The Penguin Papers

It's Freewriting Monday here at The Penguin Papers. In other words, I have nothing in particular to write about today, but still want to write. Which means that this may not be readable at all. Or may be very readable, but not worth caring about. Or worth caring about but... Okay, I think you get the idea. I have several ideas swirling around in my head, but nothing stands out as The Topic for the day, so you may get all of them or none of them, just whatever flows out from my addled Monday brain through my fingertips. One of the things rumbling around in the old brainbox is what I wish for in the coming year. Health and happiness, of course, for everyone in the household, good grades from the kids and maybe the possibility of seeing how far I can take the blog this year. It's just a baby blog, somewhat neglected over the last year, but it's something that's mine. All mine. And I can do with it whatever I want, within reason. The direction doesn't need to be spe...

I've had an ongoing flirtation with photography since I was a kid, starting when I got my first Kodak 126 Instamatic at the age of 9 or so. Pictures, to me, are a tangible memory cue to happy times in my life and a photographic chronicle of my kids and grandkids during their journeys to adulthood and beyond. And to be completely honest, I do like looking at pictures of myself as the skinny young thing I was once upon a time. To take a picture is to grab a part of a memory to store it away for safekeeping. That said, as much as I enjoy taking pictures, I fear I am not very good at it. I want to be, I think I can be, but when I take pictures and look at them critically afterwards, I don't like what I see. My current camera is a point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix L100 . It's a fine camera and easy to use, but I'm not very methodical about what and how I do things. I often don't remember what settings I use, so it's difficult for me to successfully edit my photos la...

I really don't know how the topic came up nor do I wish to delve into the odd psychology of this household that allowed such a tangent to occur but for some reason the ever-popular movie Oversexed Rugsuckers From Mars popped to the top of the conversational stack. And people wonder why I have issues.