Boomer Randomness

Saturday began with a quiet, peaceful fall morning, the perfect contrast to a fairly stressful week. I woke up early to take sunrise pictures in a nearby town. The temperature was a crisp 42 degrees. There were very few people in Middletown Park. The loudest sound was the honking of geese on Kingsbury Pond. The sunrise was brilliant, with just enough golden clouds to compliment the yellow, orange and red of the leaves on the trees surrounding the water. Fall has a different feel than the other seasons. The air flows with anticipation on its breath. Sounds echo a bit as the trees lose their sound-absorbing leaves. Shadows are long and linear. Nature sheds its skin during fall as the beginning of a cycle of renewal and it can be a good time for humans to follow the example.

I had planned to attend the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear in Washington DC yesterday but chose to do some other personal things instead. However, I did watch some of it on C-SPAN and I wish I had gone. Jon Stewart, the organizer and star of the show, is a comedian by profession and this rally was partly a spoof on rallies. But taken as a whole, this event came much closer than most to representing the majority of Americans and their beliefs. Most of us live in the middle, we don’t always agree but we do compromise and our whole government and way of life is based on diverse people getting along. I’m not going to attempt to describe the whole thing here. Just let me share some highlights: - No accurate crowd estimate is available, but those who speculate on such things seem to think the crowd size of this rally was at least as large the Beck rally a few months back. One survey says it was twice as big. - A wide range of famous people appeared on stage during the rally, including She...

- This year October had 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. That won’t happen again for more than 800 years. Feeling pretty lucky, I played the lottery this week. And I matched (drum roll please): no numbers. - I got up at the crack of dawn yesterday to take this picture. This is the last week this year that the crack of dawn is after 7:30 am. - Some business surveys indicate that Halloween is the second most commercial celebration of the year, right behind Christmas. - I’m used to getting Christmas cards, birthday cards, Valentine’s Day cards, even Thanksgiving Day cards. This year I got a Halloween card. How cool is that?! - Fall is my favorite season. Fall can also be a depressing season, but I am determined to keep most of my usual fall depression at bay. When it rears its ugly head, it’ll only be for minutes, not weeks. I’ll allow it to visit me for a couple of select days this year, but that’s all. - Can you believe it’s already the last day of October?? Where d...

Happy Halloween from BOOmer Randomness!!

I’ve had a pretty good run of creativity during the past couple of weeks. Lots of posts on this site, two new posts on the poetry blog , daily photos in my nearby town blog and some seasonal shots on my photo blog . I am lucky to have a job that involves creativity, mostly with audio, but challenging myself in other creative outlets is good therapy for me. I appreciate that you visit my various blogs, whether I know you or not. I enjoy sharing.

Sharing an old song from my youth that always meakes me think of Halloween. That's not what the song is about but it has the right feel. Enjoy.

Sony announced this week that it will stop making the Walkman. Uhh, they still make that? I have one of those, somewhere in my cluttered home office. Two, in fact; one is very basic, the other has a radio in it. Haven’t used them in years. I think I still have a few cassettes, also buried in the clutter. The Walkman was revolutionary when first produced three decades ago. You could now take your music anywhere, untethered. Joggers used them, although I don’t know where they put the cassettes other than the one they were listening to. Is that a cassette in your pocket, or …. Anyway. Now we have the iPod, a smaller portable media device that can store a few thousand of your favorite songs with no external 12-songs-a-piece thing like cassettes or CDs to carry around. Did you know they still made the Walkman? I didn’t until I read an online article about it. That story listed a few other technological entities that you probably thought were gone … Film . It’s hard to find but it does still...