Category Archives: Creativity

– Duh – It’s 2019 & They Haven’t Blown Up Our Planet Yet —> {{ Or is this our delusional “AfterLife”? }}

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{ “It’s 2019 & The Planet Hasn’t Blown Up Yet {{ Or is this our delusional AfterLife? }}  }

July 25, 2019 by Jim |

{ This is an edited version of something I tried to post earlier in our very old “Aerendel” blog hosted by wordpress dot com. }

Thursday, July 25th, 2019 – +25˚C / +76˚F —> With quite a few interesting clouds in the otherwise blue sky @ 3:40 pm in Atlantic Canada —

– These are the interesting clouds in the Eastern Sky – I couldn’t add this to the original post unless I gave them my credit card numbers etc. and agreed to their upgrade demands. – Schnarr! –

— Yay! I think that worked .

– Our Smoke Tree from the South West – With the corner of our porch behind it. –

—Well, this is schnarr – I spent – I don’t know – several hours the other day trying to find the old password to this here blog { “Free blog” – hosted at –wordpress.com– } and it just told me that if I try to upload more than 1 more MB of photos I will have to start paying WordPress for an upgrade. The also don’t want me to be able to be able to add, edit – or even think about trying to do anything else with the plugins. grrrrr-

— But anyway – It’s a Mercury Retch { aka ‘Retrograde’ } et ‘Mon Amour Fou’ is on the West Coast –  🙁 – But – life sort of goes on I guess – She’s dealing with corporate snafus and I’m dealing with beedy grastardly folks who offer freebies and then try to hit you up for more and more bux every time you turn around? – Ehh- WordPress is not the beedy-est  of the beedy grastards out there – and the stuff you can get for free from them is still really good compared to most of the others trying to prey on people they probably believe belong to the ‘great unwashed’  – But I’m still not looking forward to watching them go down in flames – too many innocent bystanders will get burned in the process.

-This is the same Smoke Tree – photo taken from the North West At About 12:30m – same time as the above photo – Funny how the lighting changed –

— Sigh

~~~~~ Jim

Posted in “UpDates”, Schnarr, Uncategorized

Australia Calling?

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Tuesday, February 6th, 2018 —> -4˚C / +23˚F & ‘partly cloudy’ @ 1:33 pm in Atlantic Canada —> Today would have been my Aunt Phyl’s birthday…

Koala Ren

– “Koala Ren” –

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Update: Contact from another Australian Travel Service : 12-Things To Do in Australia.

= = = = =

— Ordinarily, I might have ignored this:

— But The love of my life has relatives in Australia. I’ve always been semi-fascinated with Australia { And New Zealand, I mean any place that names their capital city after me can’t be bad – roight? 😉 } & Cathi’s got relatives in New Zealand, too.

— I went looking for anything that might have cited the article referred to in this message { below } and couldn’t find it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. & it could have been something from one of the twitter feeds that are on both sides of the posts/articles here –

— But – in the spirit of personal nonsense { which often makes more sense than anything ‘sensible’ —> }

— Here’s the message from Janice of your-rv-lifestyle :

 

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Dear Jim,

My name is Janice and I’m a writer at Your RV Lifestyle. I was doing research on things to do in Australia and just finished reading your wonderful blog post: http://aerendel.ca/aarchives/?cat=13

In that article, I noticed that you cited a solid post that I’ve read in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia

I just finished writing a guide that is even more detailed, updated and comprehensive on the 100 best things to do in Australia. It is over 10,000 words and packed with practical tips and advice. You can find it here: https://www.your-rv-lifestyle.com/things-to-do-in-australia.html

If you like the guide we’d be humbled if you cited us in your article. Of course, we will also share your article with our 50k newsletter subscribers and followers across our social platforms.

Either way, keep up the great work!

Warmly,
Janice

 

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— I’m not sure if this qualifies as ‘citing’ her article in her magazine – But hey – I looked at the link and it wasn’t anywhere near as schnarr as the spam links I used to get in way too many ‘comments’ here – and – if we win the lottery, and win big enough, we’ll probably go looking for Koalas and hope to hear some didgeridoos freeing the tension from around my spine. 🙂

 

~~~~~ Jim

 

Monday, January 8th, 2018 —> Back to School – Back to Work – Back on the Chain Gang in New Brunswick?

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Monday, January 8th, 2018 —> -15˚C / +5˚F with ‘light snow’ @ 6:44 am in Atlantic Canada —> On this day in the year 1958 my fambly moved into our long time residence on Huntington Road —

2018-01-08 7:50 am Snowy landscape with driveway and lit up porch.

– & this was our driveway and lit up porch { looking South } this morning at about 7:50 am Atlantic Time –

— We woke up to about 7 cm / almost 2 & 1/2 inches of very fluffy light new snow on everything out there in the real world this morning.

van leaving driveway this morning.

– Cathi leaving for work this morning –

— If we weren’t so busy grumbling about two and a half inches of new snow that needed to be cleaned from the van we probably would have wanted to blast, “I don’t like Mondays!” on the nearest available stereo device. The very light fluffy snow might be pretty, but it was slippery. { And that’s our garbage and recycling near the curb you can’t see, because nobody can see it today 😉 } & My supervisor at TVCOGECO would probably have yelled at me because the photo looks like it was taken on an angle that was not level – But: The street is not perfectly level. The utility pole is not perfectly level and the whole freakin world is off kilter lately – isn’t it? And somebody on the radio last week explained that our weather patterns are way off kilter because the earth’s crust slipped almost imperceptibly last year and that was just enough to screw up our weather patterns. I think my Yogi friends would probably argue that the weather, and the slipping of the crust were probably symptoms of what goes wrong when the spiritual atmosphere of our world is heavily manipulated by nasty greedy ‘elite’ power crazy idjits who control as much ‘information’ and ‘fake news’ as they can get away with – We’re bombarded with insidious lies constantly – designed to keep up as off center and in a state of easily manipulated constant fear and confusion. Somebody start playing “Everybody wants to rule the world” –

Road Conditions this morning.

– Cathi told me that somebody where she works raved about how intelligent the road crews were around here – as far as they left a little bit of snow on the roads so tires could get a grip. – She wasn’t impressed. –

— & Road clearing philosophy aside —>

Side yard?

– Was it Currier and Ives who painted all kinds of idyllic winter scenes in the 19th century? I’m thinking this is really pretty. I hated the fact that by the 1970’s in Southern Connecticut all of our snow either melted or turned black from automobile exhaust within about a week of it falling. But I guess, this is my punishment for liking snow – “Brrrrrr!”

— Um, have I done enough damage for today?

~~~~~ Jim

From Friday, November 17th, 2017 –

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Friday, November 17th, 2017 –

- Fredericton Airport On A cloudy Evening -

– “Fredericton Airport On Cloudy Evening – From before the latest renovations began … –

— 8:10 pm.  —> Stopped @ Superstore for Emergency Greenies. —> Got to the Airport with 10 minutes to spare. —> Wondered why it was so easy to find a parking space. —> Cathi’s plane is an hour & 4 minutes behind schedule. —> Instead of 7:46 pm it is now due @ 8:50 pm—

~~~~~ Jim

Positive Directions ?

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Sunday, February 21st, 2016 — +3°C / +37°F — Dark & Overcast in Atlantic Canada @ 3:22 am — I think it’s my not-so-old (ex) neighbour, Dana’s Birthday today —

Stone houses built against cliffs along a river or a lake.

Draelen’s been finding a lot of beautiful landscapes and city-scapes being re-tweeted by Artists he’s following on Twitter- Here’s one of them. — Makes me want to be there – This one was posted by “@MarionSpekker” and re-tweeted by “@huskorkut”

— I was just looking at things that Draelen (he’s part of our web game development team) has re-tweeted lately. Some of the photos and art work he’s found is absolutely inspiring. Kinda Makes Ya wonder how anyone could be given a wonderful, incredibly beautiful, and just plain breath-takingly amazing planet like this one and want to destroy it for a little bit of temporary profit.

Puppy with a pink Valentine's Day Heart.

In the past I might have winced and rolled my eyes about something this cute, wondered how the photographer manipulated the puppy, and maybe even commented about pictures like this possibly sending someone into diabetic shock. But I saw this at the right time, I guess, and thought, – I wish I saw this in time to copy and paste it into a private message and send it to the woman I love. –  Sigh, Maybe I’m just getting sappy in my, ahem, old age?

— And, after reading through a page of Draelen’s recent re-tweets I thought I should tweak a few settings on this blog and then went ahead and changed the Title that appears at the top of the page as well as the smaller ‘description’ that follows. I hadn’t realized that the header photo wasn’t as wide as the blog since we ‘stretched’ it to add a second column of ‘wigets’ to include Drae’s Twitter feed. I also moved that column to the right side and moved the stuff that used to be on the right – moved it over to the left. I don’t know, it just looks better to me this way.

Bird

Since I came to Canada as a visitor and liked the person I came to visit so much that I’m still here – I learned to appreciate birds a lot more than I did before Cathi captured my heart and all that – And I saw my first Bald Eagles, not in Alaska when I was up there, but here, in the Fredericton, New Brunswick area. I’m not sure what species this guy here is, but that’s quite a striking photograph.

— I do believe I’m richer for all the ‘eye-opening’ images Drae found and shared with his small circle of twitter followers.

City Scape

– For a long time, I had completely lost my wanderlust – It made no sense to me that I might spend a whole lot of time and energy – and probably lots of money too – to get to some exotic place and discover that the reality didn’t look half as good as the photo-shopped image in the travel agency window. I also dreaded finding myself halfway around the world and lonely because somebody I wanted to be with was thousands of miles away, and I didn’t want to discover that paradise was full of nasty – biting bugs and mean, bullying, or just plain evil or psychotic people. But I really wish I could teleport to this spot and see if it feels as magical in person as it looks here.

— Yup, so instead of me getting all upset about evil manipulating elitist pigs lying to us through their bought-and-paid-for ‘main stream media’ – I’m sitting here working on my novel, thinking about ways to make the game world we’re still working on, still making progress —

— Funny when Photos or Art can touch you and change your outlook from ‘I’m Mizzuble- Right?’ to, “Wow – This really is a beautiful world, isn’t it?” [ And I’m not even going to growl, “Let’s keep it that way!” ]

— Thanks for putting up with me? –,

~~~~~ Jim

 

Saturday, Snow, Then Rain, Then Snow Again ? — From “Latest News from Aerendel”

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Copied & Pasted from “Latest News from Aerendel” :

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Saturday, February 20th, 2016, —ƒƒ— +2˚C / +36˚F & raining at the moment in Atlantic Canada @ 1:11 pm  —ƒƒ— Kathy Krafchick’s Birthday ( & Patty Heart’s too) —ƒƒ—

light dusting of snow on trees and stone wall

– Um, I took this photo about an hour ago. It was still snowing then, but lightly. –

— “Yooks Yike another weird weather day in Atlantic Canada” It began with a light snow falling, the Weather Network expects we might get a centimeter – and then they expect rain ( they were right on that ) And then they expect the rain to turn back to snow –  I don’t think they wanted to guess how much snow we might get on the second round of white stuff, but they thought we might get “≅ 10 mm.” [ almost 10 millimeters ] of rain – But they only expected the temperature to reach 0˚C / 32˚F and we’ve already gone past/above and beyond that.

Crow in a tree against a grey (snowing) sky.

Two Crows were scolding me – When I picked up the camera and aimed at them, one flew away. If you can see the crow in this photo we’re both lucky. Yeah, I think I got him – Upper third & Right third of the photograph. I know what I was looking for.

— Yeah, Crow is one of my ‘totem animals’ – but I’m not about to call myself “Jim Crow”, or ‘Jim Mountain Lion” or Owl or Wolf or Turtle or Swan or Skunk – There’s a Dog in the mix too, and I think Possum shows up to protect my inner child by deflecting threats away – You can read all about that in “Medicine Cards” – don’t google it – go to smartpage dot com and protect your privacy –

Dusting of snow on a stone wall.

And This is the part of the stone wall that caught enough of this morning’s dusting to look interesting, at least to me.

— And while I was uploading photos from the camera’s SD card I realized I hadn’t uploaded the couple of photos I took during our latest visit to the north side’s Pizza Delight, ether on Maple Street or St Mary’s (street or road?)

Cathi in our Pizza Delight restaurant.

I might have mentioned this before, Cathi had some modeling experience as a teen-ager And she looks like a slightly different person in almost every photograph I’ve seen of her. I egged her on to pose for this one, Don’t know whether she’s putting on a modeling face of thinking I’ve lost my mind again for asking her to tip her head forward and look up at me. Almost every model I’ve ever talked to wished that professional photographers were a lot more human than they pretend to be.

— Yay? I should quit while I’m ahead –,

~~~~~ Jim

Found a box we hadn’t opened since we moved here :)

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Sunday, July 26, 2015 -( 15˚C / 59˚F & raining in Atlantic Canada @ 9:59 pm Atlantic Time 🙂 )-

2nd Prize for Comic Short Story 'published' on GEnie in 1991.

Cathi stumbled upon a couple boxes we hadn’t opened since we moved here in 2013 – I found this 🙂 in one of them.

— And this:

3rd Prize certificate.

3rd Prize Certificate for another story I ‘published’ on GEnie

— So, yup, I won second and third place in ‘Comic Short Stories based on Multi-player Games’ that were interactive and live on GEnie in 1991. (( “No brag, just facts-” ? )) 😉

~~~~~ Jim

Weekending-

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Sunday, July 19, 2015 -( 16˚C / 61˚F @ 10:45 pm in the dark and damp here in Atlantic Canada )-

Messy office.

This ‘Office’ is technically transitioning from ‘completely freaking messed up’ to ‘I just might be able to find something I’m looking for in here’.

Yes, we had a weekend. Of course it rained, but- We got things done, and moved forward into a more optimistic state of mind, no matter how many idiotic bits of political lies and rule bending b.s. the current administration is bombarding us with constant commercials on just about every station in Canada, and maybe especially New Brunswick and a couple other target areas. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are so obviously lying and trying their damnedest to get away with immoral bull [ chips ] by playing their propaganda clips before the election has actually been scheduled – which is unethical, immoral, not quite fattening, but should be illegal, and will probably help convince the majority of Canadians who are not brain dead to vote the morons out of office that much more quickly… I might be able to shudder and shrug my way through it. But the evil sonuvaguns are trying to convince vulnerable people that if any of the other parties get to form the next government they will steal the candy out of their babies’ mouths, take away their pensions, and, in general, peel the skin from their bodies as painfully as possible, and set their private parts on fire. The politix of fear are alive and well and Canada.

Pallets, lumber & garbage can cover.

Pallets (& plywood) R us. I got a little bit done, pulling nails out of interesting pieces of lumber that used to hold three decent pallet together to form shelves for plant sales at a nearby chain type hardware and lumber store. They do have Home Despots up here, but this is a more local franchise. The thing on the far left is something I built out of plywood and 2x2s to discourage the local racoons from messing with our garbage. That’s my white hat reflected in the window.

We got out and about on Saturday afternoon after a pleasant brunch. & After grabbing a couple necessities (like food?) at the nearby supermarket, we stopped off at a ubiquitous hardware chain store and stumble upon a couple goodies, like stain for our projects on sale. 🙂 And we were checked out by one of the most friendly and pleasant young cashiers we’ve ever encountered there.

And then I convinced Cathi to check out the free pallets one company leaves out in the hopes that they won’t have to pay somebody to haul them away or whatever business they’d have if nobody came along and took advantage of the free pallets.

What we found there this time was three surprisingly good pallets and one smaller pallet with split pieces but a couple good two by fours. So Cathi said she was happy we checked. We also found the last of the season’s small potted herbs for sale for $.24 each. I think we got two small plastic square things of lemon balm and a couple other intriguing plants, one was peppermint? some kind of mint and the other had tiny light purple flowers.

This morning Cathi went around and planted the herbs along with the ivy she brought home a couple days ago-

Ivy surrounded by grass, climbing a fence.

You probably can’t tell with a casual glance, but there is some newly transplanted ivy in the center of this photo. I told Cathi I’d like to see some ivy and she found some in the bargain/closeout section of one of the stores she frequents. We had nine little pots of English Ivy, which I hope really likes the climate here, and when we set them on the outside porch they thrived, sort of said, ‘thank you’ and now there are something like 4 plants around Jassper’s fence and a couple more in not so easy to spot places. But Yum- They should enjoy the rain we’re supposed to get in the next several days.

And, beyond my usual feeling like I’ve lost my mind, we did okay. – It had rained overnight, and it’s supposed to rain every day for the next four days? At Least?

— As long as you don’t dwell on the fact that, for a promised interview with a local Author I was trying to get an old mac computer to work with the old free version of ProTools and when I struck out with the best computer I still have here for that option I tried to wake up an older G3 (“cute”) MacBook and which, for all its 640 megs of RAM started up and charged the nearly dead battery really well, but when I tried to restart using Mac OS 9.2.2 the hard drive with that operating system had a coronary and played dead. I tried another external Hard Drive with a similar Operating System, but it was even worse. — When I took the worse HD into the office here and connected it to another Mac, that other Mac saw it long enough to know it was there, but when I tried to ‘verify’ and then repair the danged thing, it disappeared and said it was beyond help, but I should back up what I could and then it wouldn’t mount the danged thing and reformat it. But if it ain’t mounted ya can’t back anything up- bluddy idjits- so I tried repairing it again a couple times with the disk utility and it finally gave up trying to tell me it was too far gone (or too old, or too riddled with planned obsolescence???) to fix- well, surprise surprise, it fixed it enough so it would mount. I then tried backing up files. First the routines thought it might take an hour, then a couple hours, then 16 hours. So I went to bed & when I woke up and checked it, it looked like it had been backing up nicely for several hours and then hit a bad file with a name that was about two miles long and full of heiroglyphics- and the only thing it had actually backed up was a stupid icon. grrrr. So I spent most of today manually backing things up one file at a time.

All the time I was gnashing my teeth and backing up stupid files etc. Cathi got up quietly and went outside and transplanted things, thinking it would be raining later.

Garden gnome hiding in ferns.

I wanted to upload a photo of Cathi on her Gazelle, but I need to straighten it out so I’ll upload the photo of a gnome hiding in the ferns by our stone wall.

— And there a very interesting story at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-greedy-companies-making-products-that-break that says France has a law against planned obsolescence. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

Talkin to Mom and Cathi’s found her first novel :)

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Monday, July 6th, 2015 -( 19˚C / 66˚F @ 12:59 am in the dark up here in Atlantic Canada )-

Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse on the Green in Fredericton, one of our favourite Ice Cream, seafood and sandwich places- We’ve had our second visit of the season, and it ice cream is sensational, as ever. 🙂 Photo taken in September 2013.

Talked to Mom and Sharon (my sister) tonight via Skype. They’re in Alaska. And I’m on the other side of the continent. I tried to take a couple screenshots of the conversation, but in my hurry, I pushed the right keys on the wrong computers and then wondered why the pictures didn’t take. -duh!- Both Mom and I felt slightly under the weather for part of today. I thought my problem was going through a box we haven’t opened since we got here and maybe breathing in mold or something. After I ate something for dinner and chilled for an hour or so I was fine. Maybe the electromagnetic atmosphere around mother Earth isn’t feeling all that great and sharing her blahs with us sensitive human beans. 😉 Anyway, I had a very nice talk with Mom and my sister and we’re hoping we can talk again on Friday when we may experience fewer interruptions. 😉

& recently – Getting ready to clear 757 photos from the card in my camera, I uploaded those to a backup computer and founds lots of yummy stuff from the past five years – much of it might only have been on the backup computer, which now has a couple lovely screenshots that were not of me and mom skyping happily earlier tonight. I’m thinking some of those older photos should be on a History page here in this Archives blog

For right now, let me say that the Lighthouse on the Green here – the above photo is from a stormy day two years ago – is charging $2.00 Canadian $’s for people to climb to the top and look out over the city- proceeds to benefit SPCA Fredericton 🙂 🙂 🙂

Al Fresco

This is a shot of the Lighthouse on the Green’s ‘Dining Room’ taken on September 27th, 2013. See what you’re missing?

— Achy but optimistic in Atlantic Canada –,

~~~~~ Jim