long afternoon

It’s a sloooow day, and I’m practically in a coma from having eaten way too much lunch. We had an office birthday lunch, and went to a place I’ve been dying to go for years and years. I’ve wanted to see the inside of the building, since it’s one of the few actually historic buildings we have here. Usually they get torn down. This used to be the jailhouse. It’s off the main street in a kind of odd spot, and has actually been about a gazillion different restaurants. It’s only been in its current incarnation for a few months, but I was very pleased. It is quite nice inside, although teeny. Original jailhouse brick, strange ghostly photos, good atmosphere. Well, for a jailhouse. The food was great – I had a crabcake, sweet potato souffle, and squash soup. And a teeny biscuit. HOURS ago. It did not appear to be that much food, or to be especially filling, but I am stuffed and now I need a nap. Can’t concentrate, very little to do, I’ll write an entry instead. 

I’ve been really sad about Tracy Lynn, or Tammy Lynn as she was also known, or Lucy Lou as her last diary was called. I’m sure everyone who knew her already knows what happened. We’d been friends here for years, and on Facebook too. She was an alcoholic, and when I first started reading her, she was still drinking very heavily. But she’d gone the past two years without drinking, and I was hoping things were turning around for her. Sadly I think they just got worse. She and her husband divorced, he took their dogs who were like her children, and she ended up moving in with another guy in a different town — then her original house was seriously damaged in the Joplin tornado, and her health really deteriorated. She started drinking again, and Tuesday night was stopped by a deputy for drunk driving (after a number of 911 calls) . She pulled a gun on him, and he shot and killed her. A total shock. And hard to believe – that’s one of those things you read about that happened to strangers, not someone you’ve known for years. Her last entries sounded more and more hopeless, so I’m sure it was at least partially intentional on her part. I feel terrible for the deputy – I’m sure he’ll never get over and it sounded like he didn’t have any choice. I’ll miss her. She was very funny, a good writer, and brutally honest about her own problems. I often wondered about the choices she made, but she never glossed over anything she did. She had a kind heart. 

Well, on to brighter subjects. Like the weather, which is absolutely stunning – and has been all week, and is supposed to continue throughout the weekend. Gorgeous blue skies, temperatures in the low 70s, trees are starting to turn — it could not be prettier. Unfortunately this weekend is NOT the big annual Oz Festival weekend — that was last weekend. We had tickets for Saturday morning, first thing (it draws such a crowd you have to get tickets online now and arrive at your allotted time). Last weekend was the polar opposite of this weekend. And I do mean polar. It SNOWED. Yeah, AAAAAGGHH!!!! It didn’t accumulate where we are, beyond piling up on the poor fall flowers. But on top of Beech Mountain, where the festival is, it was in the 20s, pouring snow, accompanied by 40 MPH winds. Yeah, did not sound like fun. We’ve been when it’s very cold before – one year we went both Saturday and Sunday – Saturday it was in the low 30s and blew snow and we froze to death; Sunday it was in the high 70s. So that’s also "polar" as in "bi-polar". So for the first time in something like 16 years, we missed the Oz Festival. We probably could have gone Sunday and used our Saturday tickets, but it was nearly as cold Sunday. Just not snowing and not as windy. Kim came up for the weekend so we still had fun. Just not what we were planning. 

Oh, here’s a phone-picture of what I got to view from my front door Saturday morning-

Yeah. Not a pretty sight. Not for me, at least. Winter-Hater Extraordinaire. 

Well, it’s getting late and my brain is no less foggy (even after more coffee), so I’ll do something easy and post some more pictures. I saw something somewhere a few months ago about submitting photos to be included in Blowing Rock’s calendar, and decided I’d submit some. Naturally I have no clue where I saw that, unless it was on Facebook. I did print out the details, which really just consisted of the email address to send them to, and the theme, which is "stone". As in stone buildings and stone walls and all the stone stuff Blowing Rock has all over town. (And it wasn’t named after all its rock construction- it was named after The Blowing Rock, "North Carolina’s Oldest Travel Attraction Since 1933". I assume they mean it has been a travel attraction since 1933, not that it was declared the oldest travel attraction IN 1933. And the rock itself certainly pre-dates 1933. But whatever! That’s where the town got its name. 

ANYHOW, I sent some pictures in last Thursday night, since the deadline was Friday. I’d meant to take some new ones specifically for this purpose, but since Last Minute IS my middle name – or names – I of course did not get around to actually doing it and then I had to take my camera to the shop in Asheville for cleaning after discovering the sensor was FILTHY. By finding spots all over my Roanoke pictures, especially the Peaks of Otter very-blue-sky ones. I got them out with Picasso but still, it was obviously time for a cleaning and there’s nowhere here to do that. And the camera shop in Asheville usually can’t do it same-day, and they are only open Saturdays on the weekends so I always have to leave it till I can go back and pick it up. All this to say that I did not have my Big Boy Camera in time to take calendar pictures before the deadline. But I did have approximately 97,065,473,124 previously taken pictures of Blowing Rock, so I figured I’d find something to send. And I did find quite a lot, but unfortunately since it’s for a calendar they had to be horizontal, and a whole lot of mine were vertical. But I did find a few to send and the next day I got an email back from the woman who is putting the calendar together, asking if I could send a non-tinted picture of the Wonderland Trail rock wall, since although she liked it a lot it wouldn’t go with the other calendar pictures, and also do I have anything that would work for "Fall", since she didn’t have very many fall things to choose from. And she’d keep accepting them till the next Friday, as she’d been moving offices and hadn’t had time to do anything about the calendar yet.

SO, I’ve spent several very pleasant evenings wandering around Blowing Rock taking pictures. I couldn’t actually find much that looks like fall and features stonework, but it was fun trying. (The trees have not really changed a whole lot here yet- not much color mostly).

My Wonderland Trail picture had a weird white sky, so I thought, hey, I’ll send something artsy and different!

  
Kind of a Lomo-ish effect. But yeah, probably not so good for a calendar of pretty scenes. So I took a bunch more and sent this one: 

This was nice and fall-ish:

And the snowballs were very pretty, although they don’t show the stone wall that well from this angle:
 

This was more wall, but kind of odd flower placement. Still, it’s fallish. 

And this actually shows gorgeous fall colors, but the light is not great and it’s not a very eyecatching shot, other than the trees. But that’s the only thing I could find that combined trees AND stonework. 

 I also sent a couple of my favorite Blowing Rock wall – the old theatre. One even has snow. 

So, we’ll see what happens. It would be lots of fun to get a picture in the calendar. I’ve never managed to get one in the Boone one, that our "Not-A-Meteorologist does every year. I am just not very good at pretty scenes, I don’t think. If they did a calendar of weird stuff, or ruins, I’d be in for sure, but just pretty scenes don’t seem to ever come out well for me.