ABC’s of the Prairie
With little competition for attention, still, signs on the prairie need to be large to compete with the scale of endless flat land and full sky.
But when it comes to irony, nothing competes with this sign just a few miles outside the town I lived in. Without a sign telling us so, how would we ever have guessed that we were in a mountain time zone? Our surroundings certainly belied this assertion!!
The ABC’s of Approaching a Volcano
Just keep following the milk truck to Lala land!
And you just might be presented with a little surprise. This is Colima Volcano venting and her sister mountain just over her left shoulder. They call them fire and ice…one has snow on it, the other venting hot volcanic matter!
Signs of Life: Smoke Signals (Under the Volcano)
Kids, don’t do this at home, but the rush of life lately has caused me to break some general rules of sane behavior. Let me preface my confession by saying the past three weeks have been crazy as I’ve been trying to balance life with construction projects, art exhibitions, doggie problems and packing to leave for two months at the beach. As a result, I’ve missed several of Cee’s photo prompts–which I try to never do.
So, jump ahead to yesterday (which sounds like an oxymoron, and I guess it is.) I finally have the car loaded to the ceiling with art supplies, kitchen gadgets, groceries, clothes and boxes of retablos for an art walk I’m participating in at the beach. My house and canines are left in the accomplished hands of Maggie, my house sitter. True, I forgot to fill up the car, check fluids and check on why the “maintenance” light has been on for the past month, but at least the guy at the first Pemex station I come upon notices that all of my tires are 10 lbs. under the prescribed pressure and has filled my power steering fluid up to the prescribed level–even though the warning on my car says to use only Honda power steering fluid. Where outside of Guadalajara would I find Honda power steering fluid? It’s probably just like that warning to only use genuine HP laser cartridges in my color printer (at $100 a pop times four as compared to the $10 generic ones). At any rate, I’m off and thinking about prompts missed when I suddenly catch my first sight of Colima volcano!!!
That’s it…that little breast-shaped mountain to the left of the far right tree on the horizon.
I do pull off the road whenever I can, but also start snapping shots through the windshield as I drive.
No, I’m not focusing by taking my eyes off the road. I’m glancing up, putting the camera more or less where my eyes are and snapping shot after shot. I’m holding the camera out the window and shooting.
235 shots in about an hour’s period as I approach the volcano, pass it and OMG!!! As I look into the rear view mirror, I notice that THE VOLCANO IS ACTUALLY VENTING!
At the end of the day, after 5 hours of driving, I reach my destination, immediately run into someone I know, find my rental agent out of her office, make a call but no answer. I sit in the car, air conditioner running. (Yes, it is hot at the beach) and review my photos in my camera. Thanks to the Lala truck that drove in front of me for a good distance, I’ll be able to use my photos for both the ABC prompt and last week’s “Compose Yourself” prompt, but I think I’ll put those pictures in another posting. I think the venting of a volcano as one drives by is excitement enough for this post, don’t you?
I call Juani from Juani Rentas again and finally get her. She’ll be here in 5 minutes. I shift to a parking spot opening up across the street from Casa Gaviotas––my home away from home for the next two months. I unload the car with the help of Israel, across the street, put my frozen stuff in the fridge, duck over to Daniel’s for a fast tequila toast to the sunset and set off for a music jam night at my friend Carol’s house. Home at 10:30 to finally have a better look at my volcano shots, and here a few of them are. By the time you see my “Compose Yourself” and “ABC” posts, your trip to here will seem as long as mine has been, perhaps. Sorry Ann, sorry Audrey–two friends who always advise less is more, but who would I be if I took their advice? Certainly not me!!!
I’ve shown you what I did this week. Now, here are my answers to the weekly wrapup questions:
http://ceenphotography.com/2016/01/16/cees-weekly-wrap-up-january-16-2016-and-wpc-alphabet/
(My alphabet pictures will be in another post.)
Since my learning style is experiential and this trip has certainly been a experience in excess photography, I’m posting it on the Daily Prompt page as well! https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/learning-style/
Master of Education
I happen to have my degree
in learning styles one through three.
We learn by what we hear or see
or experientially.
Hands on, hearing about, viewing?
My best learning style is doing.
Hearing, reading? Not so much.
I prefer the sense of touch.
My own fingers on the clay
are how I choose to spend the day.
I can’t learn to cut or glue
by sitting here and watching you.
Since I lack sense of direction,
I’ll never find your intersection
if I’ve just seen it as a rider.
I need experience that’s wider.
Everything under the sun
that I witness being done
I have to do myself to learn.
I don’t retain without my turn.
So if I want to learn to bake,
I’ll only duplicate that cake
if you let me sift the flour,
bake the cake and stack the tower,
mix the icing and smooth it on,
then sample it until it’s gone.
Far better, then, than sound or view––
to make my cake and eat it, too!
The prompt: What is your learning style?
Hormigas!!!
What are these leaves doing scattered over the terrace just hours after Pasiano swept? I decide to investigate.
Aha! The evidence is pretty clear when I find a chewed-up leaf.
Can you see those razor-sharp incisors about to close around this leaf?
More leaf-cutter compadres ascend my hibiscus, scouting out fodder for the hundreds of ants who will trek here in darkness to strip the bush and carry it away.
The team work is so incredible that I hate to interfere, but if I don’t, there will be no foliage surrounding my house by the time I get home in two months.
As above, the “timberjack” ant saws away on yet another leaf,
I scatter pellets.
By tomorrow, all the pellets will be gone, carried away by these bearer ants–and hopefully, the ants will be gone, too.
Hormigas, by the way, is Spanish for Leafcutter Ants. (I didn’t want to give away the answer before the question was asked.) They are fascinating to watch, with their generals and slaves, double machete-weilding lumberjacks dropping pieces of leaves to the bearers below, tinier slave ants carrying many times their own weight, some ESP that causes swarms of ants to appear to help any ant who needs help over an obstacle or out of a hole. I could watch all day as bush after vine is depleted of leaves and flowers, but then–I’d have no bushes or flowers, so I resort to the little pellets that, carried back to the nest, with luck for me and no luck for the ants, will clear it out. Cruel nature either way.
http://ceenphotography.com/2016/01/13/prompt-stomp-week-14-challenge-things-that-are-small/
Hibiscus
This is the single hibiscus on its bush and my next blog posting may indicate why!
http://ceenphotography.com/2016/01/15/flower-of-the-day-january-16-2016-and-color-your-world/
The Time to Be Good
In a study by Oxford Online, associated with the Oxford English Dictionary, “the” was found to be the most frequently used word in the English language and each of the other words in my title was the most common word in the English language for its part of speech. It is no surprise to me that the word “the” heads the list. “The” creates specificity. It helps us to define and narrow the field. It wins us precisely what we want. Ours is an era of so many choices––a plethora of brands of everything from potato chips to lipstick. Don’t even get me started on coffee. Starbucks alone maintains that it offers 87,000 combinations of coffee choices! Reason enough to need a bit of “the” in our vocabulary. Plain coffee Americano decaf with soy milk and stevia? That is “the” choice I make every time.
“To” is indicative, I think, of our modern need to be elsewhere. A Ted Talk that I recently viewed showed a video that depicted all of the airplane flights occurring simultaneously, then all of the ships enroute. If it had tried to depict commuter traffic, I’m not so sure that much of the U.S. would have been lit up, rendering any distinction between vehicles or routes to be impossible to make out. We drive to work, to play, to school, to recreational facilities. Then on the weekends we drive elsewhere to “escape,” but in doing so, are trapped in more traffic. In airports, we watch people coming off a plane to come “to” where we are as we await the opportunity to board the same plane to go “to” where they just came from. We are almost constantly going “to.”
I was surprised that “time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language, mainly because, with all of our labor saving devices, somehow we have less time rather than more. If someone disagrees, please, please inform me of how you have managed this. I no longer even have time to read unless I listen to an audiobook and combine my reading with other activities such as driving, working in the studio or kitchen or while trying to fall asleep at night.
So why is the word “time” so frequently used? As I tried to figure out why, a number of phrases I’ve used in the past 24 hours swam into memory. While preparing to leave for two months at the beach, I have almost constantly worried about not having “time” to arrange for everything I needed to arrange for in order to leave on “time.” I won’t bore you with the list, but it is long and varied and has kept me so busy for the past two weeks that I found my “time” had run out last night. I was due to leave this morning, but had not found time to say good bye to best friends, let alone time enough to write this blog and finish packing. So I delayed my departure by a day in order to gain “time” to depart in a more leisurely fashion. I made “time” for things important to me, such as this essay I am writing right now and the possibility of saying good bye to friends such as Audrey, whom I haven’t seen for weeks because neither of us has had the “time.” Perhaps it is our complaints of having so little of it that cause us to overuse the word?
The most commonly used words that I am most heartened by are best when combined. “Be good.” What better advice for each of us and what message is most needed in a world of cyber shaming, corporate greed, Isis and the seeming impossibility of gun control, let alone control over the kids and crazies who refuse to exercise control? It is a selfish world we live in. “Be” is too often considered in regard to only ourselves. But “good?” It seems to be an aim that more and more of us yearn for—hoping to combine it with “be” in order to restore sanity and love and caring for our fellow human beings––whatever their skin color or religion or social group or national background.
Perhaps in our choice of most commonly used words, be they conscious or unconscious, we are all sending ourselves a message. Like a crossword puzzle, we just need to combine them in the right way. It truly is the time to be good!!!
(If you’d like to see other most commonly used words, go HERE.)
The Prompt: Morphing—Language evolves. The meaning of a word can shift over time as we use it differently—think of “cool,” “heavy,” or even “literally.”Today, give a word an evolutionary push: give a common word a new meaning, explain it to us, and use it in the title of your post.
Disclaimer: Please note that the pictures and description of Harriet and Paul are meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek. They came to film night directly from a matinee performance of a benefit lip sync show where they depicted Ian and Sylvia. Remember them? The red hair is a cheap wig I brought home from the states for Harriet, but she looks so good in it, we all think she should wear it for real.
Bloody Good Time Had by Local Film Group
Local socialite Harriet Hart prepares her famous ham ball as her husband Paul opens the wine for the refreshment hour that preceded the Lake Chapala premiere of “What We Do in the Shadows.” Attendees were appreciative of the fact that potluck refreshments of sushi, ham ball, frittata and carrot cake were served and partially digested prior to the film, which is not for the squeamish.
A showing of the mocumentary “What We Do in the Shadows” was a resounding success at a film night hosted by Judy Dykstra-Brown in the Raquet Club, San Juan Cosala, Jalisco, Mexico. This hilarious send-up of vampire movies records the misadventures of four vampire roommates whose ages bridge the years from 3,000 years to a modern day youth’s rendition of vampirism. Clement and Waititi, creators of the HBO series “Flight of the Conchords” wrote, directed and starred in this spoof of vampire movies from Nosferatu to Twilight. The Critics Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes stated that, “What We Do in the Shadows is bloody good fun,” and went on to say that it is “smarter, fresher, and funnier than a modern vampire movie has any right to be.”
The film, which scored a whopping 96% approval rating on the tomatometer, and won top honors in its category in film festivals around the world, depicts the lives and tribulations of the four New Zealand flatmates trying to fit into the modern world––from their 6 pm rising through their squabbling over household chores, their harassment and rumbles with a local werewolf gang hiding out in the park, the pining of one still-youthful vampire protagonist as he stands under the second floor window of his lost non-vampire love, now in her eighties and living in a retirement home, to their arguments concerning bloodstains on the rug and sofa:
“Just put down newspapers!”
“Vampires don’t put down newspapers.”
“Well, what do you think people think when I bring them home and the house is so disorderly? It’s embarrassing!”
“You bring them home to kill them!!!”
At the end of another fine film evening, guests were entertained with a version of the Rolling Stones’ hit song “Let it Bleed” by Harriet and Paul Hart. Ms. Hart, a long-time resident of Ajijic, is a former groupie and present chairman of the Mexican Rolling Stones fan club. In retirement, Mr. Hart, a former deputy minister in charge of human resources for the province of Manitoba, is now a cowboy wannabe.
For scenes and out takes that you’l have to watch more than once, go HERE.
(For further commentary and a trailer of this not-to-be-missed film, go HERE.)
The Prompt: Ripped into the Headline–Write about something that happened over the weekend as though it’s the top story on your local paper.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 