Posts Tagged ‘personal’
Personal Interlude
Filed Under: personal
Things have been very busy outside of the day job (and at the day job as well, but who cares about that stuff?). I put most of the finishing touches on a new website for Rudi Dornemann last week. I’ll let you know here when he signs off on the site, and I’ll try and write up a postmortem at that point. It was a fun project, involving updating an older design of mine for a different sort of website.
I finalized my artwork for the Strange Horizons donation card over the weekend as well. I will let you know how to get that special Roundbottom art when the donation drive begins. I’m really pleased with how the image turned out. The poor little gob!
I’ve also put nearly every book I own into boxes for the impending move to our new place (only six blocks away from the current house, but $300 a month cheaper).
Blogging will be lighter over the coming two weeks as I’m in the process of finishing up a couple of freelance projects while packing for the move. I currently have no projects scheduled for June or July, so if you are looking for a designer, and want to discuss the possibility of hiring me, you know how to reach me. An awesome new website would be a good investment of your government stimulus check!
I will be on vacation in Oregon for the second week of June, but I can still work on a project for the latter half of the month. If nothing turns up, I’ll put that time into building the new Roundbottom site to go with the relaunch, and in general, just doing more photography.
Have you missed some of the recent Daily Photos? This link will take you to the tag that I file all the daily images under. I don’t usually post images over the weekend, but sometimes I get excited about sharing the work I’ve done and upload it earlier. On my list of things to do is to create a feed specifically for just the daily photos so that I can offer up my blog as a photo blog and get it listed in the directories for those.
One last exciting thing. We purchased a 24 inch LCD for the office computer over the weekend. It is mighty. So mighty that it gives me eye strain to work on it currently. I’ve had to dim down its light as much as possible just to handle looking at it for more than 20 minutes. But I opened up Photoshop first thing after installing it. Oh boy, the room. The room… Unfortunately, the machine it is hooked up to is not powerful enough to run the Age of Conan MMOG I just bought, which means I do not have a computer that can run it period. Perhaps a video card upgrade will solve my problem, but that is $100+ I don’t want to spend after dropping so much on the new monitor. Luckily, I didn’t really pay for the Conan game, but traded in a ton of stuff for it at GameStop. All part of slimming down my possessions for the move. The next step in this is holding a garage sale this coming weekend.
House Warming
Filed Under: Web Design
Hello and welcome to the new Jeremiah Tolbert.com. Over the coming months, as I can spare the time, I will be rolling out new features. Currently, the portfolio and photography sections need work, and the newsletter and the freelance pages have zero on them. Everything else should be in working order, at least until I decide to try something entirely new and weird.
Please, look around, and let me know what you like, don’t like, what works, and what looks buggy. I value any and all feedback. If you’re seeing this on LJ, I would appreciate you, just this once, coming over to the site itself and leaving a comment. I need to make sure the comment system is working well. Your comment might go immediately into moderation, but that just helps me figure things out if it does.
Thanks for your patience as I work out the kinks and get things running more smoothly. I think you are going to find that I’m taking my blogging game to a whole new level with this release.
Memories of Africa
Filed Under: Science
Besides my ostrich encounter, there were really only two occasions where I felt that my life was threatened by wildlife in Kenya. There were several occasions of fearing for my life involving other people, but that’s another post.The incident happened in Tsavo. Tsavo is famous for one thing in particular. Man-eating lions. Around the turn of the century, Colonel Patterson was tasked with building a bridge for the British Empire (a bridge that still stands today, and is not remotely impressive). He watched in horror as worker after worker (mostly “coolies” from India) were dragged away, killed, and devoured. Eventually, Patterson killed two lions, but only after unbelievable difficulties. The lions were named The Ghost and The Darkness, and a film about this incident starring Val Kilmer came out in the mid-90s. The lions’ bodies are on display in the Chicago Museum of Natural History. They are male lions, but they have no manes. None of the male lions in Tsavo have them. Upon seeing the area, you would immediately realize why.
Tsavo was green and dense with thorny thicket when we camped there. It was not like the rest of the African savannah. It is almost certain that the male lions of Tsavo do not have manes because if they did, they would never make it ten feet through the underbrush.
The first night we made camp, we could hear lions roaring as the sun set. It was the first time we had heard anything like it, and we were all thrilled. We put our tents, which were made for three people. After an evening around the fire, we all retired to our tents. I slept for a few hours, but woke some time after midnight with a pressing need to ah, relieve myself. There was only one problem.
The roaring continued, but it was much, much closer now. Without opening the tent, it sounded as if a lion was not more than 30 yards away. Another lion was answering this lion from the opposite side of our camp.
I tried to hold it as best I could, but eventually, I absolutely had to go to the bathroom. I roused my tent mates and we opened the ten flap just a bit and pointed our flashlights into the darkness. The eyes of something flashed green at the very edge of the light. The roaring stopped.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to step right outside the tent, and piss to the left. You guy watch those eyes, and if they start coming towards me, say something.” And that’s what I did. It seemed like I was urinating the contents of a small ocean. I kept my eyes on my business and did not look at the lion. If I did, I, well, froze up. Finally, I squeezed out the last drop of fluid and not even pausing to zip my fly, I dove inside the tent.
The eyes never moved. We sealed up the tent and went back to sleep as best we could with massive cats roaring all night. In the morning, the lions were gone.
I can’t remember where the second brush with death happened. It was either Tsavo also, or Amboseli. We were riding in a Land Rover down a muddy road in the park, and the brush was fairly thick on either side of the road. Everything that wasn’t green with life was a dark red from the clay mud. Wildlife was hard to spot. I stood on my seat, holding onto the edges of the hole in the roof, and scanned with binoculars, looking for something interesting. Then, the driver spotted it.
A bull elephant came out of the brush not even twenty feet from us. His skin was streaked red, and his tusks were almost four feet long. He took a hesitant step, then flared his great ears forward. I snapped a shot with my camera. Then, he charged.
Our driver gunned the engine, and we tore off down the road. The elephant stopped in the road behind us and raised his trunk in disdain. For less than a second, I was pretty sure I was going to be thrown from the Rover and trampled to death. Everyone in the vehicle laughed hysterically, and I mean that literally, for half an hour afterward.
When my Dad killed The Family Dog
Filed Under: Top Post
My dad died two years ago. It’s been hard to get over. We had a year from his cancer diagnosis until he passed away, and I never wanted to admit what was happening and I’m only just admitting it now. I didn’t want to see him on his death bed in the end, because I knew that if I didn’t see it, part of me could deny it had ever happened. He was 44 years old. In case you’re wondering, I am 29. My parents were young when I was born, and I’ve always banked on that to avoid those tragedies that we all face some day. Life is strange that way. All of my friends with parents in their 50s and 60s still have theirs, and I’m down one already.
You focus on the happy memories at first, but sometimes, there are less pleasant memories that repeatedly rise up like angry ghosts, demanding to be accounted for. They spring on you in the middle of the night, take grip on your mind, and refuse to let go. Lately, I can’t stop thinking about how my father killed his dog when I was eight.
My parents had recently divorced. To this day, I’m not sure what the circumstances were. As part of attempting to make it up to myself, my sister, and my little brother, our parents each got a puppy. That dog that lived with my mother was Beauty. I cannot remember the name of the dog that lived with my father.
The two were sisters, mutts, smallish dogs, but not punters like poodles or chihuahuas. They were loving, but hard to train. And my father’s dog liked to chew things.
I did not see him kill the dog. I am not sure how I know what happened, but I can picture it like I was there. My father was living in the basement of his oldest sister’s house on the east side of Topeka. During the day, he worked as a meter man. He wore a blue uniform that was often mistaken for a policeman’s uniform with black shoes that he kept well-polished. I think he had a special affection for shoes then, given that he walked miles and miles every day as part of his beat. This was before the scooters meter people use now.
He came home from somewhere, I imagine it was to buy what few groceries he could afford after giving most of his money to my mother to feed us, and his dog, the one whose name I cannot remember, had chewed one of his work shoes to pieces and was starting in on the other. It was then, in a fit of anger, that he threw the remaining shoe at his cowering dog, striking her in the head. She whimpered, fell onto her side, and died.
I know this story. Someone told it to me, but it was not my father. He never spoke of it. I saw tears in my father’s eyes several times over my life– he was not the kind of touchy-feely modern man that some fathers are, but he was not so stoic either. But I can remember asking my father about his dog, and seeing him shake his head and turn away to keep me from seeing his tears.
My mother gave Beauty to my father. Despite all the trouble they had, despite the fact that he had killed his own dog a week before, she gave him the dog. If he were alive, he would probably tell me that the reason was that my mother couldn’t handle the dog, that Beauty was constantly making messes and she gave him the dog in frustration. I’m not so sure about that.
A year later, she was remarried, and we moved in with my father. Beauty became the family dog, and at some point, I forgot the other dog. We gave Beauty away to my mother’s sister when my father remarried and we moved from Topeka to Lawrence. She’s long dead now. She was a good dog. Gentle and forgiving of children.
I wish I could remember the dog’s name. I think that some small part of me should honor her like I honor my father. He wasn’t perfect, but I know he never meant to hurt his dog.
