The imagination ...

... is a wondrous thing.

From as far back as I can remember, I have imagined what this person or that's voice might actually sound like after only hearing about them or corresponding with them in writing. And what might they look like? Would they be short? Fat? Skinny? Tall? Ugly? Gorgeous? Young? Old? I would say that I've been wrong at least 80% of the time, which is always good for a giggle, but that doesn't deter me in the slightest. In fact, I'm encouraged to go to even more wild extremes.

I'm not talking about grotesque fantasy here. I'm not into that, altho I did find kind of a neat site while cruising the net late last night, and passed the info along to a blogger friend. Don't know if she enjoyed it or not. I've since erased both it and the e-mail to her, along with her subsequent reply, so I can't link it for you. Sorry about that. I didn't realize I was going to go quite in this direction with this morning's post. That'll teach me to hang on to e-mails just a touch longer, won't it?

Anyway, this particular site's author is a young man who is studying art somewhere in the Southeastern US, and included among his first several postings were caricatures that he had made while either sitting in a park observing passersby or in a studio with posed subjects. My mind immediately wandered off from there to personal memories of sketch artists over the years ... at a park, a carnival, etc.


One of the things I have had the most trouble with over the years is trying to remember people's names. I know that there are a lot of people who use word association techniques to try and remember names. That has never worked for me.

However, I distinctly remember, from many years ago, my high school algebra teacher's name. "How could that possibly be?" you might well ask. Well, her name was Allegra Utley. Now, I ask you ... how could you possibly EVER forget a name like that?!?


Before I actually arrived in Houston many years ago, I had this mental picture in my mind of cowboys and Indians, the old 'wild west' -- you know, all sorts of nonsense like that -- alligators (maybe!), scorpions, snakes, guns, and the like.

There are no cowboys here (except during the annual Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo), no Indians (at least, none that advertise themselves as such), alligators? -- yes, there are a bunch in the bayous!, scorpions? -- no, you have to go a lot further west to where the land is much dryer, snakes? -- oh yeah, guns? -- oh yeah, and who knows how many of them are registered.

What DO exist here are a couple of other critters that are rarely mentioned in the tourist guide books. 1) The fire ant ... my Lord, what an awful creature! They don't exist up north in "damn" Yankeeland. Y'all should thank your lucky stars that they don't! 2) The asp ... supposedly, this nasty caterpillar-like-thingee that clings to the underside of leaves, just waiting for some unwitting passerby to nudge the leaf and allow the asp to 'drop' on them, whereupon said passerby would undergo just a horrendous -- and sometimes quite debilitating -- sting. (For YEARS I looked for this nasty caterpillar-like-thingee!! I've never seen one. And, by the way, I never want to see one, much less have it drop on me.)


I am kind of 'ticked' at myself. Where this post ended up is nowhere near where I thought it would be when I started. HowEVer, I'm going to end it now, before it gets even further removed!