I spent Memorial Day weekend in a place where my phone didn’t work, on purpose. I got a tan, or a “sunburn”. I pulled six ticks from body parts ranging in offensiveness. No one else got any ticks because I was apparently very mean to someone recently, or something.

Anyway, It was my Brother in Law and Sister’s farm down in Virginia. Having grown up in the suburb of a city, I really have a warped perspective of what a ‘small town’ is. I didn’t really notice that until I went to their farm for the first time. It also makes some sense of why it’s so difficult for the various political sensibilities in our country to understand each other. But I don’t really know anything about all that. At some point I will contradict that last statement–I am probably bullshitting you.

The TL;DR version of this post is that I’ve spent the last week creating this birdseye panorama of the Farm. If you’re interested in how it came into existence, I’ll get into that.

54 images.

Except for the givens–shooting rusty things with guns, smoking, sitting on the porch, riding the four wheeler–The the Farm is always sort of a different kind of excitement. Last time we blew up a propane tank.

Natural selection is really just a roll of the dice some times, as is the likelihood that I’ve referenced a scientific theory correctly.

Sitting on the porch based activities. That’s Jef & Rivka, Felipe took the photo.

Anyway, this time at the Farm, my Brother in Law pulled out one of those big kites you see at the beach. After flying it for a while–by which, of course, I mean sitting on the parked four wheeler it was tied to–I realized that once the kite was in the air, there was some pretty serious force. Like… maybe enough to lift a baby…

This photo commemorates that we reeled the kite all the way in, instead of just cutting the line and sitting on the porch some more. That’s Sean holding the kite.

But not a baby, because of the legal ramifications. And I really like all the babies I know. Anyway, a GoPro Camera is way lighter than a baby so we sent that up instead.

Jef, who makes music–but not enough–sampled the wicked sound the string made when the wind really caught the kite.

When we got the camera back down we found that it whipped around pretty violently up there. The footage was pretty much worthless, so far as video is concerned; except for the self-indulgent abstract  project I’ll probably fuss around with. What we did end up with though were 54 frames which, together, I was able to stitch into a birdseye panorama you saw above. I’m pretty proud of it, and it took forever. You can see all the images I used at the bottom of the post, in case for some reason that is interesting to you.

Also possibly interesting to you is the progression the image went through before it landed at the final stage seen above. It’s an animated gif.

So, that was the farm.

A Word About the Blog

On April 23rd, I said this:

So, I’m going to try and write about what I want to write about, but I’ll try and keep it entertaining. Twice a week.

Ah, I was so young back then. Life is super busy and twice a week isn’t realistic. I’m going to aim for once a week from now on–or whenever I have something worth sharing.

See you guys next week. No I won’t, this is a blog.