trivia and 50 years

The little tree frog is still in the birdhouse or was last Sunday when I took this picture. Apparently it didn’t care for having its picture taken because now when it sees me it scuttles back into the birdhouse instead on hanging out on the doorstep. 

So apparently, Christmas in July is a thing occurring on or around July 25th originating at a US girl’s camp in 1933 and, unsurprisingly, embraced by retailers as a summer sales event to clear out summer stock. News to me, how did I not know about this? 

Here’s an interesting little piece of trivia, the bullwhip was the first human-made object to break the sound barrier, producing a small sonic boom heard as a crack when flicked quickly. If you are interested in the science behind it you can watch this short entertaining video. 

Now that I finished Artemis, I’ve taken the first steps towards another shadowbox, very preliminary steps as I don’t have a completed drawing or even settled on a subject matter but I did some resizing of some drawings with which to do a couple of compositions. I’ve drawn in the main focus for three compositions I’m considering. Now to work on the surrounding elements. Maybe I’ll get around to that sometime this weekend.

Another item from the 1440 newsletter…Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe.  Two links, one of the map that you can zoom in and out of, 

the other an article  about the map and a guided tour of the universe.

Today is our 50th wedding anniversary, got married at home at three in the afternoon, invited everyone we knew and had a big party that lasted until midnight. 

We had a small amount of finger food that people brought, two kegs of beer, the Bride’s keg and the Groom’s keg, floated the Bride’s keg. The next day we went to a movie though neither one of us can remember what we saw and an internet search for movies that week of that year did not ring any bells. When we got back to the house, my parents were there planning to clean house as a surprise which we did not appreciate since we had some illegal drugs sitting around which, thankfully, they had not come across yet. We told them thanks, but no thanks, packed a bag and spent the next week at the family beach house on the far west end of Galveston Island. When we got back a week later and opened the garage with the leftover contents of the Groom’s keg, omg! That leftover beer cooked for a week in a closed garage in the middle of August and the smell was awful.

So yeah, 50 years of not just being married but working together. Feels more like 150. I came close to calling it quits a couple of times and he actually packed a bag and left once but was back several hours later but underneath it all we remained devoted to each other, that or we're just two stubborn people. We’re going out later for lunch and ice cream.