Goddamn I’m in a fucking
Goddamn I'm in a fucking shitty mood this morning. I think it has to do with my complete and utter dissatisfaction with my work environment. The only redeeming factor is that I make a decent wage, but this is becoming, if not already, the most shining singular example in my life of where happiness cannot be bought. I am not going to let this post dwindle into yet another tired rant about my management incompetence straight up the chain to the CIO or how culling the copious fat in my organization might be the best step toward moral redemption here... instead, I'm just going to state that I'm very unhappy and leave it at that. Done. So, after Lisa's comment about Texas and wide open spaces yesterday, I was thinking about the vast expanse of this state and how underappreciated it is by it's residents. I mean, we have coastal beaches and arid deserts. We have rocky hill country and humid forest. We have panhandle plateau that sees snow in the winter and border valleys that live in three digit temperatures in the summer. We have rivers and waterfalls... wildlife and protected parks. What a neat trip it would be to actually explore the state! I mean rally dig in and discover. I think I'd like to do that with anywhere I live... not take for granted... that's the key. So anyhoo, I digressed from what I started to say... when on top of Enchanted Rock, I took a few photos to stitch. It's a shitty job because I was doing more from documentation that art, but you get the gist of it. Since it's being served from a slow Net connection, be ready to go to lunch, have some coffee, take a nap, read a little book, and wait before you click on the link, but here you go Lisa: not "urban sprawl" (quick snapshots, unedited, stitched, sensor dust and all... cropped a lot to clip edge distortion... 21964x1762 or about 21.2MB).
Thinking about this stuff reminds me of when I was a boy, between first and fourth grade, before my grandmother’s personality deteriorated away due to repeated strokes. She had subscriptions to TEXAS HIGHWAYS and ARIZONA HIGHWAYS magazines. Amazing photographs. I used to look through her stacks of back issues for hours.
The drive from our home in Miles and Brownwood (West Texas) to Corpus Christi was, even to a child’s eyes, very picturesque. I hated long drives, due to accute motion sickness, but I remember the sights fondly. I had a mini vision-quest back there not too long ago and it made me want to do it again where I wasn’t on someone else’s time table and I could explore my childhood further.
My friends that migrated from the East Coast to SoCal all think of the long stretch of I-10 through Texas as the hellish part of the journey but I’ve made the drive back and forth from LA to Austin some half dozen times now, always straight through, and I love the portion through Texas. It’s half the distance traveled but there is so much undeveloped, unspoiled landscape to see that it doesn’t bother me at all.
The Enchanted Rock Panoramic pic is awesome!
Lovely!
I took a nearly identical panorama when I went to Enchanted Rock. Hopefully you didn’t go in July… it gets damned hot up there.
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