Gramps had a big time with his Frankenstein mask.
Abby making her jack-o-lantern face.
I headed up to the Buffalo National River on Sunday to shoot some fall foliage. Gina elected to stay home and I couldn’t find anyone else who wanted to spend the day doing outdoorsy stuff with me. So I took off alone. The weather forecast earlier in the week called for cloudy with some rain maybe, which would be perfect for viewing and shooting the colorful leaves. It rained Saturday night and was still raining in Little Rock when I left the house at 6 a.m. but by the time I got to Conway the sky was clearing. When I hit Russellville the sky was clear and I knew that I was going to miss all the good light. By the time I got to the Buffalo, the sun was high and harsh. I had originally planned to do the Hawksbill Crag hike, but I bailed on that and decided to just climb to the top of Roark Bluff across from the Steele Creek campground. My photo suffers from the harsh light. You really need a cloudy day after a rain to really get the great colors that nature has painted across the bluff. This was the first time I’d hiked Roark Bluff. It’s dangerous up there. The photo-taking spot is on a little spit of rock that juts out from the main bluffline. It’s a sheer drop on either side. If you fall, you’re going to die.
On Saturday we caught part of the classic William Shatner movie “Kingdom Of The Spiders,” which features a horde of tarantulas devouring a town. On Sunday we went on a ramble and found a large tarantula sneaking across a parking lot just off of Arkansas 7 north of Hot Springs.
This copse stands right along the path where I do my running in Two Rivers Park. It’s always pretty with the late afternoon sun and for three years I’ve been meaning to go out and shoot a photo. I finally got around to it over the weekend.
Abby finally got her loose top tooth to come out. That makes two lost. She was the second kid in her class to lose a tooth since school started. Some weird intrigue went on in her head as all this played out last night. She went to bed about 8 and, because we’ve been cracking down on her going to sleep as soon as possible, we didn’t hear from her for a long time. Finally about 10:30 she called out that she needed to go to the bathroom. Gina gets up and sees her to the bathroom and back to bed. Cut to this morning and she wakes up and declares her tooth free of the gum shackles that had imprisoned it for about 4 and a half years. There’s blood all over part of her sheet. After a long interrogation about just when she pulled the tooth, it turns out she had pulled the thing before she even got up to go to the bathroom. She didn’t tell Gina about it, she said, because she didn’t want us to be mad that she pulled her tooth instead of going to sleep. She also said she wanted to make sure the tooth fairy didn’t know about it until she could spend some time playing with the tooth. She said the tooth fairy came in her room in the night but she held the tooth tight in her fist and the tooth fairy couldn’t see between her fingers to where the tooth was. The tooth fairy left soon after.
It’s Abby Monday. She’s about to lose a top tooth and starting to look a little snaggley, kinda like Jewel.
The new bridge at Two Rivers Park. I thought black and white captured the moment so nicely.
A couple weekends ago we took Daisy down to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a camping/strike-it-rich trip. Summer has calmed down a bit. It was merely near 100 degrees instead of well over 100 degrees. We rented the Full Monty Prospectors Kit, which consisted of a bucket, a shovel and three screens. I’ve lived in Arkansas for over 30 years and had never been to one of the states biggest claims to fame. There are many ways to hunt for the diamonds. All of them rely on a vast amount of luck. I tried the squat-and-shake technique.
Wow, the old Post Irony was hacked a couple days ago. From rummaging around in the hundreds of odd files that materialized on my server space, I determined that fake Viagra was somehow involved in the unseemly attack. After stumbling around the Internets for about 24 hours I was able to somehow restore order in the Post Ironic universe. I’m still not sure exactly how I accomplished it. Some stuff is still broken, but I’ll get around to fixing everything some day.
I know what you’re thinking, “Who the Hell cares that Post Irony was nearly unceremoniously wiped from the face of the earth?” But my sister Katie actually noticed that something was wrong and alerted me, the blog owner who had no clue that the precious account of his early middle age had been staked through the heart and left for dead for almost two days. So somebody cared.
On the bright side, this dastardly act got me to change hosting companies. I’ve been dissatisfied with my hosting company since day 1. I think the change will result in the site loading faster.
That is all.