25 days ago.
Yesterday. I haven't seen an autumn last this long around here in years.
foliage
-
autumn peak in the Ozarks
I can always tell when my regular readers get frustrated that I haven't updated, some of them start doing frenzied dances all over my weblog and every Lexx tag I've ever made. I know! I'm sucking! I need to update! I love you guys! You look so cute dancing all over my stuff like that!
You'd think this whole being allergic to autumn thing would deter me from frolicking out in it, but I installed a scaffold framework under my left eyeball so it couldn't ooze down my face (loaded up on benadryl, I'm still floating) and spent the last three weeks running around all over the place. (I know! It's not a Lexx update! But that's right around the corner!)We took off for miles two weekends in a row, one to Stockton Lake and one to Silver Dollar City, both during what turned out to be a lengthier than usual peak autumn foliage in the Ozarks. We have the potential for spectacular color around here, but so often get cut short by sudden sheering winds and nasty cold rains that the leaves get stripped off before we have the chance to bask in their glory. THIS year, autumn walked in casually, hung its coat and hat on the rack at the door like a gentleman, sauntered to a comfortable seat and quipped with the waitress before ordering a pot of coffee, settling itself in to regale us with made up tales of courage and daring do. We got more than two weeks before most of the leaves even thought about the oh-why-not leap into whirlygig freedom around my parts, and it turned into a slow almost choreographed Disneyish promenade that is still happening on my street. Because the last several autumns have been so disappointing, I had my camera *ready*. There is no "I'll go back and get that tomorrow" in Missouri. And now, true to nature's ways, here come the cold winds and rain, and tomorrow the magic part will be all gone, just in time for the spooky Halloween part.
The hardest part is trying to catch the real magic on camera. Some of the trees around here go through more than one color change that slowly dots through the trees until you see everything from green to yellow to orange to red to bronze and brown all at the same time on one tree, and it's stunning, but it keeps changing so quickly that the next day the variegated colors are done. Another tree might turn a bright yellow, then shade to an slightly oranger yellow, kind of like peaches, and then get a burnt sienna overlay that makes it look delicious when the sun hits just right. And while some of the tamer red maples go red all over and lose their leaves quickly, the wilder indigenous ones will flame up more slowly, with the red creeping through the green and then the edges of the red leaves crisping up like the edges of a berry pie in the oven, until brown laces all the red leaves. When the bright sun comes out, the trees glow, and I've never been able to truly catch that quality on a camera, even an expensive one. The pictures will come out brighter and more colorful, but you have to be *in* the woods under the canopy while the sun comes out to be part of the glow, like the magical Elven wood Lothlorien. In the upper left corner of this first one you can see a little leaf sticking up that is yellow AND red with the slight brown edging that I was talking about.
Persimmon trees remind me of peach pie.
By now, regular readers of my silly survey blog are recognizing my aspie 'train spotting' quirk as a tree obsession that goes into synesthesia overload when all the colors come out. Since I grew up in the desert without a lot of trees, and now I'm surrounded by them because I live in the woods, it's all magical. I LIVE IN MIRKWOOD, guys. Yeah, *spiders*. The Ents around me may not be fully awake, but the whispering never stops.
People living along the coasts might be surprised to know that we get some of your seagulls coming through the heartland. Hundreds of them circled in while we were at Stockton.
No idea what this was about. We get a few fun loving eccentrics hiding out in these hills.
-
killing time in between thunderstorms
Killing a little time before the next crazy thunderstorm hits. The last lightning storm lasted nearly 5 hours. We're under a tornado watch, so I'm watching the weather maps.
This is the kind of pictures I think would make good 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles.
I like how driving through the Ozarks feels like the bones of the earth are showing. Don't drive with a camera in your hand just because I do sometimes.
This is only one set of towers within 5 miles of my house. You'd think I'd get way better broadband, but I don't, despite having the best. We live in a weird pocket, my street is like the Bermuda Triangle.
I'm not terribly fond of driving through junky little towns, but this one feels like there is something special about it. I think it's all the trees hiding the town...
I love the shockingly brilliant red maples standing out before all the others turn orange and yellow. In a few more days half the county will seem like it's bright red.
I feel like I'm on the top of the world at this point because you can see so much horizon all around. That's one thing about living in woods that I miss, I grew up with lots of horizon in a desert.
My street feels magical because of all the trees. When the leaves fall it's like driving through a movie, and when it snows you feel like you're way far away in a magical wood, in a different world.
I love the way the world looks from my yard.
Looking out the window in between thunderstorms.
Kinda having a little trouble trying to keep up with a half dozen eggs every day. Those girls are machines.
Please go to Lexxperience.com for updates. This site is not yet EU cookie compliant and being blocked in some countries outside the U.S.
XANGA IS BACK - a public thank you to the Xanga Team.
Lexxperience.com supports mobile viewing until Xanga gets that going again. (It's back on my Android now when I turn it sideways.)
Lexxperience is also on Facebook
Public sharing page for Lexx fans.
Open discussion in the Lexxperience group on Facebook if you'd like to interact with me and other fans about what I'm writing about Lexx.
SAVE LEXX <-- what's happening with this blog.
I will NEVER ask for or accept donations to keep this site going. Ever.
Laptop screencaps used in not for profit blog episode and character reviews and film study at grandfortuna.xanga.com and lexxperience.blogspot.com Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."
My screencaps are hosted at LexxPix. You are welcome to use my bandwidth to share these pix to other sites.
Join registered hashtags #Lexxperience, #Lexx, and mashtag #MerLexxian for real time twitter feed, photos, and videos.
Public hashtag #pblexxpix goes to a shared album in my photobucket. Anything on twitter, instagram, and photobucket labeled with this hashtag will automatically appear in this album as well. You are welcome to use my bandwidth to share these pix to other sites.
Lexx fans have permission to translate and copy my material to other fan sites and hotlink images from this blog.
Subscribe to GrandFortuna by Email
My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.
My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.
Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.
