Cleaning house

 

As we come up to our final move to our charming, slightly messed up wee apartment in the big city, I have preversely decided it is the time to organize my photographs.

Every once in awhile I decide it is time to organize my photographs on my computer. It is a big job.

It is too big a job.

Here is the size of the job:

In the backyard of my parents' house in California there was a dirt hill that led down to a chainlink fence and then further down to the backyard of the neighbors below us. At ten years old or so, my friend Todd and I decided to dig, with little hand trowels, into the side of the hill to make an underground fort. We would have tunnels in there, different rooms to explore, maybe even a pool in one quiet, cool, cavernous underground chamber.

After a few weeks we had blisters and a kind of indentation in the hill.

This is the size of the job.

Still, it's interesting. I have about 100 files on my desktop full of various collections of pictures, some sort of specific, but many called something like "July" to denote all the pictures I worked on during some July. I don't know which July, one of them. They come around every 12 months or so. I actually have a similar folder to that now that I call "France Working", but I've been working a lot, so I had to make a new file called "France Working 2". They're both crammed with pictures, some finished, some not, some never to be.

I went through my first file, and that wasn't too bad because it was the file I made from the last time I decided to oragnize all my files. My goal was to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have much of both! These in this first file were already separated and so, presumably, just good, finished pictures.

Me and past me have different opinions! So I separated out the good pictures. And then I moved onto the next folder. This was called "Sources Fall".

There was a lot of neat stuff in there! 

And there was a lot of interesting things I could do with some of these pictures. Like, remember Clerkmanifestoland? I had an image of a little shop tent there that just needed a few corrections. 

Half an hour later, check this out:

The original was nice, but this is much better.

Also, it helped me realize something.

I am never going to be able to dig an underground pool.

An amusement park for muppets

 

We may be nearing the end of my onslaught of felted everything pictures. This may or may not be good news for you. I'm currently generating pictures of flowers turned into felt, but we're not ready for those yet, and it's a bit too early to tell whether we'll ever be ready for them.

What we are ready for is a visit to Clerkmanifestoland, the thrilling amusement park with that charming Fox and Skunk in Arles ride, and the Condeluded ride, which is seriously the best ride ever, and the Catcher in the Rye ride.  You know, Clerkmanifestoland? The theme park that everyone says is

A MILLION TIMES BETTER THAN DISNEY!

Not that it's a competition.

It's not a competition.

I remember once long ago Disneyland had a very amusing 3D muppet movie. 

Breaking news: Okay, this is a little amazing. I thought, for all I know, the muppet 3d movie is still around so I paused my writing and I looked it up.

It closed today.

No, like, after 35 years, it officially closed today.

Literally today is the closing day of the Muppet Movie 3D in Disney!

It was Jim Henson's last project and opened in 1990.

It closed today, or, because I am ahead a bit on my posts, for you it closed about a week ago.

Anyway, wild coincidence.

But all the better that I have in homage my own muppet world version of Clerkmanifestoland today, which is a place like Disneyland, only better, and more muppety.

RIP, 3d muppet movie.

May all the muppet ghosts come visit this version of Clerkmanifestoland.

Non felt scenes of clerkmanifestoland

 

In my fever of felting, where I am relentlessly turning new and old photographs into muppetland versions of those pictures, one category of my pictures that I've industriously been felting has been images from Clerkmanifestoland. It is pretty charming to see my carefully constructed images of Clerkmanifestoland made into a puppet world.

I mean, it's not as nice as pictures of waterfalls, or co-workers, but it's neat.

But to make these clerkmanifestoland pictures into felt, the original pictures need to be really well put together. So I have been taking these pictures of my theme park, most of which you will have never seen, and I've been editing them and making them nice enough to felt.

For the most part, though, these improved, preparatory versions are better than the felt muppet puppet versions.

I mean, the muppet versions are nice, and I'm sure I'll show them to you in time, but the real photos of this exhaustively constructed imaginary place, improved and tightened up as they are, is way more interesting to me right now. And so, that's what you'll see today!

I have done a lot of explaining about the areas and construction of clerkmanifestoland, but these pictures, while reasonably varied, are not particlarly along any theme. So maybe think of them as a bunch of nice random tourist photos from Clerkmanifestoland. It you recognize anything, or it seems familiar, all the better.