If you haven’t been able to tell, I’m in a bad mood. When my hard drive failed, I lost the bulk of my photos taken over the past years. I’ve also lost some data files for other projects I’m working on, so I’m generally in a dark funk. I have a brand new hard drive (the bad one was still under warranty) and a brand new attitude, so I’ll get over it, and I’ll get back to regular posting here at Roundrock Journal. Don’t feel too sorry for me. It was my stupid mistake not to make backups more frequently.

In a way, this crisis has been liberating. I feel lighter in some sense. Like I have a fresh start with less of the baggage of the past weighing me down. Whatever.

So let’s see, what’s going on in my world? The next edition of The Festival of the Trees will be hosted by Jade Blackwater of Arboreality. Her deadline for submissions was yesterday, but if you have some particularly juicy contribution that just can’t wait until the next edition, you may be able to persuade her to slip it in. You can reach her at jadeblackwater (at) brainripples (dot) com. You can read more about it all here.

This is Jade’s third round hosting the Festival, and she’s happy for the chance. You could be happy too. We’re always on the prowl for new hosts, and I know you’d be perfect for the job next time.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that I sometimes put in links to other, similar blogs that are not well known or otherwise overlooked. Then there’s this guy!

Or this guy! Sheesh!

One of the “advantages” of losing so much of my photo library is that I now no longer have those hundreds and hundreds of bad pix of deer parts from the two game cameras. Granted, they are not top-of-the-line cameras, and granted I am still learning how to place them, but without that old inventory, I am now much more encouraged to set them out again and see what other portions of deer (and invisible critters) I can capture. I think on my next trip to Roundrock I’ll put some fresh batteries in the cameras and try setting them out. Lucky you!

One year ago today I was chattering about a red flower I’d found in the wet area below the dam.

Two years ago today I was babbling about two years and four days ago.

Three years ago today mumbling about a roundish rock.

What’s Pablo reading now? I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned here that I was part of a two-year voyage of discussion of the novel Moby Dick. One Wednesday night each month we would discuss a half dozen or so chapters of that epic novel, and in two years to the month, we finished the thing. I understand how some people can devote their entire lives and careers to studying that work. It really is the greatest novel in the English language, as many have asserted. Anyway, it’s made me want to read other works much more carefully, and to help me do that, I’m now reading a nonfiction book called Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. The author takes passages from many great works of fiction and parses them almost word by word to show how the writer developed the passage and why it works so well. I’m only a couple of chapters into it, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

Missouri calendar:

• Snakes begin winter dormancy.
• Bittersweet starts to ripen.

Today in Missouri history:

• On this date in 1953, six-year-old Bobby Greenlease was taken from his Kansas City school by a woman claiming to be his aunt, who told the nuns there that the boy’s mother had just had a heart attack. The woman and her boyfriend accomplice kidnapped the boy and held him for ransom in St. Joseph. Though the $600,000 ransom was paid, the boy was murdered. The kidnappers were later caught. It would be nearly thirty years before half of the ransom money was accounted for, it having been stolen by a cab company president who escaped justice.

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