curiosity without the cat

yesterday was a productive day for us here are arrt pirates. we went out and took pictures at lakeview cemetery then we went and spent waaaaay too much on books at the barnes & noble in the village. on the up side of spending too much there, i now have a calendar for next year and, for once, it's not after the first of the year! plus its a really good waterhouse one. <3 waterhouse.

as for the cemetery, well, that was fun! we plan on going back sometime to get pictures earlier in the day and at different times of year. the cemetery was much bigger than i thought it would be, but it was worth the 2 hours of wandering about - we still didn't really see it all after that much time. most of the other people there were going to see the lee's graves (bruce and brandon that is) and so we kinda had the run of the place without worrying that someone would randomly walk into a shot.

in one part of the cemetery, there was an older man tossing out food for a murder of crows. we were wondering why some guy was standing there tossing stuff at the crows when we crested a hill and first saw him and heard the birds. and, as we got closer, we could tell he was feeding them. we tried to get them to cooperate with us, but they wouldn't. they knew we were trying to get cool shots of them on the gravestones, so they kept watching us and then being like "nope, sorry, you lose" and flying off. as we reached the old man feeding them, he was picking up bits off of the pavement. he stood up and gave us a kinda look, not really pained or anything, but kinda neutrally long-suffering (can anyone really look that way?) and said basically "someone's gotta feed the crows." i can't remember now if that was exactly it, but, in essence, that's what he said. as we walked off, we debated why he was doing it. was he a caretaker? was he just some guy who likes to feed birds in cemeteries? does he just like crows a whole lot? was he paid to come in and feed them regularly? in the end, we decided that, whatever the real reason is, it would be totally awesome if he were feeding them simply to keep the proper ambiance in the cemetery. after all, a cemetery isn't complete without at least a few crows hopping about.

i think she put it best yesterday when staysea said that it would be interesting to see how different we see the place even though we're there at the same time taking pictures of the same things. in the end, i have 5 rolls of film plus a 6th in my camera from the trip. i'm not sure how much staysea has, but she has a few as well. soon as we have them all developed, we'll throw up each of our own impressions of the cemetery.