Snow White and the Seven Dwarf Cars

LATE EDIT: Facebook decided my previous title (Huffy Puffy and the Seven Dwarf Cars) was somehow unworthy of a link from their site, so I renamed this entry and relinked. They’re fine with bigotry, misogyny, and blatant lies – but use a nonsense name and they have a conniption fit.

It’s the weekend and since yard sales are still nonexistant – and Mother Nature granted us more lovely cloudy skies – we were off again, armed with our cameras.

The challenging part of our excursions these days is going somewhere we haven’t already been. Granted, even revisiting old spots we can find new things to photograph. It’s still blah to cover the same ground, ad nauseam. Yesterday we did revisit a couple of spots where we’d been before – but this time we went into the Dwarf Car Museum. And it was a hoot!

These itty-bitty machines are drivable, but you’d definitely have to origami yourself to get in.

The furry mascot is named Monkey-Do. His siblings, Monkey-See and Monkey-Hear, crossed the rainbow bridge a while back. In human years he’s about 127. He’s quite the character and obviously the boss of everything. The blue car – I don’t pretend to know the make – is named “Pretty Woman”. The name on the front is “H1ME”, nearly as I can tell.

To give you an idea of scale: the roofs of these fall slightly over waist-high on a normal human. Keep in mind these pictures were taken from a mobility device. I was sitting down and looking at them on that level.

Outside were a few normal-sized vehicles and some other quirky corners. On the second photo below, the light was so harsh I had to manipulate the hell out of it to keep it from being silhouettes. I still kind of like how it turned out.

JustaI

It was just a fun place to visit. We’ll be going back, sooner or later. They do have a website if you’d like to check them out, at dwarfcarmuseum.com. The museum also includes the owners’ family memorabilia, such as the kitchen his mom owned back when, and a painting of a duck wearing sneakers (it had connections to Jay Leno, but I only caught snippets of that conversation.) The owners/operators are there to give you a complete history, whether you want it or not. Incidentally, while their website says it’s free admission, they now ask $5 per person, which is perfectly reasonable. 100% of everything collected goes right back into running the museum. Good for them.

We did go beyond the car museum. G and I had run across a spot out in the middle of nowhere which had clearly once been a grand locale – a home, presumably. The buildings were long gone, but there was evidence of landscaping. We decided to revisit the site, on principle.

I didn’t capture the other direction with a line of palm trees. Plus, whoever owns the property was working on it and had cleared a lot out since we were there last.

This building houses a bakery. It sits in Stanfield, Arizona. Its rough exterior made us think it was abandoned until we looked closer. (Taken from the rear of the building looking forward – but this represents the exterior treatment all the way around.)

This railroad-crossing signal was situated where a dirt road met the highway. It was as much a barrier to civilization as a barrier to prevent accidents.

It’s ironic how we still call them telephone poles, when virtually no one still has land lines. There are holdouts, for now. (The holdouts may topple if plans go through to spike the cost sky-high.) A few of these poles still carry phone lines – for most rural communities in Arizona, DSL is the sole high-speed Internet option, if there’s any option at all. This was taken just off the main highway, but from this perspective it looks like there’s nothing but sky, weeds, mountains, and electric crosses.

Hopefully nobody’s getting tired of the photos. It takes time and experience to become an accomplished photographer, and I can finally see real progress in my snaps.

And now for an unexpected piece of good news… I think the computer issue is resolved. I hesitated to type it out loud, lest I jinx things. It’s been two days without a single crash, and I’ve used Photoshop and Affinity Publisher simultaneously. The motherboard replacement didn’t do the trick, but I went back to Intel and downloaded their “search-and-update-drivers” program, which did exactly what it said. And lo, the computer gods must’ve taken pity on me, because it seems to have worked. Knock on wood, fingers crossed, and whatever else it takes to make it stick.

EDIT: Blergh. Had a crash today. But it’s still the longest I’ve gone in months and months.