One thing you don’t want to see on your first official day of house husbanding is ice dangling from the eaves. That means you’ll be stuck inside the house with a television-addicted kid. “Can I watch one Dora, please,” is printed on the official seal of the Dailey household.
Fayetteville gussies up its downtown square every year for Christmas. The city makes a big deal out of it. We’ve never been so we thought we ought to go before blowing this popsicle stand. I have to say I was underwhelmed. It was fairly pretty, but it was tough to find a good photo. Maybe if I had my tripod and I weren’t doing a family outing and the wind weren’t blowing about 50 mph, I’d have got some better photos.
Abby had a cookie with blue icing on the way home from school today.
I love checking on what search terms people used to get here. My favorite so far: “crossdresser peeing.” Well, I mentioned seeing a cross dressing biker in one post and I’ve mentioned potty training Abby a couple times, so I guess that’s how Post Irony pops up in that search.
A few other people got here by searching for “sexy crossdresser” and “little cross dresser.”
My second favorite of them all: “grilled plecostomus.” Who wants to grill plecostomus? I actually put this one into Google and Post Irony comes up fourth. I looked through a couple of pages of the search results and didn’t see anything that addressed actually grilling these unappetizing fish.
A couple of posts chronicle my adventures in photographing my Abe Lincoln bust, so it makes sense that searching for “abe lincoln yelling” would get you here. I just don’t know if searching for Abe Lincoln yelling makes any sense.
One post mentions me seeing a middle aged woman getting an airbrushed tattoo in the middle of her back, which drew these searches: “star tramp stamps,” “best place for a woman to get a tattoo,” and “sexy middle aged women.”
In the same post I mentioned the mannequin legs used to advertise the tattoo stand, which match the search terms “sexy legs” and “disembodied legs.” Who’s searching for disembodied legs? Maybe somebody else will do that search, get this post in the results, come here and explain why they did that search.
Welcome to the new Post Irony. I got so bored over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I upped and got some server space and installed WordPress there. Now I’m free from the free WordPress.com service. That means I can use plugins and alter some of the style: fonts and colors and the like. That also means the blog isn’t free anymore. I got my domain name for a year and two months of hosting for about $18. I can live with that.
Then I spent a long evening transferring all my posts from the other blog. I used the same theme but there are some differences. The photo in the header is gone, rendering it pretty ugly, but I’m looking for a new theme, so maybe that will change. I installed a plugin that pops up a fancy box when readers click on photos to see bigger versions. Couldn’t do that on the old site.
I also built a Web site at my new domain, dondailey.com. It’s kitten weak now, but as soon as I learn some actual coding skills, I’ll make it better. It will be a magnificent showcase for my past journalism work. Or something. Uh…
We hosted a Thanksgiving feast for Gina’s parents, my Dad and my Grandma, the star of an earlier post. I used a brining recipe from Alton Brown of Good Eats fame and it turned out marvelous. It was the third or fourth time I’ve brined a turkey and it’s the only way to go. In my experience, roasted turkey is generally dry and unappealing. With the brining method the juices flow out of the bird like the Nile River when you hit it with the electric knife.
I got a package in the mail that had a huge wad of shredded newspaper inside as packing material and when Abby found it she went nutsy fagan.
I shot these with my 50mm f/1.8 prime at f/4.5 and 1/30. I left the auto ISO on and it jumped around quite a bit. These two shots were at 2200 and 1600 ISO, respectively. We were in the kitchen under the funky flourescent lights, which made the white balance weird in the top photo because the light behind Abby is a different temperature than the light shining on her face. I had to play around with it in Photoshop quite a bit to get it close. I ended up just concentrating on getting her face right and just letting the rest go. That’s why her hair and counter top at the top left are kinda blue-purple.
I was shooting some pics of Abby in the light from the living room window when she picked up these black shoes and worked real hard at putting them on. She got finished and looked down at them and I asked her, “How do they look?” She said, “They look wrong.” I replied, “That’s because they’re on the wrong feet.” So she took them off and ran into the other room to see what her mom was doing.
I can’t get her to ham it up for the camera. This is the look she generally gives me when she notices I’m taking pictures.
I set out Saturday for the third weekend in a row looking for some fabulous fall foliage. I failed. In the hope that the leaves down south were still in peak form, I headed down to the Cossatot Falls State Park. As I headed down I-540, I could see the leaves in Northwest Arkansas were about done. I was hoping the foliage would get better the farther south I traveled on Highway 71. I was disappointed. Plus, the area I went to might not be the best for fall color anyway. The area is mostly timber company land planted in pine trees. The little swirly parts in the photo become raging whitewater holes when the river comes blasting through after heavy rains. The river is typically low in the fall. On Saturday, you could have easily waded across without a problem. Cossatot is supposedly an Indian word that means skull crusher. They say this is the most challenging whitewater in Arkansas.
We had planned to go for a drive in the Buffalo River area Sunday to see the leaves, but Abby got sick and Gina felt a 103 degree fever was not conducive to viewing fall foliage. Gina cut me loose for the afternoon and I headed out by myself.
I drove to Ponca and bought a map of the hiking trails in the western part of the national river park. Parking at the Ponca access to the river, I took off east on the Old River Road Trail, which I had never been on before. The scenery in he Buffalo River bottom is always nice, but the fall foliage seemed to be past peak down there. I bet the trees along the river in the top photo were afire in red and yellow a week ago. That would have made a better picture, of course.
