Wednesday, April 26, 2006
It's not all about Allie...
In its original Bookworm concept, this weekend at the ocean was all about me and my birthday. An opportunity to fulfill a longtime dream of teaching my grandson to fly a kite. When I was little like Allie, my Dad made me kites. He split the wood parts from a board and shaved them down thin with his pocket knife. He covered the frame with glued down newspaper and tied on a tail of knotted rags. Perhaps this worked when he was growing up on an Eastern Washington homestead in 1915, but it never worked when he tried to do it for me in 1941 or so. These homemade kites never attained anything remotely resembling flight. And now I know one of the reasons why. Good kite flying winds are between 7 and 20 mph .... our prairie winds in Eastern Washington were normally between 30 and 45 mph. No chance! Bookworm reports having had similar kiting experiences with her father.
But I digress extensively. This was MY weekend and let no one forget it. I took every opportunity (okay, one or two opportunities) to enjoy being a photographer. The shot above was of a sand drawing that Allie (can't get away from him) made when he and I first hiked over to the beach.
But on Saturday morning, when it was too early for my companion slug-a-beds to be out and about enjoying the cool salt air and marveling at the advertising ingenuity of remote beach towns, I took a stroll around Ocean City looking for my favorite subjects: oddities, graffiti, rust and disintegration, weather artworks, etc.,. Despite my expectations, Ocean City was not a treasure chest of such subject matter. Too organized. Too cleanly. Not enough junk!
I did get a couple dozen nice shots of decrepit boats decorating motel entrances and purposeful graffiti on the side of a surf shop.....
....and Mr. Porpoise here - on a metal plaque decorating a stone wall. So in between photographing Allie in the pool, on the beach, flying kites, riding horses, and flopping in the ocean - I did get some time for FossilGuy to wander around and do his thing.
I wonder what's going on with the pictures here? They were all the same height dimension (400) when I downloaded them ... yet two of them stretch across the entire available width(?).
Nice. Very nice.
It's a long time since I dropped by, and I see I have missed a lot! :-)
I remember the kite building with my dad from my youth. He would split bamboo and use newspaper, and make a tail of newspaper folds attached to a string. I don't know why, but they never flew...
Take care.
A friend brought a kite his dad had made one day, a simple square with black plastic covering. I never thought it would fly, but it turned out to be the best kite ever! He gave it to me and I used to time how long it flew with my wrist watch. 36 minutes was the record and is almost an eternity when one is a kid.
I like the photos, they are very nice. Allie seems to be full of beans too, good thing my son never grew roots before going to school or else my hair would be even greyer... :-)
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