Geez, It's Dark Out There

It seems to me that the dark took a giant leap forward in the last couple weeks, maybe because we were in the Eastern time zone?  Anyway, it's shockingly inky out there when I roll out of the sack around 6 o'clock of the AM.  (you know, I dearly love "o'clock" I don't know why... maybe it's the apostrophe)  And I think the dark's making my nose run, it doesn't run in the daylight, only at night.  Crazy, huh?
 
I tried to take pictures of the barely lit horizon but the camera insisted on gathering light and making it brighter--and blurry because I couldn't hold it still enough.  Bah.  I had to wait a whole hour to get this shot of the brightening sky without extra light or blur, and this red leaf was evidently trying to come indoors because I caught it on the step and brushed it away.  Sneaky devil.  There's bound to be a setting on that camera to make it do what I want it to but I don't know what it is and can't find it, not even in the manual.  Makes me frustrated.  I should probably sit down with my knitting pal Mitch and have him give me tips, he takes awesome pictures with his digital camera that looks almost exactly like mine, it's even red.  Yeah, I'll do that one of these days.
 
I spent most of yesterday "putting out fires" at work-- fixing boo boos that were made by Mr. Boss and gathering intel to smooth over a glitch with an irate customer's mask when he returns from a vacation--that I didn't have time to knit one stitch.  What's up with that?!?  October's supposed to be a dead zone at the Aqua Center, but there I was working away, earning an honest wage.  Tsk.  I have things to knit, people, and a business history to write, I don't have time to sit at work and WORK.  *shakes head*

I know I've said it a hundred times but I dearly love borrowing audiobooks from the library.  Lala emailed me yesterday to offer to come up for an overnight so we can go see Catching Fire, the second of the Hunger Games movies, so I cruised over to Overdrive and borrowed all three audiobooks to re-listen to them.  Snap, just like that, two of them were ready for me to download when I got home, and I had an email this morning that the third one was mine--for 2 weeks anyway, so I slurped them onto the laptop here and then fonged them into my iPod or Kindle depending on the format I chose.  I kind of go back and forth liking one over the other, I like the iPod for its size and more books are formatted for the iPod but I love the Kindle Fire for all that it can do like play games and track trip expenditures and hold a calender so I'm where I need to be when, for the Overdrive app that reads me stories in the car and at work, and for the Cloud that stores all my books and songs.  Just lately I realized that Amazon put all the CDs I've ever bought from them into my Cloud so that they're now at my fingertips.  How cool is that?  Very, I'm telling you, very cool.  Now I kinda want one of the new Kindle Fires that is the X one that you don't need a wi-fi connection to be on the 'net but I suspect there's a monthly charge for that.  I can live with my "old school" Kindle Fire, no problem.  I"m good.

October 22--Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus.  I dreamed of flying babies.  Babies with little pearl wings sprouting from their shoulders.  Red-haired, blond, and brunette curls tousled by the wind of their flight, they buzzed around, naked and plump, in the summer sunshine.  I lay under the linden tree, the cool shade perfumed and enveloping, lying on a quilt made of soft cotton patches in bright colors, like a bed of flowers to wrap myself in.

Well, that's fanciful, isn't it?  Those cherubs were irresistible the way they hovered over the reclined Venus.  What is it with artists and naked ladies anyway?  Yeah, yeah, I hear you, it's the purity of the human form not the naked-idity.  Blah, blah, blah.  Right.  I'll believe that when pigs fly.  It was just an excuse to have a nude woman lying around the studio.  Okay, dudes and dudettes, I'm outta here.  Time to read the paper and make a few Cheerios go away.  Then maybe it'll be quiet at the dive shop and I can get some things done around there.  Ciao.
--Barbara