This week, Tina gives us “carte blanche” to include those photos that don’t fit any particular category or are otherwise unique. She writes, “I don’t know about you, but there are images in my archives that will never fit into a challenge category. They don’t tie together in any cohesive way, but they keep calling to be included. This week, let’s embrace their differences and focus on our “Odds and Ends”. You can read her entire challenge post here.

I’ve already enjoyed reading about the earliest challenge responses (I am writing this on Sunday for publication on Thursday.) It is interesting to see the wide variety of images that people have included.

My own opening photo features a grave and a pickle story. Frances Bavier played Aunt Bee on the immensely popular Andy Griffith Show and its follow-up Mayberry R.F.D. from 1960 to 1970. After retirement, she moved to Siler City North Carolina. The story goes that she was annoyed to no end by people leaving jars of pickles on her porch. That fan trivia came from an episode where Barney and Andy substituted store-bought pickles for her own less tasty pickles. Even these many years after she passed, it is common to see one or two jars of pickles near or on her headstone in the Siler City cemetery.

In California’s Pinnacles National Park, we saw many vehicles parked in the lot with their hoods up. Letting in light keeps rodents from wanting to nest and from eating the delicious electrical wiring found in today’s modern vehicles. I didn’t know this… I had to ask at the information center why there were so many hoods up, mostly on vehicles of employees of the park, it turns out.

While visiting the Arizona Renaissance Festival a few years back, we walked by a monk who passed along the following advice, “Enjoy the cleavage today, I’ll hear your confession at church tomorrow.”

Goldfield Arizona is a tourist attraction at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. It features an old west theme town with those daily on-the-street gunfights and a mine tour. On the route toward the entrance to the mine tour, this ramshackle outhouse next to a box of explosives attracted my attention. For a time, I enjoyed making 3-D popouts, a Photoshop trick where the subject of the photo appears to pop out of the image. They are relatively simple to do once you learn the trick in either Photoshop or, as in my case, Photoshop Elements.

If you’ve used one of these, you’re probably advanced in years like me. They are still legal to use but are seldom seen except on classic cars, especially mid-20th century vehicles. The spinner knob allows one-hand steering, and it is especially useful when backing up. The driver puts his or her right arm on the top of the front bench seat and turns to look out the rear window. The driver’s left hand grasps the spinner wheel and rotates while backing. This allows for an easy one-handed backing turn out of a parking space, for example. Even before backup cameras, the move to individual seats and headrests made these accessories much less useful.

Near Allenspark Colorado in 1916, Monsignor Joseph Bosetti discovered a large flat rock formation. Recalling the biblical phrase, “…upon this rock, I will build my church,” the Monsignor did just that. It took Monsignor Bosetti 20 years to accomplish his goal, and it was completed in 1936. The Catholic church is still active and is a monument to God that was spared when a wildfire destroyed the nearby retreat center in 2011.

Clicking on any of the images above will allow you to view the images in HD or you can scroll through the album on my Flickr site here. Thanks to Tina for coming up with a very interesting challenge this week. Next week, Patti of Pilotfish Blog will host the Lens-Artists Challenge.

John Steiner