4 day old papillon puppy in a shoe video - Stills set to old "Armour Hot Dogs" radio commercial

---

I recently came across a treasure trove of stills and video I shot of our most recent Papillon puppy, Ambrose. I may have posted some of this material earlier but now I have much better editing software.

The radio commercial is from the "Old Time Radio" collection at Archive.org - Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

The video is likewise.

Can't get any salt- use a torch to melt the ice! - Dealing with ice without resorting to violence

---

With much of the country socked in by major storms, salt has been hard to hard to find. Heavy hand tools are an effective way to deal with the ice, but they are hard work, and aren't ideal for those who are disabled to use. This video shows an effective and fun alternative to beating at the ice with a sledgehammer- using a propane torch to melt ice.

Obviously: Be safe, sane, sober (durrr!)

This was the most fun video to shoot since before my atraumatic femur fracture, it hearkens back to "splitting wood while balancing on a bongo board." So yes, even after fibromyalgia's soaked my body in pain, osteoporosis has rendered my bones brittle, and TIAs have taken away my steadiness, I still have fun with life.

Poetry: Pain is NOT my enemy | Pain is NOW my enemy | Evil is my enemy (the most personal, profound poetry I've posted)

---

I composed this poem about 10 months ago, but I kept it to myself until now because it is so deeply, INTENSELY personal. Its like an MRI of my soul!

I decided to post it because I've found that direct discourse is utterly inadequate to describe what my life has become. I also thought it might help give voice to what other sufferers experience, and those to whom I've shown it have confirmed that it is quite apt of their experience as well.

I posted it as an image not text because when I composed it, I "saw" the white space, the indentations... they were there from the start. More, the poems on the left and the right HAVE to be right next to each other, in apposition. (That is why they are in inverse color.) While they are seemingly opposite in meaning, both are true.

So I will never post a pure text version of this, though I did have hopes to do a video of it. My recent computer crash and the horrible weather here have sapped my energy to the point where that's now nothing but a fond hope.

I've written other poetry which is also deeply personal and is similarly intense which I do intend to post in due time.

Of interest to fellow artists... it was hard to find software which would present the text and photos as I wanted to. Photo editing software failed, pretty spectacularly. I wound up using Open Office, the superb open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Just my experience in using it for this poem has convinced me to switch to it. I got it into image format by printing to PDF and then doing a screen capture of it. The final step was cropping it. (So I could have posted it as a .PDF were that allowed on the blogs and facebook.)

Word Pictures 2010 as 5x7s

Oy... why is it that CVS and Walgreen's insist on cropping every photo, and don't give you the option to opt out? Because of that, I needed to create versions of all my Word Pictures so far in 5x7 format such that the butchers at the pharmacy photo counters can't chop them.

I didn't do my monochrome images, and a few of my color ones which were variations of a theme aren't included either.

Still, this does serve as a nice overview of the project so far, and a handy quick reference. I'm not putting the large Multiply thumbnails in this post because you've seen all these before, but here are the smaller ImageShack ones.

---