I woke up and had breakfast. Then, while flipping through the channels, I came across a Band of Brothers marathon about half-an-hour into it.
At one point, my Dad handed me one of the Patrick F. McManus books that I handed seen yet, Kerplunk! which I began reading during commercial breaks. My Dad warned me it wasn’t as good as other books, and I ended up agreeing with that. Most of the stories seemed haphazard, as if he wrote them but they weren’t long enough so he just added some stuff to them. Although I have to admit, the story with Rancid’s maggot farm was … a tad disturbing.
After lunch, I grabbed my camera and a bag of bang snaps and went for a walk around the family farm. When I was a kid, I loved bang snaps. Somehow I would scrounged up four or five and I would try to think of something cool to do with each one. Probably the best is when – with a plastic bag and a rock – I tried to get one to go off under water. Unfortunately, the impact with the surface of the water set it off. I couldn’t try it again, because that was the last one I had at the time.
A couple years ago, around July 4th, the grocery store had a display of sparklers and other wimpy fireworks, including a box of 200 bang snaps. It had been almost two decades since I had played with bang snaps, so I bought a box. I went home, snapped ten or fifteen in the parking lot, and pretty much grew bored with them. They’ve been in my closet since. Every now and then I’ll remember them, and go out and snap four or five. So I took a bag home to see if they were still good and try to use them up.
The reason I took my camera was I have an idea for the cover of a book I’m working on; basically just a picture of a tree. I probably have a dozen tree photos, but I was looking to get a few more pictures so I have an even larger selection to choose from.
Along the way, I just took some other photos to remind me of home and to work on my photography skills. For example:
I also took some time to watch the “woods fill up with snow.” (If you look really, really, really, close, some of the white pixels are snowflakes.)
Since I was in the woods, I stopped by the hunting shack my brothers build, probably twenty years ago. My brother-in-law recently fixed it up to use this hunting season.
Eventually, I went back home to warm up and finish Band of Brothers as well as Kerplunk! All in all, it was a good day.