While driving down Ocean Parkway one day, I caught a glimpse of something off the side of the road.  I was going by too fast to see what it was and I kept passing it on a weekly basis, but never remembered to slow down to get a better look.

One morning, I decided to wake up before dawn to take pictures of the sunrise.  I figured I would finally find out what this mystery object was on the side of the road, and get some good shots of the sunrise over the ocean.

Over the dune, I found an odd collection of broken fishing gear, plastic bottles, buckets, sneakers, clothes, and driftwood.  But I found something that surprised me even more - a heavy wooden cross with a man’s name on it.

Who was this man?  Were these discarded objects a shrine to his memory?  Is he really buried under the sand, or was he lost at sea?  And am I morbid for being fascinated by this and taking pictures of his final resting place?

What I do know is this – that the placement of his cross is no accident.  It is turned so that it faces each new day as the sun dawns.  Whoever put that cross there loved him enough to give him an eternity of sunrises.

Share on Facebook

I’ve made quite a few changes to the site over the past couple of weeks:

•  It was time to renew my webhosting account with NoMonthlyFees and I considered whether I really wanted to stay with them.  They have no phone support and their online support was cheesy and largely unreliable, FTP’ing files resulted in constant disconnects and I thought I could do better than the package I had.  Turns out, I was right.  I switched to AN Hosting/MidPhase and I’ve been quite happy so far.  I’m getting much more for my money.  I even got 3 months for free (email me if you want the same deal!)
• To prepare for the impending transfer to a new host, I upgraded my WordPress blogging software.  I backed everything up and everything went swimmingly.
• Then I tried to upgrade my Coppermine photo gallery.  That didn’t go so well.  Turns out, the newest version of the software requires changes to the webserver it’s hosted on and NoMonthlyFees was not having that.  So I researched other popular photo gallery programs like Gallery but I wasn’t all that impressed.  I finally found what I wanted in a WordPress plugin from Thomas Boley.  You can see the result by clicking the “Photo Gallery” link in the top right hand corner (among the other new links up there)
• I was able to transfer all my old posts and your comments to the new webhost, but not the old style – colors, boxes, fonts.  So I decided it was time for a change, and went looking for a new theme to download.  I found this one, which I was very impressed with and hardly changed anything, from Patricia Müller at Vanilla Mist.com
• I’ve also added another plugin for posting comments.  When you go to the comment link (And you will, right?  Please?) you will find a little box with letters and numbers in it.  It’s now required to type in what’s in that box in order to submit a comment.  Why?  Because believe it or not, evil spammers have found this site and love to post comments about all sorts of nasty things.  This helps prevent a lot of that from happening.  And if you want to hear the letters and numbers instead of reading them, click the little speaker icon and the NORAD computer will read it to you.

I’ll be spending some time getting all my pictures organized, posted, and the descriptions typed in.  Let me know what you think about the new look and all, even if it’s bad. 

Trish

Share on Facebook