Things Are Just Things........

e·phem·er·al

əˈfem(ə)rəl/

adjective

adjective: ephemeral

1. 1.

   lasting for a very short time.

   "fashions are ephemeral"

   synonyms:

   transitory, transient, fleeting, passing, short-lived, momentary, brief, short; More temporary, impermanent, short-term; fly-by-night "last year's ephemeral fashions"

   antonyms:

   permanent

   • (chiefly of plants) having a very short life cycle.

noun

noun: ephemeral; plural noun: ephemerals

1. 1.

   an ephemeral plant.

When I watched the movie version, the claymation version, of The Little Prince I learned of the word ephemeral.  The Prince had made friends with a rose, a plant.  When the prince met a character who looked like Mark Twain, the man told the Prince gruffly that his rose was ephemeral. The Prince was very sad as he had full belief that his relationship with the rose was going to be permanent and thought the rose had mislead him by making him thing the flower would live forever. The story goes on and on reminding the boy that people come and go and he should look up to the stars and see all his close relationships smiling down at him. 

I now have declared "THINGS" really are ephemeral and in my older age that I need to rethink keeping  all this stuff that I have.  What brings this great discussion up is because of

the happening last night when the above green mug fell and shattered.  My wife felt bad but I didn't.  It really was only a brief walk with history as I remember my parents having orange mugs like this and my grandma had various colored one.  I found the mug in the dirtiest, filthiest old box in my father in laws run down, falling down garage.  He probably got it at an auction in a box of junk and he just tossed it aside like junk. It really was pride that I had saved it and cleaned it and used it a little.  It became a water glass for the bathroom sink. 

The bird watering dish is glass and it too will never work on any of my cages.  It is impractical as the bird has to reach through bars to get to the water.  I have it as a rescued item because I do remember having two for feeding my green bird out on the farm back in the 60's.  I guess it is the memories it has that it belongs in my museum. When I go  it will have to go to the dump.

The  cereal bowl is old.  It is stoneware and I remember eating oatmeal from it as a kid back in the 50's. I think it was from a cafe of the 40's.  I think my mom liked using them as the oatmeal would be very hot and the cereal would warm the bowl.  That kept the heat in while you piled lost of brown sugar and milk on the food.  I remember it most in our old drafty house down on the farm when it was cold in every single corner and hot in the center of the house. Mornings were pretty frosty and a blanket rapped around me kept me warm while eating breakfast.

 The never ending jar collections too causes me to remember the products and the great colors of the glass are neat.  Rescued jars from a dump are fun as you pull out the prized piece to store on a shelf on in a box.  You can't put all of them in the kitchen window. A resourceful person could maybe sell the bunch for someone else to hold in a box or set on a shelf.  I do still like having them around but they too could be tossed in an instant.

More of the same and they too have not been cleaned in this photo just like the ones above.  Oh, I just noticed the green mug of which is now gone. 

A good thing to keep is the velvet rabbit that belonged to my wife.  The stuff animal does have a higher place in order of older things. I guess things that are hot in the auction market does make them less ephemeral also.

I had seriously thought about making my theme to be "Why did you share that picture?" but I made a pass on it.  As I go through my archives I do think many of them are for instant "show and tell" and not really great to be showing.

The coffee mug that I lost doesn't mean that I have no more prized mugs to use.  This mug sits by my tools for function while I was rebuilding my ever famous blue gate. This mug was rescued from the landfill in the now closed Osceola dump.  I found this mug, three nice bowls and a plate that had been tossed into the garbage.  The truck drove the trash all the way up a very tall incline in order to dump the refuse. Anyone who shops Walmart knows that they are the early forms of what is sstil being sold today.  Free is a factor for my hoarding too as I think the mug has been place high in the cupboards as more mugs have replaced its importance in my collection.

I really need to add this one as this is the mug my wife picked out during our honeymoon trip back in 1984.  It was bought at a shop on the hilly town of Cripple Creek in Colorado.  The guy at the shop took us into his basement to show the silver that still is in seams of the rock all up and down the area.  That mug is a historical ephemeral piece.  Yes it could be gone in an instant but historically is is important to hold the memories and maybe the kids will like to keep it on their bathroom sink.

Yes the flower is ephemeral as it doesn't stick around for only a season but we work hard to keep the plant alive for as long as we can.  We can make new friends with its blooms each spring and know that it will continue to enhance our lives each year. 

I am in Saturday school today so I bless you with too many words.  The head of the city where Mozart played a concert was forced to criticize Mozart's work.  The only real thing he could think of was that he had "too many notes." Mozart asked back which notes should he eliminate. As with me I did have 'too many words'.   My time seems to be taken up with so many things right now that I couldn't take new photographs.  I tried to find my photos of antique valentines but they are buried on the other computer.  I didn't get called in to do this duty today until 8:00 last night.  We went out for a meal at Olive Graden and stopped at the bookstore for a short while. 

The neighbor lady is better as she returned from the hospital a few days ago.  My wife and I are her chief caretakers at first since it was a weekday that she came home.  The dog has been in my care almost two weeks. We have been her emergency person before but I think her three kids might fill in this weekend for us.  Important things like oxygen tanks and taking the pills needs to be attended to immediately and not whenever a child of hers can drop in, so we were there when she first came home to get her settled in again.  I am hoping her oxygen thing can be reduced to zero within the next week.  Her lungs are in bad shape from smoking for so long and so hard that they need to heal from a serious copd attack.  I will check in at noon today to be sure the dog gets fed and that she gets something to eat. I believe a daughter is coming in this afternoon and we will have some time off.  We do know what it is like to need someone to lean on when the need is immediate and we are so glad we can do it.

 

Thank you for stopping in today.  I see we have the next snow starting to fall.  I hope you all are a safe out there throughout the world. Do be careful. 

Friday the 14th.........

The neighbor's cat has found a place to be to keep away from the other pets which include more cats and many dogs. I posted a couple other pictures of this soft white cat on my Photo a Day blog.

I had mentioned in an earlier blog about the behaviors of the Junco bird.  They seem to keep their distant from each other and do become aggressive as the feed.  It is almost like watching a pecking order of sorts and the drive each other out the way to eat.  The older feeder at the table doesn't have anything in it in this photo but five birds here are all sitting on separate chairs waiting their turn to  check it out for seed.  There may be some little seed left but the  main one is to the left and it has one bird on the top, one bird in the middle shelf and one on the bottom.  Sparrows do not feed that way as they just bunch in all at once crowding in as close as possible.

It is snowing this morning but not like this imitation recreation.  It will be stopping around noon and warm up just a little.

Here is another shot of the morning doves that were at my feeder a couple of days ago.  I didn't have to go in for any work today and that is good.  We have been helping the neighbor who came home from the hospital last night.  She really should have stayed there longer but she didn't.  We helped with medications and her oxygen device that she she needs.  I will go over a couple more times through the day and her kids then will be off work.  Her little terrier was so happy to see her and is just going crazy continually running and jumping because she is home.  

We will take a trip to a place to eat early in the afternoon so we can beat the crowd later today.  The roads should be more cleared of the snow that we received over the night and we will return before the traffic jams sit up in late afternoon.  We are told now that our major highway 141 which goes to our area has a traffic load of 82,000 cars a day. It is a well traveled road.  

Have a good February 14th today and thanks for stopping by my post.

Thursday's Things.......

The junco is a great addition to our new birds in out area.  I don't think we have had any around for years but suddenly the past three years they started showing up at our feeders.  They really like the try feeder and I have noticed are aggressive about their personal space.  They wait their turns to feed and an aggressive one will come and drive another away. I have a photo, lost somewhere, that shows them all sitting spaced a few feet away for each other all around my tables and chairs.  I think there were about 7 in all that were waiting there turn to get to the feeder.

Looking out my back kitchen door you can see the ice forming from the eaves troughs.  The view of the back alley can be seen as well as the ash tree that is doomed.  Large cities are just cutting them down now rather waiting for the death of the tree.  It is just going to be gone soon. I have heard that a neighboring town had the ash bore and I think that I saw the insect last summer on one of my flowers.  It is getting to be a messy tree and I will probably take it down myself as much as I can one limb at a time.

This is a shot of the female that usually comes to the feeder in the evening.  It usually is too dark for me to take a shot but I sort of captured one.  I took it so quickly that I have a definite lean.  I didn't edit it as I was on the wrong computer when I download the photos.

The mourning dove blends in well with the background.  I shared about these on my Photo a Day blog today.  They do seem very peaceful as the sit and enjoy their feast.

Looking out the window it still seems about the same.  We will get up into the 40 degree mark if they get it right.  We are so use to the teens feeling warm that I bet we will take our coats off for 40 degree weather.  I don't think the warm is going to stick around very long but a couple of days would be nice.
I am in the high school science room in the morning today and will be it the special needs room all afternoon.  Getting the special needs student to work is a real challenge and that is why they are at risk.  I will try my best to get some work out of them today.

Thanks for stopping by today.

All Over The Place........

The "duck platter" is what we called it.  It actually is more than one duck, as it is a Mallard duck and hen floating among  the cattails.  It belonged to my Grandmother Brooks. One can even see trees in the background with a small mountain in the background.  I have never noticed that before just today while posting it. We never ever used it while I was growing up.  I don't know why we didn't use it except that it had that special family thing about it.  I guess my mom had smaller everyday cafeware platters that she used and definitely we didn't want to break it. I never dreamed that it would be mine but it was there for the taking and the other brothers were not taking anything.   The yellow creamer was also a special thing for my parents to store their silver dollars.  The depression era did cause one to hoard things when there wasn't any money left in the house.  I remember the cotton on the bottom of the piece so the silver dollars wouldn't break the piece. It was the all out final emergency fund as if there wouldn't be a drop of money left in which to spend.

Tom Tom, here on the car, we believe is living inside of the house which is attached to the garage in the background. Tiny Tim the next smaller yellow cat that would eat at our backdoor apparently is being kept in all winter by the other neighbors because he hasn't been by for a couple of months to eat a bit of  dry cat food.

Now we have two darker colored cats that are sneaking in and grabbing food to eat.  They are very hungry and we are glad they are stopping in to eat.  The one cat looks like he could be a Maine Coon cat.  The other is more short haired and almost black in color.  Sadly they both are feral cats and they run and hide if anyone comes home in his car.  They are so scared of humans and yet will fight over the food on the porch without hesitation.

We are glad to be able to feed them but would like to see them living in better conditions as it is so very cold and snowy out there.

I looked up the spelling of feral and I see that the cat is considered to be a domesticated cat that has returned to the wild.  In this case the parents may be domesticated but the offspring so many times were left in the wild or I should say outside in town.

 This is a photo I took a couple of years ago as a challenge to arrange and shoot an all white still life. The antique things in the photo are the dogs, noxzema containers, and the one small bowl that is from a cafeware collection. The Phalzgraff jelly bowl is from a set of dishes my wife bought when were first married.  It is an all white set called the "Heritage" pattern. The penguin is not an old piece.

Finishing with a photo with more color is the old barn that my dad made for his grandsons back in late seventies. I honestly don't know where it is right now but it must be in the basement somewhere. My dad was a farmer and the boys never were on that farm as he had sold it and moved into town.  They had farm things given them like tractors and wagons, but they really didn't ever identify with that way of life.  Both of the boys do plant things and the young guy has a garden to grow vegetables in the state of Maine.

I graduated up to high school today being in the math room.  They are all getting ready for tests that they will be taken tomorrow or Friday.  So I don't have to teach, just maintain good behaviors and stay pleasant myself.  I am really tired today and I do notice the kids seem slow today too.  I think we are all getting worn down from the weather.  The second round of a different kind of cold is going around also.

 We will be into a thawing temperature tomorrow but I don't think it will help much as the snow keeps things pretty cold.  I know that all of my blogging friends are experience so many different things.  Flooding in England is a very bad thing as well as severe cold in places where they don't have that kind of weather all make everyone less safe.  I hope we can get to spring soon and all of us will have better health and attitudes.  Thanks for stopping by today.

Monday, Monday..........

Candy in the cookie jar makes me a happy person.  It plays music when the lid is removed and it has been in storage for awhile.  I think I should buy one of those new kid of oreo cookies and put them inside of it.   I saw they now have marshmallow creme oreo cookies.

 My long picture of the school in which I have to replace the glass, gives me a lot of fun times looking at the different things that can be seen in the photo.  The one house in 1920 in the background can still be seen standing over on Cherry Street.  I also remarked there always clowns that will climb the slide to be in a picture and then I saw it was mostly adults that are on the slide.   Other pictures I will be sharing show the kids coming to school without their shoes. All ages of school attended the school in the same building.

I will share the top view of this glass vase in my Photo a Day blog sometime down the road.  I have four glass goblets in green that are of the same company as this red one.  They were in my parents house.  This red vase, laying on its side, was from my wife's family home. I took the shot with the vase on its side as it gave me less reflections this way.

I was a middle school math teacher today,  teaching all seventh and eighth students their advance arithmetic lessons.  It seems to be made more complicated when it comes to the way that they explain it.  I have to review be fore I start to teach linear equations.  I am not sure that it is necessary but I do teach it.

It hasn't warmed up and maybe Wednesday we will feel 30 degrees F.  Two days of warm weather so we can thaw out the bones and then we will drop again.  Thanks for stopping by today. 

Just Checking In.........

I have a new discovery about this snow animation thing.  When I downloaded my photos into Picasa, which Google now shares and owns only one photo showed up duplicated and animated.  As the snow scene photos sat in storage in Picasa apparently the Google system evaluates the photos and decides to put the effect onto more of the pictures.  One day I had only one animation photo and today I have four photos in the same bunch that are now duplicated with animation added.

A purist of photography probably thinks the effect is a lot like adding plastic flowers to a real bouquet of flowers.  I think that it is making a photo that could be a little bit boring with no center of interest into a lot more interesting visual. It maybe is just plain fun. I don't plan on using it often, or should I say sharing them, but when it makes my Christmas tree sparkle and the snow storm more exciting.  The rest of the year I won't probably get any animation.

I really am thinking Spring as I can't stand the winter anymore.  We did have a very beautiful snow Saturday morning as the fluffy snow covered everything and it didn't seem difficult to move around.  It was a nice snow as the wind didn't blow and unfortunately we are getting use to the stupid cold.  I do though know, that in thirty days things need to start changing. There will be a tree limb mess all over the  yard and dead leaves to clear up as they escaped my rake in the fall.

The water from the snow melting needs to soak in and not run off as we are still living in a drought area. My downstairs bathroom needs to get thawed out some day soon as that shower drain doesn't work with a frozen trap in a crawl space and bailing water out after a shower is getting to be too much.  Above freezing temps will change that in a half of a day.  The idea that the earth is warming up too much is contrasted with the idea that we are always in cycles of weather as history has been proven.  Winter will go away and I hope we can forget it one more time.

Thanks for stopping by and my bad mood will maybe go away tomorrow.  Everyone take care.

Saturday at School........

The snowman is smiling because he actually can be with some real snow.  The garage sale item was unusual but now it works great out on the porch railing.

I don't hunt nor track animals so I really can't read tracks but I think this is a rabbit.  They hang around under the bird feeder and I bet too the squirrel drops down corn kernels while they are eating. I did see two large rabbits in my back yard a few days ago and they look like they are getting plenty to eat. Their fur is really thick right now with it being so cold.

My bench and bridge in the back yard shows the amount of snow we received a few days ago.  This morning we are having another snow.  It is one of those fluffy snows that builds up  rapidly.  I can slightly brush the snow on the car and it falls off instantly.  We are suppose to get a few inches of the white stuff by noon.  That will clean up everything again with its new white coating. Oh yes, this is a Where's Barney? photograph.

The jug sits on my side porch as decoration.  It came from my parents who have had it for a lot of years.  Friends of my parents, actually they were distant cousins, came to the door at the farm and handed this to my dad for his birthday.  My mom took a picture of it but one of my brothers have the picture.  That had to be back in the late 60's when he received it.  I remember it because June was trying to shock him with such a large jug suggesting it might be full of moonshine.  Dad would have loved that for sure. My dad is smiling with a cigar sticking out of his mouth receiving the jug.

I keep out for everyone to see as I figure sitting in the basement means I am just storing it for my boys to get rid of or take home with them.  Some people say that they, the thieves of the world might steal it.  I decided that it may be valuable but it isn't gold so it gets to be freely displayed. The milk can came from Coin, Iowa and the black painted milk can was bought for a quarter at Shenandoah, Iowa.  That is the birthplace of the Everly Brothers and that is another story another day.

When I was young and in the 60's, antiques at farm sales went for fifty cents to a few dollars. Mom bought two dressers for six dollars apiece. Those were the good old days when June probably picked up that crockery jug for seventy five cents. After graduating from high school and while attending college, the public became aware of the value of antiques and that did increase their value more.  I did buy a complete set of antique dishes in the 70's for six dollars at an auction in Coin, Iowa but later when I wanted to expand the set I had to pay over a dollar a plate. To my shock in the late 70's when moving to Woodward I tried to bid on a very beat up wooden medicine cabinet at my neighbors house.  It was bidding up into the thirty dollar range and I thought that I would not go to auctions anymore.

A new project that I have in the works is replacing the glass on this old photo.  I will probably blog more about it later but it is and interesting photo.  Taken in 1920 the entire school and staff are standing outside the building. Boys with out shoes and kids on the slide having their picture took taken.  I am hoping I have a scrap piece of glass to replace in this as I think I have some scraps from other projects that were that long.

I am in Saturday school and I have the first hour done.  It is a long four hours and I am glad that I can get a lot of blogging done.  The name Saturday school doesn't mean I have to teach unless someone wants help but it means just monitoring behaviors to keep them under control.  The receive the assignment if they don't make up their tardies after school or if they do something bad to merit sitting in the library for four hours.   With the snow coming down so hard this morning I was concerned that they wouldn't show but most of them did.

Visiting a bookstore at ISU today. Also  a stop at Hobby Lobby for supplies is on our agenda this afternoon. We don't go up there much during the school year with a few thousand students but we will venture out today.  I hope all of you are well and staying safe.  We will never be warm again as the Arctic has decided to go on vacation in Minnesota, Iowa and sometimes in Missouri. We don't have a thawing day in sight for a very long time.  Maybe in late March we will feel some heat as the earth must be tilting back into it's summer position.   Thanks for stopping in today.