Friday, January 16, 2009

Day Sixteen: 1°

One little degree can be quite a defining thing.

One degree can be the difference between getting to walk on a frozen lake and getting to pay a $500 medical bill for the hypothermia you suffered after walking on a lake that wasn't quite frozen enough.

One degree can be the difference between lining up your golf shot properly and getting a hole-in-one (...never done it) and cursing yourself for missing two "gimme" putts and walking away with a bogey (...done it plenty of times).

One degree can be the difference between being a college drop-out who works behind the counter at a fast-food restaurant and being a college graduate...who still works behind the counter at a fast-food restaurant. (Shouldn't have majored in art history!)

After seeing an add for the movie The Air I Breathe, and meeting Forest Whitaker in New Orleans, I found out that I'm only one degree of separation away from Kevin Bacon!

Sometimes it seems that life is just one degree off from where you would like it to be. I'm sure if you asked my friends they'd be more than willing to agree that I'm at least one degree off from normal. My sense of balance must be off, too, because I usually find it necessary to rotate my camera pictures one degree clockwise or counterclockwise to make them level.

And at the time this picture was taken, the thermometer in Lawrence read 1°F. Pretty cold, by Kansas standards. (Of course, at the time this picture was taken I was not wearing a coat, being the stubborn, Minnesota, it's-not-really-cold-yet boy that I am.)


Photographer's Note: Look closely - what do you see? Do you see a guy in a big, white coat turned around facing a bush, perhaps doing something he shouldn't be doing outside (especially on a freezing day)? A couple of people have told me that this is what they saw in this picture (which is actually snow falling around a lamp in the trees).

To those people I say, 1) I would never take a picture of somebody doing that...just to set the record straight, and 2) yeah, I see it too, now. Thanks for that.

:)

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