Melli is hosting an ABC photo challenge in which we’re supposed to look for letters in common everyday things or in nature without actually manipulating anything to make the letter and without photographing the letter itself in a word or sign. We’re doing two letters a week, and this week it is M and N.

You’d think these would be pretty easy to find, but I didn’t find one of them easily.

In fact, I won’t describe…because I would embarrass myself…how I drove 15 minutes out of my way because I thought I remembered a house with a fence that had an N shape to it — but the curve of the fence curved under instead of over, making it not an N shape, but since I was in the neighborhood of a Sonic and love their munchy, crunchy ice, and we don’t have one right nearby home, I decided to stop and try one of their breakfast items, but apparently they weren’t open (who serves breakfast items and isn’t open at 8:15 a.m.? Then again, a lot of places are still without power from the snow — maybe that was the problem), so I drove 15 minutes back home,found an N in my own neighborhood, then almost got my car stuck in the ice in my own driveway (frozen from the meltoff from yesterday), then tried to download my photos into Picasa only to discover, in place of all my photos, little icons that look like a torn pieces of paper, which, according to their “Help” section, means I need to rebuild my database, (but, they say, you should back up your pictures before doing so…but how can I do that when the pictures aren’t showing up? Argh. It did this once before and then fixed itself. Hopefully it will do so again, and then I will back up the pictures taken since the last time I backed them up and try the database rebuilding thing), BUT I did learn something new: that I could download pictures to Flickr straight from my camera and edit them there.

And that, my friends, is probably the worst sentence in the history of the English language.

But I emerge triumphantly facing this challenge with my M and my N! I got that done today if nothing else! (I did also happen to find a Q and R for future use as well!)

So here they are:

An M on the gate to Suzie-the-dog’s fence:

(I don’t know why it is in the shape of an M. Maybe the manufacturer’s name begins with M? Or maybe it was meant to be a decorative scroll and just happens to look like an M?)

And here are a couple of N’s I found on a house in the neighborhood (and I hope they didn’t see me taking a picture of their home and wonder what in the world I was doing):

You can find other participants to the ABC Challenge at Melli’s today, who I hope had a less eventful time of it this week. I am off to get breakfast now so I can become coherent again.