Octavia The Spy

We all have habits that I'm sure would seem strange to other people if we shared them. Which is usually why we don't tell people about our habits of, say, harvesting and assimilating facts about the people around us. It's not that we do it for any malicious purpose--maybe it was once a survival trait and is now a harmless subconscious reflex. Maybe it pays off when it's time to get a neighbor a birthday present and our husbands are totally clueless but because we have a logbook for everyone we encounter we know they mentioned a renewed interest in fishing last summer and that new tackle box will make us the VIP guests of the Cake Master of Ceremonies. Maybe your habit of cultivating underwear yeast to make a beer out of is weirder! Okay, that was just defensive. Sorry.


Anyhow, because I've got blog ADD and have been REMEMBERING to take a photo a day (usually), I'm over posting it everyday for the time being, lol. Once it gets to a certain point I'll probably start photo-bombing in order to catch up, but that's not for a while at least. In the meantime, I've decided to share another facet of weird with you in a new segment Octavia The Spy, where I share seemingly pointless observations and data harvesting about the people I encounter/see/stalk.


This woman lives behind my house and two houses to the right. She keeps her dogs caged in a kennel in the backyard, and when she goes out to feed them, she says very mean things to them in a very loud manner.

Yesterday I hung out in Lesley's (across the street and to the left one house) driveway with her and this kid came up and would not stop talking about selling his bikes to us. Once he'd reach the end of his speech loop, he'd start back over at the beginning. I suspected he was mentally handicapped in some way, but that didn't stop me from beginning to laugh hysterically at the awkwardness of two adults being held, pinioned, by this child's nonstop spiel about bikes. I laughed at a retarded kid. I'm not proud. Then again, he may just be stunted by terrible parents. Lesley said he shows up every once in a blue moon and talks forever like that about random stuff. This is that kid;

There is a group of teenagers that I need to sneak a picture of and tell you guys about. Watching them walk past my house, I've gathered up some good, angsty intrigue about them. This doesn't qualify as gossip, does it?

Daily picture/ Day in drawings project

I haven't drawn anything in about a thousand years. I used to draw at least one serious picture a week, and was doodling any other time, but I haven't in literally forever. I moved on to other mediums and never looked back.

This is relevant because I've recently decided to jump on the "picture a day for a year" bandwagon that most photographers I know are riding at the moment. I'm not sure if the idea was posed in some popular publication that everyone but me reads or if it was some sort of spontaneous social movement, but after taking the first day's picture, I realized that I have very little pictures of myself in comparison to the mountains I have of everyone and thing else. What is the point of photography if not for some small immortality? I too would like to leave evidence of my existence behind. So I'm doing this project with my camera phone.. I'm going to try to pair each day's photo with a little page of drawings of the day's happenings, but I'm lazy and am likely to miss a few days.

07 FEB (did not have a drawing because I didn't think of it until 08 FEB)

 

08 FEB