Greetings, my scrumptious dumplings! Ol’ Marko here, providing a small, Friday-flavored sanctuary from the Great Orange Cesspool of reactionary judgementalism. Oh yes, I've been browsing the Hidden Comments list again. So many first time commenters, first time diarists, drowned in the cesspool. So many cries for help. So many lost and lonely trolls. The humanity! The spambots! No, darlings, please stop. Don't reveal your Moderate Republicanism in the cruel comments section of some rec list diary. Struggling with the vile propaganda of a childhood in republican America? Kossacks will chew you up even as you attempt to distance yourself from your own self-acknowledged stupidity by placing it in quotation marks. Take it slow. All are welcome here. Don't be just another rock crusher. Try out your sales pitch for your towing service before you hit publish on that diary that will just get you autobanned.
Autobahn? No, we didn't drive down to Carinthia via Munich, but you just reminded me that I have a couple leftover photos to share from our trip last week.
We were staying in an apartment in a house on a gorgeous mountain lake. I can’t imagine the mind that decided that a boat would be more useful as a planter filled with dirt and wood chips, terracotta cats, fish, birds, snails, rusty silhouettes of geese, flowers and witches in flight and throw in a fairly realistic, plastic swan buried up to its neck ...
I can't imagine the mind, but I have met the person. I'm tempted to say that I could only encounter something like this in Austria, but I grew up in Wisconsin.
I could walk a few blocks from where I’m sitting and show you a yard with a life-sized fiberglass Santa statue painted to look like a garden gnome.
Have I shown you my Harlem Globetrotters bobble-head?
And speaking of heads— Walking up or down the stairs to our Austrian apartment put me at eye-level with this beauty:
I did want to share a couple sketches that I did on my walk along the lakeshore last week. When the lake was calm the surface was like a mirror; the reflections were so perfect.
My brushes were pretty crude and the paper unforgiving, so I switched to a dip pen and did a little ink line sketch. I stopped when the wind picked up and the amazing reflections were lost in the rippling waves.
And one evening, being a bit anti-social, I did a little drawing of a dragon in my sketchbook:
Thanks for stopping by.
This is an open thread.