A dozing moment of insight brought some of my photos back to me.

I have been on a photo hunt for months now. The goal: find as many of my photo originals as possible, and lodge them on flickr. I was unhappy with storing them on domesticat, and decided it was well past time to archive them in one place.

I had considered the originals of my Sedona photos lost. Not any more:

"I think a lot of people who come to visit Mauna Kea come for a reason," said James Kimo Pihana, a ranger with the Office of Mauna Kea Management. "People challenge the mountain. The mountain always wins; it is people who lose. But the mountain accepts challenges."
'To The Summit,' by Bret Yager for the Hawaii Tribune-Herald

I just had a discussion with my fellow IT workers, and I just dropped a southernism they don't recognize. I stopped to think about it for a second or two, and realized that I don't know the 'real' name for what I'm describing.

Growing up in Arkansas, we were careful about where in the yard we went barefoot, because there was a certain type of grass we called 'stickers.' It was grass, but it has small but definite thornlike parts, and they stuck in your skin (thus the name) and made it very uncomfortable to walk barefoot on grass.

Dad -

I didn't really call you that while you were alive, and it feels strange to call you that now, but I didn't know any other way to start this letter.

I've become a person who grumbles at roadside memorials for victims of traffic accidents but who writes something about you every year on the anniversary of your death. I wondered about that for a number of years before I realized that I was closer to your death than I was to your life, and I've spent the years since trying to come to terms with your absence.

This entry covers it better than most:

I've been wrapped up in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet for a few days now. I realized I was on to something unusual when I started flagging passages every few pages.

Comments from the narrator so far:

Love and freedom

But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth? (p. 53)

Background to this email: Jeff's and my 10th anniversary is in late July. We found out last week that instead of the fall, as we'd been told, my mother's wedding would actually be on Saturday, August 2 in central Arkansas. We had made trip plans months ago, which required changing in order to make it to the wedding. (It's about a 7.5-hour drive each way from Huntsville to my hometown.)

The last part won't go over well. I have little doubt of that.

Mom -