Morning Walk

I was walking through the woods behind my house a few days ago and saw this little "guy".

And a little farther on...

They were both small, about three inches across, I think.

Beautiful and Stupid

An incident Sunday morning made me think of a line from Cathrynne Valente's novel Space Opera: "Life is beautiful and life is stupid." A 79 year old man was injured trying to rescue a turtle on the highway.

That was beautiful. What a sweet old man, caring about the life of a turtle. But it was also stupid. There is a lot of traffic on that highway and most of it going 10 - 15 MPH over the speed limit. I understand, but it's not worth it.

I wonder if the turtle is okay.

It's Beautiful! Get Over It!

Can everyone please stop having knee-jerk negative reactions to everything? The latest "outrage" in our state is the new license plates - the design and the extra five dollars we're going to have to pay for them. Five dollars, folks. Really? That's what... two or three fewer beers? (I have no idea how much beer costs.)

Personally, I love them and I can hardly wait to get mine. I am not terribly fond of the current license plates. I mean, they're okay. I don't hate them. They are culturally appropriate and reasonably attractive but in real life the image of the statue is not so well defined. Unless you're really close to it - closer than you would be in your car driving around behind one - it just looks like a confusing, dark blue... something. Also the red numbers and letters are more difficult to read than the black ones.

The new plates are beautiful. I love them. Did I say already that I love them? Sure, maybe it's the same problem - that you won't be able to tell that the white area is a silhouette of a bird and if you can you might not be able to tell that it's a scissor tailed flycatcher (I'll bet 80% of the people couldn't identify a scissor tailed flycatcher if they had one sitting on their hand.) but overall it's a beautiful design. The colors are beautiful and I think you can at least tell that it has a bird on it, if not the species.

Anyway, get over it. In another few years they will come up with another new design and everyone will hate it and talk about how much better the old design was. So why wait until it goes away? Start liking it now.