BibliophileBullpen

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I attract crazy people. I don’t know why I just always have. Not that I myself am not more than qualified to ride on the short bus, but seriously folks you are making me nuts.

Today one of my customers seems to have been sucking extra deep from the crazy fountain. She ordered a DOZEN FINE Inkredibles. So I shipped a dozen FINE Inkredibles which happen to be GREY.

The Coarse are white and the Extra Fine are black..though after this batch of black, the factory may start making them beige..i don’t care as long as they work.

Anyway…in the mail comes back FOUR of the Grey Inkredibles and a piece of a white one in a baggie. The note indicated that she had really wanted EXTRA FINE Inkredibles erasers and that I had sent her the wrong ones.

So I explained the whole thing about the color and offered to send her 4 WHITE ones as per her SAMPLE. Now she is screaming at me that I obviously don’t have what she wants and that she deserves a full refund for all the wrong erasers I ever sent her. yeah like THAT’ll happen.

I have issued her a refund for the 4 returned grey erasers and once again tried explaining the difference between black and white. But I think the problem lies bigger than that. The damn things keep going up in price for me to have manufactured nevermind shipping.   I think I may stop offering the Inkredibles by the dozen, this isn’t the 1st time someone has had buyers remorse when they open the box and discover just a box of erasers.  Really excellent ones, but erasers none the less.

Two of the THREE green herons I got to see yesterday.

Today I passed the CPR course (my last certification was like 5 presidents ago) and became another volunteer with the Community Emergency Response Teams…so far i am not called upon to do anything more than that. But what the hell, I have all these excess free time that needs killing.

Yesterday I …was it yesterday? that seems so long ago….i went out at 5am birding.  A buddy of mine wanted to tag along so I ran around to 3 different walmarts to find her a vest.  (don’t get me wrong this is a real friend whom I love dearly, but i have been doing her editing for a year and now she’s been offered an asst editor job.  So for ten minutes I DID actually think about hiding her body in the swamp….)

But on the other hand it was so far my best birding day ever – 32 species PLUS …an immature bald eagle just hanging around the great blue heron rookery.  I figured out I don’t really want to Bird (big B) as in another bloody hobby I need to spend time and money feeding, I just want to know what’s living in the Sanctuary that is 9 blocks from my house. So far the guestimation is over 50+ species of birds – THAT ought to keep me busy birding (small B).

Later the conservation officer made me fill out a bunch of official endangered animal sighting forms.   Directly afterwards he and I went out and hiked half the rail trail, so we could discuss the trail design, or actually how to integrate the wild life sanctuary trails and the rail trail, so as not to piss of the birds, the animals or the people.   Basically I was out rowing and hiking until about 1PM and spent the rest of the day completely dead to the world.   Sooner or later people are going to figure out I am just making this all up as I go.

This is Smiley. Smiley has been adopted into a forever home, however he is going blind unless Animal Rescue Merrimack Valley can raise the $1200 to get him emergency eye surgery. Please donate to ARMV’s Medical Costs.

I got my draft copy of the Methuen photoessay book..most of the pictures looked good. there are a few i’d like to reshoot and some i can’t. But overall i do need to shoot another two dozen to flesh the book out. Perhaps I will take the lazy person’s way out and some corny postcard photos…. I dunno, i just need to keep shooting and try to get it finished before the end of September. So i can get it into the stores for November. Who says I’m dumb?…don’t answer that.

All in all sales are a smidgen amount higher than last year at this time. Which still leaves me time for getting into trouble and working like a dog at things that don’t pay. I swear if I put all the energy into my real work that I put into the non profit stuff I’d be set for life. Yeah but it’d be a boring life.

The Rail Trail had a very good week. a very good week. I discovered that the students at the school abutting the trail built their own makeshift bridge to get to the trail. I have never been so happy to see anything in all my life. I couldn’t find the access point until I saw that. I also found out the city has an easement through the school parking lot to the street. Something i have been looking for since I started this. If you can imagine yours truly doing something between the snoopy dance and a solo conga then I apologize for the image.

On the other side of the coin, the animal rescue group is stretched to its breaking point. I personally collected 3 discarded cats in the last 2 weeks, I am running out of places to hide them. At least the white ‘tom’ cat turned out to be a hermaphradite with a cryptorchid; it never made it home from the vet, as they kept it to adopt it themselves. …and you thought cat rescue couldn’t get weirder.

Don’t get excited it’s just the cover.  I sent a first draft to Blurb.com so I could see how things look.   It’s still about half the size it should be and I am sure half of those pictures will look like hell.  But one has to make a start somewhere. I figure I will get this draft copy back and then I will have a good idea how to adjust for the medium.

Usually I am way too cheap to print my photos for no good reason (read: paying), though once in a while I send something to the copy shop and have it printed on color paper – usually just to pin to the wall or give away.  But here’s hoping that I can come up with enough that don’t suck to fill an entire book.

I am trying to intersperse the really good images with ones that I am not overly excited about hoping that no one will notice…hey it’s Methuen…If it were someplace classy I’d be worried.  As for content I still have no idea what I am doing, but I don’t shoot people as a rule..well not with a camera anyway….and I avoid cars and signs and anything that can be dated, so hopefully the book will look, as they say…timeless. Oh puhleese, can i get more pretentious? I also tend to avoid all the traditional static shots of civic buildings and statues etc… I prefer images that make one say ‘where is that?’  I mean if you WANT post cards shots….but a fucking postcard.

So basically it will be a crap shoot, either the draft copy will look like hell and I will dump the idea and stick to amusing myself, or it will look partway decent and I will try shooting another bunch of images for it.  As it is I have spent the last 2 days rooting around in my hard drives looking at images I forgot I had and then trying to find print resolution versions of the damn things. I will let you know when it gets here…and YES I meant the double entendre in the title, did you think for a moment that I didn’t?

mama needs a new camera 8(   I know I know i just GOT a new camera. Which is all well and good for animals that sit up and say hello. But for sneaking around trying to take pictures of the very shy regardless of size, the autofocus is a bitch. I have half a mind to rebuy another telephoto for my film camera. My Canon AE-1 never let me down. However the digital refused to SEE the green heron even when he wasn’t moving.   To be fair the damn bird is the same color as the surrounding greenery and it couldn’t actually FOCUS. But if i had the control i’d have shot the damn bird up down and sideways.

I have been desiring a decent DSLR since they were invented, but have always convinced myself that I can’t afford a $$$ camera not to mention  $$$ for each lens. But at this point I am going to have to do something about the problem.  My rationalization was that I can BUY an expensive camera as long as the photography pays for it.  So i need to go through my pics and find something profitable.

I guess until I do that I won’t be doing a study of out of focus birds.

While I was hiding in the dark with my newly conditioned air, I played with my Helen Gibson research project and discovered something truly interesting…I had made an assumption 2 years ago that turns out to be false and changed my whole outlook on the archive.  Wait..let me vague that up…the majority of the items in my research materials are stills from Helen’s silent serials..nearly all have descriptions in her own hand on the back…some of them have writing from other persons on the back, some crossing out Helen’s description and substituting other titles. As I went along happily putting these in chronological order and sorting them with like items. I took these corrections as read.

Figuring she did so many films she must have just been misremembering.   As with this item someone with a  long inked description for a Capital film from 1920, and someone helpful reedited the label to read Kalem Company 1916.  The differences are apples and oranges..the Kalem Company did 1 reel rail road adventures staring Helen, where the Capital films did a few dozen 2 reel westerns with her.  This is one of the more egregious examples of relabeling, to be fair working titles were ephemeral and what was filmed under one title may have been released under another.  So the title in the description doesn’t match anything in Helens Capital filmography, but that’s neither here nor there.  Someone wrote something incorrect on the back of the still.  And in a few cases I took them at their word that they knew what they were doing.

Now i get to flip back through the collection and correct the corrections, taking ONLY things in Helen’s hand as gospel. I wonder how many other people are taking annotations attached to books and ephemera as truth when whomever did the scribbling may have just been wanting to sell the item faster, quicker or pricier.

Just when i swore off using the A/Cs I had a little adventure that kinda made them mandatory. One of the wooden screens on the porch fell out of its frame the other night…i didn’t notice it until 8 cats had escaped. I had to seal the house and turn on the a/cs. I think the heat made the wood shrink and it just fell out of the brick frame, so there i am trying to drive nails into brick at 2am.) I have been set traps baited with roast chicken to lure the last five gadabouts. They aren’t trying to escape they just think this is a grand adventure; they know where the can opener lives and won’t go all that far. The cats that are missing are ones I shouldn’t have still had here anyway. They should have gone to the sanctuary but I was waiting for kitten season to slack off. I figured I could wait…dumb.

I went rowing every morning of the three day weekend and even took a spin down the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail on Saturday… alas as of Tuesday the temperature has been swaying deliriously between 90 and 100. When I do go out I am in a constant state of inelegance. Since I can get away with it…i have just been hiding in the dark.

I have plenty of work to keep me busy and if I sit equidistant from all the fans in the house…I can keep tolerably cool. One A/C is in a window and the other is on the floor but I am too chickenshit to use them. My disdain for utility companies has grown to include the electric company. I wish going out on the river was cooling…it’s not…no current, no breezes…beating sunlight is no better on calm waters – one needs a motor and a venue to open it up. Motors are for sissies.

I am making preliminary designs for the rail trail – personally i’d like it to look like it has always been there and was built around the same time as the rest of the city architecture. And considering we have a nano-budget, I may get my wish. I am spending the summer going from local pol to local pol and getting all my ducks in a row for when I actually need them.

I’d like to get the thing built in the next 18 months..for many reasons not the least of which is that once i become unhomed by my brother and his wife, I won’t be that enthusiastic to build a trail somewhere I can’t enjoy it. Is it wrong of me to want the economy to stay sucky? Yeah i know it is – so shoot me.

I nearly gave myself a stroke…i misplaced something i bought on amazon, something i bought for myself and paid a pretty penny for.  I tore apart what’s left of my office and finally after giving up and saying “i will find it when I move or die.”  i suddenly remembered what it looked like and where it was.  I had put it away somewhere ’safe’  - this is the same someplace ’safe’  my mother used to store our Christmas presents that would reappear in July.  To quote Douglas Adams “this is some strange usage of the word ’safe’ that I was previously unaware of.”

I don’t mind getting old, I don’t mind the grey hair and the squishy middle. And  I am finally getting a handle on the flock of beard hairs…but the losing my mind part is making me crazy;   Forgetting words in mid sentence, walking into rooms and forgetting why I went in and most of all forgetting where I put things moments after I take my eyes off them.

This week I had 3 unhappy customers, now i have 1 very happy customer, 1 unhappy guy who never had anything to be unhappy about and one guy who was unhappy before I ever met him.  That’s about 3 over par, for me.  Usually if I fuck up, I can make it right as rain – but these days I spend half my time wracking my memory to see if I had forgotten something. Thankfully with all 3 of these cases the post office shoulders a good portion of the blame..one customer had the nerve to tell me that Priority Mail was guaranteed in 3 days…which is quite unfair –  that kind of statement can keep me rolling on the floor holding my middle for a good portion of the afternoon, and another had his complete and correct order take exactly the right amount of time and get delivered to his house exactly when it was supposed to,  but in the meantime had decided I was the antichrist and returned his purchase for a full refund.  He did however make a point of keeping the lagniappe I had enclosed…not bad for an antichrist.

It has taken me 2 years to get used to it, but now I write everything down in my moleskine…I run out of mouthwash I write it down, i make an appointment I write it down,  I pay a bill I write it down.  It’s painful to admit that my short term memory is for shite.  I can still remember my high school locker number and the name of my best friend when i was five…but 10 minutes after i walk out of a store I will forget what i bought and have to look in the bag.  These days I warn my friends, if you ask me to do something and don’t send me an email about it, it’s your own damn fault if i forget.  My ears just aren’t connected to my brain anymore.