I’ve become rather dull lately, I’ll admit. It’s crunch time with school – I’m still working on my Twisted Turtle website for Web Authoring 2, “The Final Project,” in which I am cleaning up all the crap I need to clean up by Friday. Or not. I’m struggling with that Java Script thing that was bugging me last week.
I did a bunch of Uber driving the week of the fourth of July, and I made a fair amount of money for my efforts, which was much needed, but I have to say the rides sort of blended together.
Last week, I didn’t drive as many, and I had a couple of bad ratings, so now I’m on “probation” with Uber because my rating slipped to 4.5 out of 5. I’m guessing one of the bad ratings came from a girl who was annoyed that I wouldn’t drive the wrong way down a one way street to drop her off in front of the club. She was kind of grumpy about some text before that happened, and she didn’t want to wait for me to circle around the block to get her there safely, so she insisted on getting out on 2nd Street instead of 1st. I’m sorry – the several hundred bucks I may make per week are NOT worth totaling my 2011 Honda Odyssey, which would cost about $30,000 to replace. Nor is it worth a reckless driving citation. So the lunatics do NOT get to run the asylum, even if that ultimately means my Uber driving days are numbered.
I’ve also been remiss as a reader. I have not kept up with the friends I’ve made on WordPress in my obsessive need to not only pass these computer programming classes, but maintain a 4.0 GPA this time around, and most importantly, learn this stuff. I am still trying to figure out how to transfer information from the catalog form into the confirmation form. http://home.ite.sfcollege.edu/~kate.flippen/project_5/catalog.html
But, on to bigger and better things, or at least weirder things.
Ever heard the phrase “Keep [City Name] Weird”? Well, a coworker of mine pointed out an article about Portland, one of the cities striving to stay weird. Apparently tossing sneakers over the electric wires isn’t good enough for the folks in Portland. They had to get a little more creative.
It’s a competition with Austin, Texas. I’d say that Austin had better get busy if they want to one-up the Flying Dildo town.
Oh, wait… Not flying. Hanging.
THIS would be a flying dildo:
Is that to say they give a Flying F#ck? Did you know you CAN give a Flying F#ck? You used to be able to order one on Amazon.com, but apparently they no longer sell the product. Censorship at work? Or competition for their delivery drones?
You can no longer purchase a Flying F#ck from Amazon, but you CAN purchase a Flying Shark. Close, but no cigar.
And speaking of cigars, we’re going in a big circle, aren’t we? Because we all recall that a certain president used a cigar as a sex toy with a certain intern, leading to a certain sex scandal in the White House. You know, the White House that our current president has destroyed by enacting a bill to provide the masses with healthcare and using diplomacy in matters of foreign affairs. The horror.
I suppose I don’t really have to post for Weird Wednesday, though – Donald Trump has my back. Or is that backside?
Technology. Good for advancing society, and creating interesting sex toys. I think I’m going to go hide under a rock. You know, as soon as I can get it up the hill…
This time last year, I was spending the last day in New Jersey with the kids. We visited some retro-arcade. The next day began a long and very difficult day of waiting, driving, and hoping the cash we had would cover the cost of gas on the very long drive home. I would have been repeating that today, had I gone up to visit the kids this week.
Video Arcade in Northern New Jersey
It was another difficult chapter of many in the time from 2013 – 2014. On the drive home, I received a call from my neighbor who had driven the kids back to their father’s house: my youngest, after giving him a hard time about going in, leading to a little “rough handling” in a struggle, had run back out of the house, following my neighbor, and had run into the highway, freaking her out. His father remained oblivious, not even realizing my son had gone out again.
I did something that probably only made the entire situation worse – from three states away, I called the local police department to go out and investigate, and the ensuing report came across sounding like I was interfering with child custody. It turned out to be much ado about nothing.
Within a few weeks, Adam and I held a garage sale at his mother’s house. We did okay, but there were still so many clothes that didn’t sell, so we brought them back. I decided to try to sell them to a local consignment shop before donating them.
Adam had a migraine that day. We had stopped by the store, who said to come back a half hour before they closed, to give them time to determine which (if any) items they would take. We still had a pile of clothes in the back of Adam’s Mountaineer.
At some point, Adam told me to just drive his truck, so I could take all of the clothes and drop them in a donation bin. He had fallen asleep by the time I left, and I did take his truck. I had driven it before on several occasions, like the time he was admitted to the hospital and I drove him to and from. But I hadn’t driven it alone very often.
I returned to the store, tired. It was a stressful time. The consignment shop kept me waiting over half an hour, just to find out that no, they weren’t buying ANY of the clothes. Annoyed, I put them all in the trunk, got into the car, and dialed my mother. I was using the Blu Tooth. My mother wasn’t there. I left a message. I looked down for a split second to disconnect the phone, and when I looked up again, I slammed on the brakes, too late, and crashed into the back of a green jeep. In that split second, though a shady mechanic would deny it, I had totaled Adam’s truck, while barely denting the jeep. Adam only had liability…
I hit rock bottom that month. The divorce finally went through – the highlight of my year, but with something to celebrate (finally) came an even more difficult challenge – my landlord decided to evict us on two weeks’ notice because I had allowed Adam to stay in the apartment. Back story: when I was on night shift, Adam stayed there to watch the kids overnight. My landlady had said it was okay, but apparently, it was not. She also included my friend, Rose, in the notice, because Rose was spending a few days there at the time. Both Adam and Rose had other “homes.”
I didn’t fight the eviction. All the fight was out of me. And truthfully, the place didn’t feel like “home” anymore. So, in the first weeks of school, in a weekend, I had to pack and move the contents of our four bedroom apartment to the new house that we rented. The house with imperfections that have still not been fixed, but it’s a place to live, and it’s in the school zone we wanted, and we’re staying here for at least another year…
Adam signed the new lease with me, so there would be no more issues. I had to leave many things behind when I moved, because there simply wasn’t time. I’m still missing my favorite pair of pants, for example. I threw away so many things, and still, when I turned over the key to that apartment, it wasn’t empty or clean. At four in the morning, after moving things in the middle of a storm, I simply couldn’t care anymore.
My credit is completely shot. I never have money left over at the end of the month. We had to replace Adam’s truck with a new vehicle – a Kia Soul – and the payments with the loan shark must be paid weekly, with an exorbitant interest rate. I settled for no “maintenance” and slightly lower child support payments (but they go on longer than they otherwise might have) than the state of Florida formula allowed. Some months, my bank account has dipped into the red with the automatic payments I had. But somehow, we keep going.
And with the divorce came some peace. I have started over. I am learning a new trade. My kids have had to learn to be very independent, and this year, I had no worries when I sent them up to New York. They are still kids, but they are capable of taking care of themselves even if their father works long hours. They are older and wiser, too. And while they call me and text me, and I’m sure they miss me on some level, they are no longer tied to the umbilical cord.
But I do miss them, and I am sorry I was not able to visit them. As my vacation week comes to a close with nothing to show but a little extra money coming in from Uber next week, and a web authoring project that I couldn’t quite accomplish even with about 30-40 hours of effort, I have to remind myself that this, too, shall pass. Climbing a mountain takes thousands of steps, and none of them are easy, and sometimes all you can do is remind yourself to breathe and keep going.
This was supposed to be the week of a big road trip, up to Long Island to pick up my kids and spend a couple of days with them before driving back home. It isn’t going to happen.
Life is a difficult thing sometimes. I have about $15 in my checking account, craptacular credit, and about a quarter of a tank of gas, which will get me to Valdosta, Georgia.
The ex actually graciously offered his JetBlue points to fly me up, but that leaves other financial issues, such as where, exactly, am I going to take the kids, and what will I be driving (For that matter, $15 does not buy many Subway tokens) and what would I feed them.
So this will be the first year out of sixteen that I’ve missed any of the children’s birthdays, as my oldest son will be sixteen by the end of this week. Where DID the time go?
It won’t be the last missed birthday, I know. They are all growing up, and there will come a point when they will, in turn, leave the house as adults, and make their own way in the world. Sigh.
Our children truly are not “ours.” They are their own, and we are just here to assist them in developing into the adults who will, some day, face many of the same struggles we ourselves face. They will have to decide where to work, whether and whom to marry, how many children to have, and they will have to balance all of those decisions against how to pay bills like that horrific Utilities Bill I have coming up later this week. Cue music for the Lion King’s Circle of Life.
I’m not going to lie – sometimes I get a little teary-eyed this week when I think about missing the Fourth of July, Matt’s birthday, and the sort of things we’ve been able to do in the past. I suppose you could say the drawbacks of divorce are the financial ruin and the time-sharing that come from the process. I know that’s the reason some people stay married despite feeling imprisoned.
What was I saying the other day about debtor’s prison?
It’s one day, one week, a few weeks, out of many, and they will be back at the end of the summer. Until they come home, I will be working my ass off with school, the full time job, and part time working with Uber. I am hoping to not only catch up on some bills, but put aside enough to do something fun and exciting with them when they get back.
In the mean time, I have this week off from the full time job. More time to work through Web Authoring, Programming, and Ubering. (Yes, I’m making that a verb. It’s part of my “Invent a word” program.)
American Eagle Float from Main Street Electrical Parade, Walt Disney, Orlando Florida
I’m sure the folks over in England may have a different name for this day, but for us, it symbolizes the time when the colonists (or invaders, to the people who were here before them) decided that they no longer wished to be ruled by a king across the ocean, and so they staged a rebellion to set up a republic (which didn’t include the people who were here before them, or the slaves that the colonists imported from another continent entirely) with a whole bunch of really cool principals and ideals that have evolved over time into something that still bears a semblance to the republic they created.
That’s the more or less politically correct version, and while there is room for improvement, it was founded on ideals that were, perhaps, better than the reality it actually created.
I’m sure I’m sounding like a whiny liberal right about now, and I’m about to sound even whinier and more annoying. There, you’ve been warned. But please know, I DO love my country, warts and all.
Today, I’ve witnessed a stream of Facebook posts about celebration, thanking God, and thanking the servicemen and women for our freedom. And while these are good things, I want to take a moment and reflect on something that may piss a few people off. Namely, I find myself a little annoyed by those sentiments.
Why? Because the veterans and the servicemen and women do a great service to our country in protecting our boarders, and I am grateful, but I feel they have other days to celebrate, and this holiday should be about more than “Hey, we won a war, and we keep winning wars, and that’s why we’re so great, and YAY GOD!”
America is about more than the continuous fight for freedom. Why does freedom seem to have so many enemies, exactly? Oh, because sometimes we try to push it on others. Or other people don’t like us being free. Or whatever, I really can’t figure that out. The truth is, we’ve become an Empire, though we don’t call ourselves such, and we have a tendency to see ourselves as the Democracy Police at times, and we spend so much time battling that we forget exactly what we are trying to protect.
And in the midst of all this battling, we’ve lost some of those things. Hopefully, we’ve gained others, but here is a list of the things we’ve lost in the past decades:
Upward Mobility. There was a time when anyone in this country could, with hard work and an education, rise in the social order of things and amass wealth or status. At least that was true for the people who were actually included in the Constitution. (White men. Native Americans were their own thing, and women and slaves were just property of white men.) While the Constitution is now more all-inclusive, the economics of this nation have shifted and continue to shift in ways that lock people into whatever class into which they were born. Don’t believe me?
Let’s start with obtaining that education. Have you paid college tuition lately? Just tuition, we’re not even going down the “books and other essentials”road just yet.
CNN Money made the following chart a few years ago:
Of course tuition is not the entire picture. Books? My PAPERBACK books (which frequently come from the same publisher: Pearson) run as much or more than the hardcover, beautifully bound books I purchased in law school in 1996. Yes, time has gone by, but when did someone decide that a paperback book should cost over $100? A paperback book that will be obsolete in another two years, no less.
So what is a kid to do if their parents didn’t make enough money to set aside to prepay their tuition, room and board, and books? Work? HA. Good luck. Let’s assume that you’re luckier than most kids, and you land a $10/hour job rather than the standard $7.50/hour minimum wage job. You would have to work 10 hours (we’re not even getting into the taxes and social security and other costs pulled out of your paycheck!) JUST to pay for ONE text book (before tax, of course.) Some of your classes might require 2-3 textbooks. After a trip through the bookstore for several semesters, (Again, Community College) I can promise you that you aren’t likely to spend less than $100/class. Times at least four classes for “full time” (most kids take five) and you’ve just spent more than a week of full time wages on text books. Now, how much was your tuition again?
Of course, this is only a problem if you were born into the middle class ranks or lower. The top earners can not only pay their kids’ book fees and tuition without blinking, they can send them to prestigious schools that all but guarantee they will come out with the skills and connections to land a six figure job.
Loans? You will probably be paying that debt for the rest of your life. Good thing there are no debtor’s prisons in America. Oh, wait:
There are countless stories of people arrested for not being able to pay up. We’re not even touching on income taxes, either.
Upward mobility is a dying thing.
Privacy, and the freedom from searches and seizures. Remember that whole rule about the government needing probable cause to search your home or take away your possessions? I remember. Welcome to Post-9/11, and the Patriot Act. Nothing is personal anymore. We’re not just talking about the stuff you write on Facebook and over-share with your friends and coworkers, either. Your email, your telephone conversations, that time you picked your nose in what you thought was the privacy of your Dodge Caravan with the tinted windows? Yeah, someone was reading, someone was listening, and someone caught that on camera.
Trust me on this – I work in a police station, and the regional utilities company of our fair city graciously donated a beautiful monster of a computer that hooks up to a bunch of intersections around the city. At this point, we have certain key intersections set on auto-record, in case something criminal happens in which we may need to narrow down suspects. So if some poor dude gets mugged on the corner of X Street and Y Avenue, we may have caught it on camera, and we may be able to determine the car the suspects used to get away, and issue a BOLO.
Because we have ours set on record, we can’t see as well. I never touch the things, let alone zoom in on them, but if I wanted to? Yeah, I could. I could zoom in well enough not only to read a license plate, I could get a visual on the driver sitting at that traffic light. Now, if I were using it to look down the shirts of pedestrians, I’d no doubt be fired – once someone figured it out. (Again, not something I would do.) But – in another center with access to the same cameras, they had to lecture people because they were doing improper things.
Yes, we are definitely missing some of the freedoms that once existed. That said, we have a system in place that, if we but USE IT, has checks and balances that can correct not only the more recent problems, but the older problems that have existed since the Colonists first dumped tea in Boston Harbor.
They weren’t all soldiers.
I think that’s why the Facebook postings are getting to me. What makes our country great isn’t our ability to protect behind the barrel of a gun, or nuke the hell out of anyone who challenges us. What makes us great are the farmers who toil the land and produce the food on your table. It’s the teachers who often donate their time, talent and money to make sure that struggling student finally gets it. It’s the bus drivers who get you to and from work because you could no longer afford the “privilege” of having a driver’s license, let alone a car. It’s the kid who rings up your groceries at 3:00 a.m. because you realized after working your second job that you have nothing left to eat in your house. It’s EVERYONE who has ever stood up for a belief that all human beings are worthy of respect, that each of us has “Unalienable Rights.” Yes, it is even that gun-toting lunatic across the street with whom you disagree.
Each and every one of us has the ability to make this country, this world, a fairer and better place each and every day, with the little decisions we make. And while an Almighty Being may or may not be watching over us, He/She has been kind of quiet about it, not interfering too much, unless you think that being cares more about helping you find the perfect blue dress at JC Penney than about freeing a child who was abused for years from the horrible people who tortured him.
Side note: my brother is in prison for longer than both of these people combined, because he zip-tied his mother-in-law and took his own two children in a sailboat to Cuba. With his wife. The mother-in-law was understandably upset, but physically not injured, and the two little boys came back perfectly healthy and treating the incident like a vacation with Mom and Dad. That plea bargain deal was made after independent psychiatrists determined that my brother suffers from schizophrenia, which was the only motivation behind his bizarre behavior leading up to the incident. Yay God?
My point, though, lest I go off on a tangent, is this: This nation of ours is as good as we make it. That is not something we can go to war to achieve. It is something that comes of every day acts of citizens. So no, I’m not thanking the military today, at least not any more than I’m thanking each and every person in America (including the “non-Citizen” Native Americans who have contributed to our society, and the poor people who were treated as less-than-human in the more disgraceful part of our history) for all that they do to promote our Republic.
Honestly, I’m hoping that someday, we can be an actual Democracy rather than a Representative Republic.
Language and Content Advisory: MATURE MATERIAL. Not for the under – 18 crowd.
“God I’ve missed you,” he said, caressing her left cheek. “I know it’s only been a few weeks, but it feels like forever.”
“What if your wife finds out?” Susie asked.
“She finds out. I’m tired of living a lie.”
“She’s the mother of your children. She’s your wife. I’m just your — I don’t even know what. I’m not really your mistress, because you don’t keep me. I’m that woman that you go to for sex because your wife either doesn’t put out or doesn’t do it very well.”
“You’re so much more than that. I think I may be in love with you.”
“That’s just silly. We’re both married, to other people. You to a woman who is cold-blooded, and me to a man who is frequently away on business.”
“You’ve never really talked about your husband much. Do you love him?”
“Yes. That’s not the issue, don’t change the subject.”
“How is that not the issue? I’m declaring my love for you, and you bring him up. If you love him, why are you fucking me?”
Susie looked down, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. Of course she couldn’t say the truth, the words that popped into her head: Because he asked me to fuck you.
Jake was a strange man. They had been married for three years, and she still knew so little about him. He seemed to make a lot of money that had something to do with international trade, but his work was always done away from home. For all she knew, he could be the head of a drug cartel.
Of course she was stupid not to ask. But it was rather like that story about the woman who was married to Bluebeard: the wife who went snooping could end up losing her head.
So, for the time being, she did what she was asked, and she took that ever-so-generous allowance, and she saved half of it each month and put it into that secret account. Jake didn’t know the difference – she bought enough stuff that he thought she spent every penny. He found it charming, or at least pretended to.
Most of the time, Jake left her alone to do her own thing. But every now and then, he would ask her to do something for him. Sometimes it was something little, like organize a party, or chit chat with someone’s wife.
Meeting up with Rodger/Rob had been one of her more intriguing assignments. He had been very clear on what she was to do, though he had never explained why.
Go to the Dunkin Donuts on Juniper Street around 5:30 every afternoon until the guy in the photograph showed up. When he did, she was to bump into him and make it look like an accident. Talk to him, get to know him, and if he made any advances, she was to be nice to him.
She’d asked, “Just how nice?”
The answer had surprised her.
Rodger didn’t know that Jake knew. Susie told Jake every detail. Every detail. For some reason, rather than upsetting Jake, it almost seemed to turn him on.
“I like it, that’s why,” Susie answered at last, looking up again. “Because I’m not a good person. Because I find you attractive. Because it feels good, on some primal level.”
“So you’re telling me it’s just physical, that you have absolutely no feelings for me?”
“I’m telling you exactly that.”
“You’re not a very good liar,” he said, smiling.
Jake turned the photograph over in his hand. Soon, he thought. He had waited years for revenge.
Spider Man. It had always been his favorite comic book hero. He laughed at how the name applied to him. Jake the spider-man. The web-spinner. Spinning threads around people in circles, threads that they didn’t see.
He turned the photo back up. He had loved her once. Love was a sign of weakness. The photo reminded him – for all he spun webs, someone could still come along and step on him. No. He had to bring them in for the kill, and soon.
So much for posting every day, but I suppose that while missing the mark on that lofty goal, I am still posting at least once or twice a week, which is an improvement over previous years of blogging. I have plenty of excuses, or reasons, or whatever you’d like to call them, for my cut-back on posting.
I am enrolled in two classes this summer, which will end in a few more weeks. Taking 6 credit hours while working full time has proven to be somewhat more challenging than anticipated. I’ve been taking Computer Programming and Web Authoring 2 this time around. The class period is slightly shorter than a regular semester. While the classes are both online (no real class time!) that doesn’t make them easier. I have to figure out how to do this stuff by reading, watching some videos, and from time to time e-mailing professors with questions and hoping to hear back in time to fix whatever I’m doing wrong!
Computer Programming, how I love to hate you! I have now completed five out of six projects for that class, and pretty much every one of the projects has the same over-riding theme: Plan to start the assignment early, knowing that computer coding can be frustrating and I will need to give it time. Start reading the chapter from the book, but get sidetracked with other stuff, so that I’m finishing the reading and watching of videos about 2-3 days before the assignment is due, and wondering how the hell I’m going to get it all done by Wednesday night, knowing I will have to work Tuesday day shift and Wednesday evening shift.
Read, fall asleep because it’s kind of dry reading, try to work through some of the Q & A in the book, watch the videos, download what they’ve worked on in the physical class and see if I can make sense of it, then PANIC when I sit down to write the code on Monday morning for the assignment due Wednesday night. OR – worse still, like this week, work on the coding during down time at work by using Notepad ++ and hoping that what I am writing makes sense when I take it home and load it into the Microsoft Visual program and start building. Eek. 35 errors? HELP! No. I don’t want to email the professor and admit that I didn’t start the project I’ve known about for TWO WEEKS until two days before it is due. I WILL figure this thing out!
I was up until 3 am on Monday night/Tuesday morning, and when I went to bed, I only had a few errors left, but I still had SO far to go.
Let me explain the program I had to write in C++. For “real” programmers, it’s child’s play. Create a program that pulls five scores from a .txt file, drops the lowest of the five grades, and averages the other three. Include comments along the way, make sure the output not only works, but that it tells the user what to do.
The catch: This week’s assignment had us breaking down the program into several functions. How this works, for those of you who don’t know anything about programming:
Consider writing a training manual in which you know a great deal of the information will constantly evolve. You don’t want to rewrite the manual every month to reflect major changes, so you come up with the idea of writing a very basic manual, then adding in Appendixes to include at the end, which will be called upon by the training manual. This allows you to update just one section when something changes. Like the list of Emergency contacts that changes every two months. Refer the worker to “Appendix A: Emergency Contact List” and then you only have to update that appendix. Good, right?
So, modular programming using functions does just that. You write a fairly simple program that refers your user to various functions to complete the action. So that when the class changes to include more assignments, rather than rewriting the main program, you rewrite the “calcAverage” function to take however many assignments there are, drop the lowest grade and average the rest. (Yes, that was part of the program.)
It wasn’t the most clever program, but I had to design a program with a main function, a function for extracting the file, a function for averaging the numbers included in the file, and within the calcAverage function, a function that analyzed the numbers and returned the lowest score to be eliminated.
That all sounds relatively simple, and for someone who does this on a regular basis, it no doubt is pretty simple. But not for a newbie who has to break down each step and learn a whole new process and way of thinking.
Adam has had to learn that when I go into the other room to work on programming it’s because he really doesn’t need to have to deal with me and my frustration and anxiety. We each have our own set of his-and-hers anxiety issues, and they don’t always play well together. I wasn’t very nice Tuesday night.
Wednesday when I woke up around 10:00, I took a nice calming hot bath before starting up again with the programming. Because sometimes you really need to step away from this stuff to get into a more patient frame of mind.
And I did it. It took a little over an hour with the fresher mindset. I wound up rewriting the whole entire thing in a little over an hour, making sure that each thing I built in worked before I added in more. I even deliberately designed the last function as a void function just to get it working before changing it to an integer function after watching the tutorial for the umpteenth time to figure out what the hell I was doing.
I had the whole thing turned in long before I had to head off to work, and I spent some time just “popping bubbles.” Not really – I was switching crops and candy. I play Farm Heroes Saga and Candy Crush Saga to unwind.
The rest of my day was mindless. I worked – I even worked on reviewing/editing the training manual (guess what I suggested to my supervisor? Yup. Appendixes.) for a while, but I did absolutely no school work.
Then I went out after work and after eating a late night supper, and did some Uber driving. I hit the 20 ride mark last night, earning the bonuses. Woo hoo!
My Web Authoring project is due Sunday night. Have I started it yet? Hell no. I never learn. And I’m going out to drive again for a while tonight to see if I can make even more money, because funds are still tight. I hate being broke.
A couple of interesting, unrelated things to add:
1. I keep seeing a deer running across 8th Avenue by my house late at night. I believe someone is feeding it. This isn’t a super woodsy area, but there are parks nearby. My friend Rose saw it the second time – it ran across the street, and when I said, “Oh look, the deer!” It STOPPED and looked at us. It stood there as we walked up the sidewalk across the street from where it stood, watching us. It remained while I tried to take a photo, which didn’t work because it was too dark.
When I finally said, “I give up, it’s too dark,” the thing made a huffing sound, turned around, and ran away.
Not a very good photo of the deer. You’ll have to trust me – it was there!
2. My sister has started a fun photo challenge, and I’ll post as I’m able – Disney Day Thursday. Missing the theme parks, she started a challenge to incorporate a theme each week to be incorporated into what you are wearing, your hairstyle, or make up, or whatever. The theme will be based on a ride, attraction, movie, character, etc. from Disney. This week was the Haunted Mansion:
Inspiration: Madame Leota, Haunted Mansion (not my photo)My attempt at the Haunted Mansion Challenge
I took the photo in “Film Grain” mode to make it creepier.
Funny story: the first time we visited the Magic Kingdom was when I was about four or five years old. I don’t remember being particularly afraid at the Haunted Mansion until the very end, when we passed under the figure on the right, who was calling “Hurry Back” and some other stuff I couldn’t understand at the time. I thought she was calling “Mary Beth,” which was my older sister’s name. That got me more than anything else on that ride. How did the ghost woman know my sister’s name? Maybe it was real.
Edited to add: I scored a 100 on that last project. [[SMILES]]
K.E. Wilkinson 