nothing like a visit to the cemetery at lunch…

…to cheer me up. Especially when it involves a nifty new camera and taking a zillion pictures. I actually recall taking the little Powershot to this same cemetery at lunch not long after I got it, when I was having a horrible day at work, and having the whole day turn happily around. I’m not having a horrible day today – and incidentally now I am feeling perfectly fine, no flu so far. Not even whiny or particularly cranky today. I’m just having a lot of trouble concentrating. My boss, who I like very very much – the boss whose place I will be taking when she retires – is a nervous yakker. When she’s upset or anxious, she will Not.Stop.Talking. And she has had several things upset her today.

An adviser sent her a very snippy email about a student’s substitution for a course, making it sound as if D had screwed up when in fact D was going by an earlier email from the same adviser and was completely right in what she’d told the student. Then someone cut her off coming back from lunch, zipping around her on the narrow little campus street which not only made her mad because it was so obnoxious, but also because they could have easily mowed down some of the oblivious students who are always walking out in the street from behind parked cars with their cellphones attached to their ears. THEN her email crashed and she has gone on and on and on and wondered why it did that and what happened and did mine do that and why did mine not do that and what she should do and why is nothing happening when she hits the  button and maybe she should hit the button harder and what is this bizarre message about a fatal error and should she hit the "yes" or "no" button when neither one makes any sense….finally she just called the help desk. After I suggested about ten times that she call the help desk. I still don’t know what happened but she finally got unstuck.

Oh, look, I never even finished my entry! Now I’m at home, watched the lovely Lost which just gets more and more bizarre, watched some of the debate before and after Lost, and if I don’t post some graveyard photos now I may never get around to it again.

This is a little cemetery a few miles outside town, up on a ridge. Very scenic. Very long and narrow.

Very full of strange statuary.

With coin slots??

And a surprising amount of debris –

Macro!!!!

Oh, but THIS wasn’t disturbing at ALL….

Why, what on earth is that black container? Let’s take a closer look!

Why, yes, that IS a plastic box of….CREMAINS. Although it appeared that the actual ashes are no longer inside the box. I didn’t pick it up, but I peered inside and it looked like just an empty plastic bag in there. Mary’s ashes were … scattered? Dumped under the debris? Dropped into a  permanent receptacle for perpetual security???? Had I been walking all over her????

This was so creepy and unsettling on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin. So I packed the camera back up and called it a day. But I’ll say it’s got to be the strangest thing I’ve found so far in a cemetery. It’s right up there with the "Burial By Permission Only" sign in the Sandy Mush graveyard.

Still, it was a very nice little lunchtime jaunt, with just a tinge of horror thrown in to keep me on my toes.