Old houses and mushroom houses, lined up in rows.

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Location Taken: Bay City, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

There are some fantastic houses as you follow Highway 25 through Bay City in Michigan. Each one is quite different from its neighbors, and each carries a personality of its own.

I wish modern architecture followed that concept rather than making cookie cutter houses. Sure, in some subdivisions, there is variation in the design, but they all still come from the same mold. They’re all around the same size, all with the same sort of yard and same sort of look. The houses built as the baby boom grew up (in the 70’s and 80’s) are especially egregious in this. Later houses have a touch more personality, but they still all have the same feel as their neighbors. They are clusters of siblings, not a community of individuals.

At least since the housing bubble burst, it seems to be getting better. The buildings I see put up recently have more decoration and style. There’s more brickwork, rather than the miles of plastic siding. I grew tired of those subdivisions built when I was growing up, in the late 90’s. They all looked like they were built to look expensive rather than be expensive. All the same design, and an uninspired one at that, and they had that look that just told you that corners were cut but the savings weren’t passed on to the people who live there. We called them Mushroom Houses, since they popped up like mushrooms after a rain, with how fast they were built.

I prefer the look of the older houses and neighborhoods. Where it is easy to tell one house from the next and the scraggly trees have grown into giants sheltering the children playing under them. The houses reflect the personality of those who built it and have lived in it. Better than the personality that comes across from far too many subdivisions, that of “I don’t fully care about this house and neighborhood, but I must keep up appearances”.

Still, I think I’d prefer to live in a brand new house, one that’s built with the increasingly-popular green ideals of the day. For one thing, they have enough electrical outlets and, unlike the old house I live in, they’ve all got the third prong. It’s a bit annoying having to run an extension cord through the entirety of another room from the one outlet on the floor that’s grounded just so I can have my computer in my own room.

  

I like to go for long walks on the beach – in winter. You like snow, right?

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Location Taken: Sea Girt, New Jersey
Time Taken: February 2011

There are times in a young woman’s life when her mind turns to other things.

Like how bleeping hot it is.

I’ve been running melted lately. Especially in the brain. I don’t feel like doing anything productive, so I spend all my time just sitting at my computer, playing Minecraft. I certainly don’t feel like going outside, or even getting dressed most days. My general attitude can be summed up as “meh.” My first inclination was to just have “meh” as my post for today, but well, my sense of propriety (only half melted) insisted on more. Overall, the heat is just making the days blur together, with very little getting done.

And it’s only been in the low 80’s.

It doesn’t take much to melt a Sharayah. Anything 70 degrees or above usually does the trick. I know the temperature because I took a film photography class once, which involved long hours in the dark room developing film. The room was set to 70 degrees, and I’d come out with that irritating feeling of being a bit too hot for a bit too long. It’s not like the lights affected anything, since there weren’t any.

For me, summer isn’t a time of fun, games, and swimming at the beach. I’m far more likely to visit the beach in the off months, like in this photo. I really like it when there’s snow and ice and interesting formations. I don’t go swimming then, though. It’s a wee bit too cold. Still, just walking along the beach is pleasant, especially since there are so few other people, so I can watch the sea gulls on the rocks for as long as I want. Which usually isn’t that long. I’m not much of an outdoor person. Which, alas, makes the nature photography I like doing a tad challenging. The sun allergy doesn’t help either.

  

Time falls apart, come back together, then falls again and again.

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Time Drawn: June 2012 (Today!)

I wish I could be reliable.

Time is broken for me. Well, at least my circadian rhythm is broken. I lack the natural clock that tells people it is right to sleep at night and dance at day.

For me, sleep is largely random. Days may be of any length, sleep periods short or long. I may stay on one pattern for a bit, rising and resting in the same patterns, but in just a week or so, it shifts again.

I can’t easily shift it myself, either. Sure, for a short time, I can force myself awake. I’ll set my alarm and wake up with it, even if it means only getting 3 hours of sleep. But, 16 hours later, when most would sleep to match when they woke, I shall be barely able to even close my eyes. I’ll stay up until I can finally shut myself down for the rest period, and likely only gain another three hours of sleep that night. Or less. I often react to sleep deprivation by being unable to sleep for even longer the next night, delving deeper and deeper into the odd mental states that come with sleeplessness.

Not for me is going to bed and trying to fall asleep despite not being quite tired enough. I may try, and try I have on many a night. But I shall not fall asleep. I will fall into what I call stasis. I will wake up many hours later exactly as tired as when I went to bed. I did not lose anything, but I did not gain anything. And the strain builds up. The longer I push it, the worse things get, and the less I have the capacity for.

I can’t even fall back on the drug of the sleep-deprived, caffeine. One sip and the headache starts. More sips, and it grows. It lasts as long as the wakefulness, fading alongside it. And it ruins all faint dreams of productivity during its stay. And I have found no other stimulant that works fully for me. Ginseng tea clears the mental fog, but does naught for the physical. And finding others is difficult, for so strong is caffeine’s hold on the market that it is put into all the other stimulants I come across.

I cannot guarantee. I cannot guarantee I will be awake to work. I cannot guarantee I will even be up for the standard 16 hours, for several of the variants of my patterns call for multiple four-hour naps in a day. I cannot guarantee I will have the brainpower to form coherent sentences, much less drive or create art. I cannot guarantee I’ll even be awake at the same time as someone else, despite long-laid plans to do things together.

I sometimes wish time was not broken for me. Perhaps then the hours would not slip by me, the days seeming so similar to each other. Perhaps then I could work a standard job for a standard amount of hours in a standard pattern, and actually earn some money.

Still, it does push me to less-traveled paths, to find a way to have a broken clock in a world where punctuality is king. I would not be treading the life-path I am otherwise.

And the first hint of light as the sun rises towards the horizon is beautiful.

  

Going out with Blazing Colors – Wait, can you call it blazing if they’re this wet?

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

Sometimes fascinating compositions come to you completely unexpected.

I went out for a photography walk, heading down to the local river to take pictures of it. There had been heavy rains the day before, and I had seen earlier that the water was quite high and flowing fast. But the rains had brought more interesting things than just brown water in the streams.

I hadn’t even known there was an apple tree upstream of this storm grate. It’s right by an alleyway that becomes a bit of a river when it rains, pulling from a fairly large, mostly wooded section. Still, there they were, several apples, sitting there nice as could be. Well, nice might not be the best term, since they were pretty rotted, but you know what I mean.

Even as rotted as they were, the apples still bore their bright colors proudly. And surrounded by the grays and browns of the grate and all the leaves and bark and sticks that had caught up it it, it was quite a sight to see.

I suspect these apples got nibbled on by the birds until they were small enough to fall into the grate. At least, they weren’t there the next time I went by. There’s something very appealing about thinking of these apples, even though they were on their last hurrah, doing their job proudly, feeding animals and maybe, just maybe, getting a seed to a place where it could grow.

I might have to look for the apple trees some time in the future.