I’ve been taking pictures of Lake Gaston since 1982 when Mom and Dad purchased a small lake-house. Through the years I have built up relationships with a few vendors who sell my pictures and posters and paintings and greeting cards and postcards. (I will never get rich but I enjoy the work and the occasional infusion of pocket change.) During those same years I witnessed the inevitable trend of people switching to email over all other forms of preferred communication methods; in no time purchases of my postcards and greeting cards dropped to ZERO. I am now considering wallpapering my basement with the 23,000 some-odd unmarketable postcards I have in storage.

No wonder the U.S. Postal Service is going bankrupt.

While chatting with one of my vendor/owners yesterday, it was suggested that I do something special for Lake Gaston’s upcoming milestone birthday. So I tinkered and twiddled for hours with the above 8 1/2 x 11 inch Photoshop image, eventually printing 10 of them on exceptional acid-free paper and painstakingly inserting them into modest picture frames. (Nothing fancy, but the pictures will certainly outlive me.)

Framing photographs or artwork is a nightmare. Little speck-thingies and other sorts of fingerprint-thingies that weren’t there moments before, mysteriously show up under the glass as if you had performed the framing dance while sitting in a dandelion field on a windy spring day. When the pictures were nestled cleanly under glass, I was off to sell my wares.

My first visit was to some friends of mine who own a local Mom & Pop sign shop, for whom I do occasional freelance graphic artist work. I showed them one of my framed Lake Gaston Birthday photographs — was that a little speck-thingy hiding in the corner? — and asked, “Do you think they will sell?”

“Yes, they will sell nicely.” A strange kind of silence followed. “Fifty years from now…”

I lost interest in the speck-thingies and drove home. Lake Gaston was celebrating its 50 year birthday, not its 100th. Sigh.  Just another senior moment kind of day.

How can we help (ourselves)?

I recently received an email from Lowe’s informing me they have changed their “Privacy Policy”. These are the same folks who — every time I purchase something and try to check out — matter-of-factually ask me for my telephone number. I always refuse. Why do they need my telephone number? I mean, chances are good (since I normally use a debit card for my purchases) they already have access to WAY more than just my telephone number.

The Lowe’s Privacy Policy Change email contained a link to their new Policy Page, no more or less frightening than other such policy pages, I’m sure. I spent some time reading through all the gobbledegook, finally taking a breather at their “Your Choices” section, wherein they pacified me a bit into believing I could remove myself from the insanity of online shopping data sharing, because everyone is in cahoots nowadays; Google, Amazon, Facebook — all of the biggies — wantonly swapping, sharing and receiving personal information and shopping habits as if it belonged to them, not you. How many times have I purchased something at Amazon and a day later the item I just bought is plastered on every browser page I visit? Depending on the item, that can be rather embarrassing if you have a visitor who asks to use your computer.

“Hey, Tim, how do you like that hemorrhoids cushion?”

I suspect the Lowe’s Privacy Policies are no different than most, but I gotta tell you, when I got to the part that said: “To be removed from all of Lowe’s official email, telephone and postal mail marketing, choose one of the following options: email customercare@lowes.com and type “REMOVE FROM ALL MARKETING” in the subject line…” I felt a shimmy of hope wiggle through me like a bolt from that first shot of tequila.

I opened my email program and began to reply. That’s when I read a couple more sentences and got down to the: “For any of these options, please include your name, address, phone number and email address in the request, and let us know how you provided us with the information.” part.

You have GOT to be kidding me. Let me get this right. They want MORE private information about me so they can remove my “old” private information  from their “Lowe’s official email, telephone and postal mail marketing”? How crazy is THAT!  Damn, they also want me to tell them HOW I provided them with “the information” they already have about me. Give me a break.

Little did we know — years back when we rushed like children toward the Google Candy Store and all the other personal information black- holes-from-Hell-blood-sucking-vampire-ish-mega-sites — the can of worms we were uncapping. Did I just say children and can of worms? Silly me. My bad. I really meant lemmings and Pandora’s Box.

Shades of Isaac Asimov’s “I Robot“?

–submitted by “Eric”

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Tim says: if you’d like to submit one of your own You Tube “Video Curiosity” discoveries for consideration, use the “Contact” form at the top of the blog. Include the link and your first name only. Email addresses (if any) will not be published.

Pond-raised, Fresh Water Mussels

I love seafood of all kinds, and am constantly amazed at the recent explosion of available seafood products made possible by globalization. A trip to the grocery store seafood cooler has now become a journey across the world.

Of all places, I found these packages of frozen mussels (imported from Chile) in a Wal-Mart Superstore. I had my doubts. I admit it. But when I got home and opened the package, I began to change my mind. Inside were two, separate, 1-pound vacuum-packed bags. Perfect for a single serving if you are a true seafood lover like me.

Cooking instructions are plain and simple. You can either boil an unopened package for 7 minutes, or microwave a vented bag on high for 4 – 6 minutes. I use the microwave method. 5 minutes works for me.

Do not over cook!

Be creative with sauces or not. I like my mussels plain, dribbled with lemon, or dipped in melted butter with a touch of garlic and an ample amount of chopped parsley. Last week I tried a batch of lemon-garlic mussels spooned over a nest of angel hair pasta drenched in mild tomato sauce with fresh basil and a quirt of fine malt vinegar.

There are tons of recipes on the net. Search for “mussel recipes” and hold on to your hats!

Like today, when I got up around 3 AM (which is pretty much my norm), although the previous couple of days I had hopped out of bed around 9 AM because I had had some late-sleeping company. Since my friend, Walt, would be driving down from Pennsylvania later this afternoon — an 8-hour trip — I figured I’d do a quick cleanup. After a while, the cleanup was done and I decided to go down to my basement studio to spend a couple hours painting.

That’s when the Zen thingy kicked in and I floated off into an intense concentration that was broken only by the need for a pee-break. My couple of hours of absorption was over. But, when I climbed the steps and pushed into the kitchen upstairs, everything was dark. How could that be? I distinctly remembered going down to my basement and it had been mid-morning daylight. Now, outdoors was an ominous pitch black. How long had I been absorbed in my “meditative state”? The clock on the wall and the sulky darkness outside suggested it was 6 PM.

My mind fell apart. I could not believe I had painted for 13 hours. I could not comprehend that it was 6 PM, or that it was so very, very dark outside my windows. I figured there had to be an eclipse going on out there — hadn’t I recently heard something in the news about an upcoming eclipse? I stepped outside and shielded my eyes. Heavy clouds obscured my view. I could not see the sky; everything was hushed and dark and silent as a stone. My brain had ascended beyond Zen and had quit working entirely.

I was scared.

Worried that Walt had yet to arrive, I called Walt’s house. His wife, Andrea, told me Walt had just left. Wow, he had left after dinner and was running late! I did the math — Walt would be arriving somewhere around 3 AM. I took a shower, and when I walked into the living room — it was daylight outside. I *had* witnessed an eclipse! I went back down to my studio and contemplated Armageddon and the terror that eclipses must have caused through the ages.

A clock on a tool shelf flashed 9 AM. But I didn’t notice. Instead, I was thinking about how Armageddon must be like walking from a bright basement studio with a lingering hint of turpentine and linseed oil, and stepping, eyes wide open into an eclipse.

These two animations are the best compilations I’ve seen depicting the amazing processes that have evolved in order to deliver NASA rover missions onto the surface of Mars, safely. The first video shows how previous missions (“Spirit“ and “Opportunity”) of rovers were deployed on the surface, similar to dropping a bouncing beach ball. Can you imagine? The second video details how the most recent Mars lander, “Curiosity“ was set gently down on the Red Planet, August 5, 2012.

Part 1: “Spirit” and “Opportunity” missions.

Part 2: “Curiosity” mission.

–submitted by “Rich”

Hats off to NASA and its dedicated team of employees — What an incredible feat!

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Tim says: if you’d like to submit one of your own You Tube “Video Curiosity” discoveries for consideration, use the “Contact” form at the top of the blog. Include the link and your first name only. Email addresses (if any) will not be published.

Which is how I found myself remembering being picked up by my friend, Rich one evening at the Norfolk airport. I had been returning from a trip to visit Mom in Florida, and I was ready to come home. About an hour later, it was Rich who noticed that we were the last folks standing in a now empty baggage area. “Uh, Tim?” he asked.  “Why are we the last people standing in an empty baggage area?”

I thought about my golf clubs. I thought about my hang bag, filled with my favorite tee-shirts and shorts and suntan lotion. I thought about *Tad Williams’ yet unread “Mountain of Black Glass“ (Otherland, Volume 3) novel. I thought about my brand new prescription sunglasses sitting, perhaps, on my seat as I had hastily deplaned, and I thought about Stephen King’s “The Langoliers“, a novel about parallel universe-hopping airline travelers who find themselves stranded in an airport from Hell whose reality is in the process of fragmenting into nothingness, just like my hopes for ever seeing my luggage again.

“I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

After a while, I noticed a tiny glass room set off from the rest of the baggage claim area. Inside, leaning against a scuzzy wall and bathed in the sickly green glow from an overhead fluorescent light, sat my golf clubs and Samsonite hanging bag.

“Those your bags?” asked a security-looking-type guard, gruffly. A handgun hung loosely from his belt.

Uh, oh, I thought, suddenly remembering my sister, Pat having stuffed a HUGE bundle of fresh rosemary into the golf bag just before she drove me to the airport in Florida. Maybe they found some hitchhiking bugs being transported across state lines. Maybe — I was about to get busted!

“Yes, they’re mine!” I exclaimed. “Is there something wrong?”

“Nah, they came in on another flight,” said the guard. “You got your baggage claim tickets?”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

A few minutes later Rich and I were standing in the parking lot. A cool evening breeze blew in from the nearby Chesapeake Bay. “Hang on a second, Rich,” I said, unzipping the golf bag. I slipped on a Zebco Pro-fishing jacket. The inside of Rich’s truck smelled like rosemary all the way to a sushi bar.

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Tim Says: *Author Tad Williams and I have a somewhat twisted relationship, culminating in years of a rather rage-hardened distrust. Sounds like a Simply Tim to me!

Finger thingies.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but I gotta admit my fingers are getting all twitchy and my brain is beginning to itch. Words are beginning to bounce around inside there, co-mingling with a few rational thoughts from time to time, and I know it’s just a matter of time before they hitch a ride down the ol’ spinal column and link up with whatever mechanism it is that shimmy-shoots those words into phrases (and perhaps even a proper sentence while en route) trickling them down past the elbows to my hands, which Wekipedia informs me are the “multi-fingered extremity(ies) located at the end of an arm or forelimb of primates such as humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, and lemurs”.

In other words, my confused hunt-and-peck metacarpals.

It seems I still have no problem throwing words together, even though I’ve taken an extended leave from having done so these past many weeks. So, I suppose it’s safe to say something like, “Be on the lookout. Fair warning.” Just in case.

Well, about 2 weeks ago my house was struck by lightning from an errant, but tiny and easy-to-ignore “THUNDER STORM”. Okay. Wait. Let me rephrase that: about 2 weeks ago my TELEPHONE WIRES were struck by lightning from an errant, but tiny and easy-to-ignore “THUNDER STORM”.

Sadly, like most folks, I had NOT routed my telephone and DSL lines through my UPS, and had them wired directly into my DSL router and computers. Same thing with my TV, wherein I had the phone line connected directly to my DIRECT-TV box.

POOF. When the lightning struck: PZZZZZzzz! Off went my computer. Off went my TV. And off went my telephone. In other words, “OFF WENT MY HEAD!”

That’s where I’ve been these past 10 days. No TV. No telephone. No computer. The ultimate “OHHhhhh, NOoooo Land!” I could not believe the disruption this caused in my daily goings on. I was in — shock. It was like I was wearing a concrete suit.

Which leads me to the point of this post: make sure you provide surge protection for all your phone outlets before it is too late. Trust me, the “Everyman Nightmare and Cyber$pace Blue $creen of Death” is NOT where you want to end up.

UPDATE: Well, my Mac died again. Seems like I haven’t seen the worse of that lightning. The Black Screen of Death, so very rare for a Mac. I am now on my PC, which has just finished 4 hours of Windows Updates because I never use my PC. (I put the PC in the shop last week, too, and picked it up today.) The Mac goes back into the shop tomorrow.

Sigh.

Each trip to the Apple store is a 160 mile round trip for me. Sigh all over again.

At least I’m online again.

I am not much of a soup person. Just one of those things that passed me by while growing up. “Mmmmmm mmmmm good”  was never good enough. Until the other day when I saw a plastic can of Campbell’s “Tuscan-Style Chicken & White Bean Soup with Asiago Cheese, Thyme & Rosemary“ premium soup sitting on the top shelf of my grocery store’s soup section. It was the “Asiago Cheese, Thyme & Rosemary” that got me. All favorites of mine. Okay, maybe it was the nifty plastic can.

Several days later I was watching an absolutely terrible movie on the Sy-Fi Channel (I hate that name WAY more than any of the SY-Fi movies) — something about bogus sharks, skimpy bikinis, teeth, blood, skimpy bikinis, summer break, stOOpid kids, skimpy bikinis, and a town mayor who refused to close the beaches. You know the one, similar to all the other dozens of bogus shark, skimpy bikini, teeth, blood, summer break, stOOpid kids, with a town mayor who refuses to close the beach movies out there.

So, there I was, watching this boring movie when out of nowhere I decided to jump up from my La-Z-Boy and raid my soup pantry, where — by golly! — the plastic can of Campbell’s Tuscan-Style Chicken & White Bean Soup with Asiago Cheese, Thyme & Rosemary soup was staring me in the face. I added a pinch of fresh basil, red pepper, and some grated, sharp cheddar cheese, and into the microwave it went. “Mmmmmm mmmmm good” never tasted so — good.

The bogus sharks, skimpy bikinis, teeth, blood, summer break, stOOpid kids, and a town mayor who refused to close the beaches movie still sucked.