Weekly Photo Challenge: The Summer Garage Sale

Nothing says summer like a Garage Sale. Our Cabin Community held a Parade of Garage Sales recently. It didn’t take long for me to identify the items that I would attempt to unload. I just chose all the things I had no real attachment to and no need for. The cabin is full of such items because when we purchased it, it came with all the stuff the previous owner had no use for.

I carted arm fulls of things to the edge of the road and rather than trying to price everything, I made a single sign. It said “Free”. I pinned it to the makeshift brick and board shelf the items were sitting on, and sat back to see what would happen. My first customer arrived in a pick-up truck. Within minutes she had loaded up the big old TV set that survived the flood, and 4 kitchen chairs that have been made redundant. And so it went all morning. No one could believe that everything was free, and though they probably didn’t need any of the things they took, they just couldn’t resist getting something for nothing. By the end of the day, everything had been taken except….

this fondue pot. Granted, it doesn’t have a lid, and the heat source is missing, but it has a nice wooden handle, and a lovely bouquet of flowers dancing around its belly. Truly, how could those people take home an old rake or an ice bucket disguised like a wooden apple, but leave behind the fondue pot?

I took the pot back into the cabin, washed the dust off, and put it back onto the shelf. I wonder, does everyone have a fondue pot that they never use and that is why I couldn’t give this one away? Or does no one fondue anymore?

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I’d hoped everything in the Garage Sale would find a new home. More Hopes: Weekly Photo Challenge: Hope

Macro Monday: Sleepless

This is a close up and personal look at what? (Hint – Neil Young described it in one of his songs.)

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Last Week’s Macro Photo, Is it Grey or Gray - a piece of a nest of  the Yellow Jacket wasp. Nests are built of wood fibres masticated into coarse paper.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Through

You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

It wasn’t too hard to find a photo in my archives to demonstrate ‘Through’.  Windows are very good for this sort of thing.  This one is our patio and driveway in the summer through our front door window.

This is the same view through the window today. Snow, thanks to a low pressure system moving in from Idaho into Montana then north into our province. And everyone thinks all the bad weather originates in Canada!

No, I wanted a much more difficult challenge, and for that I would have to use a magic spell. I took two photos, waved my magic mouse over them and uttered “Photoshopis elementis transperantis layerosis!”

Ta Da! You can see right through the closed door of my dishwasher! Yes, I know the view isn’t crystal clear, but dishwashers are notorious for leaving a bit of a soapy film, aren’t they?

If you would like to see how other photographers have interpreted this challenge, click on this link: WordPress Photo Challenge: Through.

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My Similar Story about looking through a window: Mrs. Mallard and the Great Balancing Act

It’s UnFriday!

Drat. I missed Clean Your Computer Day – it was February 13. Please forgive me for being four days late in telling you all about the latest cleaning tool in my arsenal. It is called Unning – from the verb un. I know you think that un has to be a prefix, but I think it has the potential to be a rather good verb. Under what circumstances, you ask?

Let me give you a few examples from the unning I did this week, while I was connected to three large Clouds:

- I had some Facebook acquaintances who, it turns out, aren’t really people I would choose to have as real life friends, so I decided I would unfriend them. But not yet – for now I’ve hid them – unfriending seems a bit harsh.
- I had about 200 Google RSS feeds that I never had time to read, so I unsubscribed to them.
- I  had about 250 WordPress Blog feeds that I also never had time to read, so I unfollowed them.

Collectively, all this unfriending, unsubscribing and unfollowing can simply be called unning. Of course, I expect I will be unned in return, but I don’t mind. We all have to do what we have to do.

Unning can be done to things too. I unned my clothes closet the other day and now I have a bag of good, unfashionable, used clothes to take to Goodwill. I unned the book shelf and collected a box of books for the book exchange. I unned the chocolate box and  picked out all the bars that were just past their best before date and I ate them.

Today is Friday, which is a fine day to do some unning, so I propose we call it UnFriday! I’m looking forward to hearing all your stories of how you used the day to unclutter your life!

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My Similar Cloud Story: Cloudy with a Chance of Pterodactyls - This has nothing to do with Cloud Computing but at the end of the story there is a link to a story about Cloud Computing