PopWars

We staggered our spinach crops but it is all going to town now. It does better in the early Spring and the heat is too much for it so it is all going to seed. We’ve been eating spinach every day for the last month. Had it for breakfast a few days ago. I picked a Wegmans bag full tonight and Peggi made an Indian dish. Cooked the whole bag down to two servings. I rinsed it in the kitchen sink and while the water was running I thought I’d run down in the basement and clean our cat’s dirt box. I must have forgotten to do it yesterday because it was a mess. When the water started coming through the ceiling into the dirt box I remembered I had left it running upstairs.

How long ago was 2001? It feels like the dark ages in digital time. The internet used to be more fun and it held out the promise of even more fun. Maybe it’s just me that has changed. I can always snap out of it.

I came across this link to a digital installation that I did for a Pyramid Art show back in 2001. I had a Mac on a table running Internet Explorer in full screen mode and this series of pages went round and round. It sort of bothered me at the time because the piece had nothing to do with the confines of the gallery and could just as easily have been viewed in the comfort of one’s home. This was the virtual age and the computer just looked clunky sitting there. The last thing you want to do in a gallery is get on a computer.

There’s no Flash involved or anything but I remember struggling to get the various movements to work across platforms. The Pyramid and the show are long gone but this piece is still out the floating around. I’m afraid to look at the code but it still seems to work.

I helped my neighbor do a few repairs to the pump down at the pool today and I had to move this old lawn sprinkler out of the way. It is unbelievably heavy and probably worth a few bucks down at Krieger’s just for the scrap metal. “Model 102” is stamped in the metal along with the manufacturer’s name, “Beatrice. F. D. Kees” of Nebraska. I looked them up on line and found they were started as a gunsmith shop and later patented and produced corn-husking hooks and innovative products such as a window defroster for automobiles and a moving lawn sprinkler that resembled a farm tractor. This photo shows one in good condition. It shows it chasing it’s own tail. I plan to hook ours up and see how it behaves. I heard that Dick Storms from the Record Archive used to have the world’s largest collection of lawn sprinklers but I think he got out of that line of work.

“Don’t you be fawning over me.” This baby fawn was almost in the middle of our path as we walked through the woods today. We came across a fawn a few years ago while walking with Jim Mott and he told us not to go near the fawn or the mother would be spooked. The doe feel the fawn are safer from predators if they are left alone. Even I can smell a deer if they’re nearby so this makes some sense.

Further along we found ourselves between a group of wild turkeys. They get confused when some of the pack are separated and humans make them nervous so they were making a racket while we were in the way. It’s pretty easy to feel like an intruder in the woods.