blog resurrection...

Every morning as I walk to work I come up with any of number little interesting tidbits that I tell myself that I'm going to blog about. Then I get to work and become caught up in the tasks that are involved in my happy little job. I don't take the traditional coffee break, so I constantly tell myself that I'm going to spend ten or fifteen minutes of my morning doing something non-worked related in order to prevent eventual boredom or frustration with work. Should anyone question me I might put my hand to my lips, with my fingers in such a way as to mimic the holding of an imaginary cigarette. If they look at me funny I'll tell them I'm on my smoke break, causing much confusion which should keep them from bothering me for at least a couple minutes.

I am happy to report that I have managed to accomplish at least a few things in the past couple of months while neglecting my blog. I've unpacked all of my boxes and found places to stuff most of my clothes... I've found gainful employment near my yuppie residence... and I have the first version of my own personal photography site up www.raffaellaloro.com (thumbnail shot courtesy of websnapr.com). I still have some changes to make, I used Dreamweaver which has left some extraneous bits and pieces here and there and my copyright symbol is not showing up, but otherwise everthing is as it should be.

In other news, yesterday evening the beau and I got on the topic of pets... and I mentioned how when I was young I never really wanted a pet. I was afraid of dogs and unlike the beau I did not grow up with an unnatural fondness for felines. I did like elephants though, I'm not quite sure why... perhaps I just wanted to pick a different animal from my elementary classmates or because I was enchanted by a National Geographic documentary that we had borrowed from the library. While going through my RSS feeds this morning I came across a fascinating article in the NY Times about species-wide trauma and the fraying of the fabric of pachyderm society, An Elephant Crackup , by Charles Siebert. It's rather long, but worth the read. I've been telling my coworkers about it all day.

An excerpt:

In "Elephant Breakdown", a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, [psychologist Gay] Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today's elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

and that folks, is the end of my imaginary cigarette break.