHHHH! What a horrible place ot end it. I have to say, in the first few episodes of season one I hated Three, but he has really grown on me and is now maybe my favorite character. I still don;t like Five – she waggles her forehead around too much when she talks and everything she says is ultra dramatic – amusing since I think I do the same thing, but hey, that’s the way it goes. I did really like Four, but after… the throne room (no spoilers) I don’t know anymore.
And now it is beddy bye time for me.
Have a crunchy autumn kind of day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #14: My Snifty Camera/ Super Moon
Today I am thankful for my snifty Nikon. Despite it’s advancing years, sticky lense, and aggravating buttons, in the end it does the best it can with what it has. Basically, I just took it out to get some snaps of the super moon:
I’m convinced for the billionth time I need a bigger zoom than 200.
Aside from that I spent the day with hubby. We finished last season of NCIS New Orleans and watched the first episode of this season. Was surprised to see Brody go, but I am rubbing my hands together at The Christopher/Sonja tension, so that’s good. While we watched TV we broke out the funnel cake kit we’ve been saving for a special occasion:
They turned out waaaay better than the mess we tried on our own last year. Namely hubby said it was the metal ring that made the difference.
After lunch (we’re adults, we can eat funnel cakes for lunch!) we started Final Fantasy XIII-2 – finally!
I wasn’t sure about it at first, but before we left the first chapter we had both a Moogle companion and got to ride a chocobo, so BOOM! I’m on board. Plus Noel is kinda hot, though with Sareh being engaged to Snow there won’t be a romance with them, which is kinda sad, but if she betrayed Snow at this point I’d have to be furious, so better they don’t do that.
I did get some Nano words in, and I’m planning to get back to it after this posts. Haven’t caught up yet, but I will.
Have a super moon kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #12 : Time with Hubby
Today I am grateful for time with hubby. It’s Friday, which is grocery shopping Day, so we headed to Omaha. We spent some quality time pokemoning at the Heartland of America park, which is always a good time.
After that we did a few rounds in the old market to hit pokestops and ran into a little bunch of screaming protesters .
I’m all for protesters , but these people lost me by screaming “Trump is not my president “. Ummmm…. no, he’s not. Obama is our president . Trump is the president elect. Maybe if they spent some time in government class instead of skipping classes to grieve because their candidate did not win…
I’m not a Trump supporter , by the way, just for the record, but the ignorance displayed here is staggering . I get that they’re trying to be catchy, and maybe I’m hung up on semantics , but come on. The media made such a deal about how educated these people are supposed to be, so represent, huh? Show us how educated you are.
Moving on. We hit ihop for dinner and I tried the apple pancakes.
After that it was Walmart to do the actual shopping where I saw the cutest minion pajama shirt.
And the bank was decorated up in the most awesome space theme. even the cupboard is done like ground control panels.
And last but not least, I finally tried the new m& ms and….
They were good. a lot less sweet than the regular peanut m& ms, so they were closer to what they tasted like when I was a kid. I’ve noticed that candy keeps getting sweeter and sweeter until, tRuth be told, I don’t even like most of it.
Anyway, that was my exciting day. How was yours?
And now I need to sleep. Have a day in the park knowing how government functions kinda day.
Jo 🙂
What Happens to Old Film
Long ago, in the dusts of time, I used a camera with *gasp* film. Towards the end was a time of great activity (aka I was short on time) and when time was available I was short on funds and, well, anyway, I never got the last several rolls developed.
I’ve planned to do it. I’ve said I need to. Then this year for Christmas Dad gave me my usual Walmart gift card. For a change I didn’t need to spend it on a) the thing I wanted that no one got me or b) groceries, so I am using it to get those rolls of film developed.
I sent in two test rolls, to see if anything would even come off of them because I had no idea when they were from. To my surprise some photos did come off, and they are from 2005. Even more interesting, the two random rolls I grabbed happen to go together.
As I said there were photos, but that doesn’t mean they’re GOOD photos. One roll isn’t too bad but the other…It’s so bad that they sent me a card about how to avoid light pollution to my film and suggested I may have changed the roll in full on sunlight. Ouch.
Anyway, I thought I’d share them for a sort of throwback fun day, and to show you what happens when you wait 10 years to develop film. Also of note: Walmart did NOT return my negatives (there were a lot of arguments about this online when I tried to find out whether they even developed pictures anymore.) I did get a cool picture CD though so I didn’t have to manually scan anything off.
These are from December 2005. We stopped at Shyla’s Christmas event, got to go to Branson and get a motel and see Ray Steven’s last show thanks to hubby’s work, had the big family Christmas, and then our family Christmas, as well as my birthday and my brother’s birthday. And of course there’s some cats.
So let this be a lesson. Do not let film sit for ten years. And now, I need to get some more developed.
Have a pink and yellow bonfire explosion kind of day!
Jo 🙂
Henry Doorly Zoo Part 2
Annnnnnnnd…I’m back. How lucky for you. Before I get into anything, I want to tell you about the cool contest we have going at the Terrible Turtle Conspiracy Webcomic site. A lucky winner will be featured in a page of our webcomic – how cool is that? And to enter all you have to do is post a selfie! You can get all the details on  the TTC site or on the Facebook Fan Page. (while you’re there feel free to drop a like!)
Today’s photos are from our 2012 trip to the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo. I posted photos of the aquarium and sea life yesterday (there were some good ones IMHO). Today’s images are from the Leid Jungle complex. the cat house, and Madagascar.
The third, and final part will post tomorrow night. While you wait, be sure to enter the awesome TTC contest for your chance to be featured in a webcomic! Remember, you can get all the details on  the TTC site or on the Facebook Fan Page.
Have a Madagascar kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Christmas Lights in Omaha
Hubby has the hard drive imaged but now comes figuring out how to…do whatever it is needs done with the image to…make it into a hard drive. Yeah, I don’t know ANY of the terminology here. Long story short, the hard drive on this laptop has bad sectors – has had since I got it three years ago – and so he originally tried to clone it, but it wouldn’t clone right so he had to go to the next step, which makes an image of the drive (like a virtual disk – with an image of a disc you then mount it in a virtual drive to access it.) However, I have no idea what he does now to make the image into the actual data on the hard drive. I’m sure he knows, but…
Anyway, so I still have the drive with errors, but at least I have a drive. I got some photo editing done of the Omaha Christmas Lights we went to see last week. There is a light show in the park in front of the Mutual of Omaha building, but we missed it. Maybe next year.
If, for some reason, you want MORE Christmas lights, you can check out my flickr album of the trip OR there’s the Christmas Lights folder which may have some of dubious quality – I need to go through sometime and weed some of the older junk out. It’s just so time consuming!
Have a happy new year everyone!
Jo 🙂
Mizumoto Stroll Garden
By editing one photo, shutting down the art program, opening the art program, editing one photo, etc. I managed to edit the photos from our 2012 venture into the Japanese Stroll Garden in Springfield, Missouri. Things like this are why I miss living there. It was cheap to get in, beautiful, and very, very peaceful. Even with other visitors in the park it was arranged so that you felt like you were the only one there.
There are more photos in my Flickr album, as usual. And while these are CC they are sadly non-commercial via the rules of the park.
And now we’re off to a Christmas thing in Shen, so have a good one!
Jo 🙂
Waiting for Time
Last night after I posted the advertisements I *should* have gone to bed. instead I stayed up with Dad (who was watching a WWII documentary) and edited photos. It’s been so long since I had time to reliably edit them that I have folders from 2012 labeled “do”.
Yeah, 2012. Crazy.
So I decided to work on a few of them. June and July to be exact. There were a few interesting ones, so I thought I’d share.
As always, there are more on my Flickr page.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about things – I may have mentioned it in here before. When it comes to writing the vampire books I am really at the level of success I am going to be at unless I want to put in more time. I’ve contemplated doing it; living and breathing advertising and editing and all of that – giving up book covers to make more room for it and cutting out spending time with others even more and….and I don’t want to. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep writing (I have a book on pre-order) but it’s time to really examine my goals. I know there are people who want to “make their living” writing, but I’ll be honest, it’s not me. I have fun writing (okay, it’s a lot of work, too!) but I originally started writing the series not for me but for two other people (literally). When I had twelve fans – including those two – I was ecstatic. Now I have 105 on my email list and all I think is “That’s it? So-and-so has 500.” I remember when my first review from a stranger delighted me, now I just look at the reviews and think “How can I get more?” I see a sale and think “So-and-so has 100.” Yes, I know that if I was “hungry” for success these could be good things, but the truth is it has nothing to do with wanting success for literary reasons, believing that I have some “amazing” story that *must* be shared with the masses – it’s just that desire to “win”. But in order to win I have to sacrifice more – more time, more money – and the sacrifice isn’t worth it to me. As I said, I still plan to write book 8, and book 9, and edit up Patrick, and follow that with a Jorick book – not to mention the three books I am working on as a co-author with others – but I think I need to look at it differently. I need to stop writing and working to “win” and go back to doing it for someone else. I know, they say don’t write for others, but if I’m not writing to win, and I’m not writing for someone else, then I’m just writing for me, and why even bother putting it on paper?
I don’t know. I just know there is only so much time in a day, a week, a month, and there are so many things I want to do that are a lot more important than “winning” at being an author. Even if it’s just working on those books with co-authors – all three of which have been waiting  – just like my photos – since 2012 for me to make time for them. I think everyone has waited enough.
Have a good one!
Jo 🙂
December Fog
There was some amazing fog the other night, so I lured the brother into going for a photographic walk with me at about ten o’clock at night. We got some good shots (IMHO) so I thought I’d share.
I know a lot of people like to get rid of the orange color caused by the mercury lights, but I *like* it – it’s what I was trying to capture. (I admit the blue and pink are a bit of photo editing magic. But they look good.)
I always enjoy fog at night because with the lights it turns the world into a magical place. The foggy night I wish I’d captured the most was in January when I was twelve or thirteen. I stayed the night with a friend who lived uptown and at two or three a.m. we slunk outside. We’d had a decent snow, but it was the powdery kind, so it was blowing around a bit, but it was cold enough to make that heavy ground fog that really clings well. At the time Coin had just put in the new pink streetlights, so with the heavy fog, the whole world was this glowing pink, and the blowing snow was like glitter – it was like being inside of a fairy globe. Add to it that super stillness that you only find late at night in the winter when the whole world seems to be asleep, and it was just an amazing moment that I’ll never be able to capture.
Have a magically-foggy kind of day!
Jo 🙂
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