Directions to a Blog-warming Party

Follow the Blogger Road until it turns to a mud track.
Turn Right onto WordPress Blvd.
OddMix has now moved into the third blog on the right.

The Address is http://oddmix.wordpress.com

You are invited to join Odd Mix and the Odd Family for a blogwarming party. The party begins today at 5:00pm and continues until nobody want to party any more.

The Old Blog-stead on Blogger Road will be left standing as a museum.

I would be grateful if the handful of you who have links to my blog would update them to the new address. Thanks

WWC #6: Mars and Venus

Well, after a couple of weeks of pretty heavy topics, I thought I'd shoot for something a little lighter this week. It will be interesting to see how serious you make it.

Without too much explanation (because there is really not much logic behind the choice) I chose a dichotomy for this weeks words. They are (in no particular order, ladies):

1. Masculine
2. Feminine

How will you say them?

IMHO... Not!

There's a breed of humility which is itself a species of showing off.
- Sam Clemmens

I have found myself on a number of ocasions inserting the acronym IMHO in my comments, or even in my own posts. For those of you who are acronymically challenged, IMHO stands for "In My Humble Oppinion". By using that acronym, I feel like I am devaluing my opinion. I am saying "I don't think you will agree with me, but..." or "My thoughts aren't really important, but..." Well, I have decided not to use IMHO any more.

You see, if my opinion were really very humble, I probably wouldn't be offering it - which I am. And if I did, it would probably be pandering to mass approval - which I'm not.

I value my opinions, they stem from who I am; and I voice them as topics of conversation. You don't have to agree with me, but whether you do or you don't, I'd like the oportunity to discuss it. I've said before that I write on this blog to comunicate with my friends. That is also why I comment. I have a special inbox for all comments on my blog and I love getting responses, even on my oldest posts. Because in these communications I get to voice my opinion, you get to voice yours, and we get to discuss it. And I am happy! Whee!

So I need a new acronym. There is IMO - In My Opinion - but that is isn't specific enough. I thought about IMPO - In My Personal Opinion - but "Imp-Oh" sounds silly to me. So I am going to go with IMNSHO - In My Not So Humble Opinion.

Well there you have it - the Odd Mix's odd acronym. IMNSHO. Look for it.

WWC #5: The Historical Challenge

The words this week were Triumph and Tragedy. I didn't have much time to take photos so I am going to use a couple of older shots.

Triumph
Launch at Last

Tragedy
Mother gone, nest destroyed - we gave them the best shot we could.
Hope they made it.

SPF #8: You asked for it.

Brought to you by Kristine.

This weeks assignment was to take a picture of:

• Something Sparkley
  
• Something Dull
  
• Something Colorful

So I took a picture of:

My Wife's rings.
In addition to her wedding band, she wears a mother's ring with six stones - the birthstones of our four kids with her birthstone on one end and mine on the other.

Leroy
This dog was about as dull as they come.

Some of the birds at Disney World
Mostly Macaws and one asian chicken looking thing.

Did you play?

Historic Weekend Word Challenge

In case you hadn’t noticed the pattern, in addition to making the words for the Weekend Words Challenge thought provoking in terms of photography, I try to make them significant to the date in some way. This weekend there are no obvious holidays so I looked at the weekend in history. I found two

Friday, the second of June, is the anniversary of the effective end of the American Civil War. That war is the bloodiest in US history – costing over 600,000 American dead. On this day, Confederate General E. K. Smith accepted Union terms and surrendered the last Confederate army. So, with apologies to the sensibilities of my friends of the southern persuasion, I chose the word Triumph.


Sunday, the fourth of June, is the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. On this day the Chinese government sent troops and tanks to disperse over a million people demonstrating support for democracy. They did so with brutal effectiveness – killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians and arresting over 10,000. I remember watching a lone student stand defiantly in the path of a tank brining it momentarily to a halt. Then the tank rolled forward and ground him into the cobbles where he stood. So I chose the word Tragedy.


And there you have it. WWC #4 is right out of the history books – Triumph and Tragedy. Your photos of course need not reflect anything so great as the end of a war or so tragic as a massacre – mine certainly will not. Mine will likely be from daily life. We certainly face enough of both in our lives for there to be no shortage of photographic fodder.

I can’t wait to see how you say the words!

The Photos are Here

At long last - I know you have been holding your breath out there - I am ready to share a select few of my photos from our trip to Orlando. I would have shared them sooner but some foreigner - probably from Kansas, or Montana, or some other unearthly place - brought their foreign germs to the East Coast and infected us with the plague. We had no resistance to the pestilence and were laid low before it. (How's that for melodrama?)

After laboriously winnowing my massive photographic output down to a measly 379 shots I have come to an impasse. I can't part with any more. My kids are just too darn cute; my wife just too darn hot beautiful. The fireworks were too captivating, and there were just too many giant fuzzy cartoon characters to hug. Soooo... I'll just have to deal with it.

Rather than post all 379 pictures here because I too used to have a dial up connection, I am linking you to a photo album. The read only password to view this album is: cgea. Yes I am posting the password on a public blog - I only put it on to keep people from randomly surfing to them.

Here is an appetizer. Sort of visual hors d'oeuvres, as it were. Bon appetit.

Memorial Day Greetings, and WWC #4

While I do hope you enjoyed your Memorial Day holiday weekend (assuming you got one) I find myself hesitant to say "Happy Memorial Day" - so Memorial Day Greetings it is.

We spent this weekend working on our move - more to the point, MDW and AnnShh worked on our move and I got to watch the kids. While it made for a long, tiring weekend, I am convinced I still got the clean end of the stick. While they sorted, packed, cleaned, and loaded, I got to play with the best four kids in the known universe - no arguments please; your's will just have to settle for fifth, sixth, and seventh, etc. - do some landscaping, dig in the garden, and push the swing. The most strenuous thing I had to do (aside from move one bloody heavy washer/dryer combination) was mow a couple of fields with the mother of all lawnmowers.

OK, On to the Weekend Words Challenge. This one was tough for me to get my head around. I could come up with quite a few ways to show remembrance and a couple to show duty, but none seemed quite right. I wound up choosing these:

Duty -
The price of doing one's duty is sometimes life itself.
In World War Two over 400,000 United States servicemen and women gave thier lives doing thier duty. Each of our allies had thier own toll - some many more than the US. In remembrance of the US dead there are 4000 stars sculpted on a wall at the US World War Two Memorial in Washington, DC. It is a poigniant reminder of the price of freedom - and the duty accepted by its defenders.

Remembrance -
Stone remembers when the frailty of human memory would allow events - momentous and small alike - to slip away into obscurity. On a small stone building on the corner of the whitehouse grounds are highwater marks . The building was moved there from the Capital gates (which are at a significantly higher elevation) so the marks record truely significant floods. No one remembers these events which must have seemed apocalyptic at the time - only the stone recalls.

How did you say the words?