Photo of the Day, Etc. is Moving

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America the Beautiful

This blog is for yesterday, May 11, 2011, but I couldn't post it until this morning because Blogger shut down the edit features on the blog last night at 11:00 pm to do maintenance on the site.

Fyodor Dostoevsky claimed he got characters out of news paper clippings and family. Real life is always weirder than anything you can make up. Take "Cannibal arrested after his 'dinner' called cops" for example. How weird can people be?  There was a headline the other day about a person who called 911 because he was short-changed in a crack deal. Okay? Then the guy is surprised to learn it's illegal to buy crack! I guess he was pretty cracked up.

Today's photos include America, a white butterfly, a red mini rose, which we don't know the name of, Puck in the window and Harleys on Gold.  

It's really pretty cold tonight. If it freezes, the water line to the swamp cooler will probably break, the latest growth on the roses, and the few iris that are still thinking about blooming will get damaged.  The cold makes all my joints hurt, yet I had to climb up on the roof to fix a little hole in the water line to the swamp cooler this afternoon. The hole looked like something bit the line. If it's not the cold, it's the critters! The transitions from one season to another are always challenging around here.

Abstract Kitty

Rosencrantz was feeling rather abstract this morning, trying to blend into the chair we left in the dance room last night. 

One of the few iris that survived last week's hard frost is another purple and white. It's too bad the black iris didn't survive the frost. Black flowers seems to be quite tender.

Our neighbors got some chickens, and among them is a young rooster that seems to be half cocked. He tries to crow in the morning an instead of a nice full "cock-a-doodle-doo" he gets a "cock-a" out, and at best a "cock-a-d". Hmmm! I'm not sure those words describe his pathetic crow that well.

There was a load banging on the back door of the office this afternoon. A fireman asked if we had a fire, which we didn't, then told us one was reported on the block and asked us to evacuate the building. There were six or seven fire trucks swarming the block, KOB news reporters showed up; but no fire was found. Maybe the awesome show of force by the Albuquerque Fire Department was so intimidating the fire put itself out. When no fire was found, the fire trucks finally left, and the reporters seemed a little disappointed.

America

Rose Water for Stretch

Stretch is very happy. The roses are starting to bloom so we can keep a rose in his water dish again. He loves lapping water right off the rose petals. We have to wait for our roses to bloom because commercial roses will have pesticides. There's nothing like having a happy Manx!

Our honey suckle is blooming with an interesting array of color. I took the photo this morning before the hurricane winds kicked in. While I was waiting for Laurie in the parking lot at UNM, the sky was quite interesting and warranted a photo.

Star and Stripes is blooming. The bloom pictured tonight was interesting because of the petals in the center that did not open, forming a cone over the pistils. 

There are snakes in the grass and then there is Puck in the grass. Both work on the element of surprise, but a snake is less of a threat.

The Vietnam dong has gone limp, as it has lost most of it's value. With the amount of debt the US has piled, up the dollar isn't long to follow.

Tuscan Sun

As it warms up there are so many things to be done around the house. I started the day hooking up the drip system and repairing broken drip lines. Then I cut dead canes out of some of the rose bushes, and tried to charge the truck battery — it would not charge,  so I need to get a new battery. It's wired because I replaced the distributor cap and rotor a couple of weeks ago, started up the truck and drove it around. I guess the couple of hard freezes after that did in the battery. 

I hooked up water to the out door kitchen and catio, and had to repair two breaks in the line from the sub-zero temperatures we had in February. The front door had been getting really sticky and hard to open, plus the lockset had worn out after more than 28 years of use. I finally got around to fixing the sticky door and replacing the lockset today.

Between the maintenance and repairs, I did get some photos in. I gave Le long Lens a workout on very small butterflies that won't let me get close to them with a macro lens. The speed of the lens is great because I got the orange butterfly in flight, and the white one when it opened it's wings for a fraction of a second. All the cats were being cute as usual, but Mama Manx won the cute kitty pose of the day.

Compensating for what?

Tristan thinks big lenses are compensating! Well they are quite useful actually. Laurie got a photo of me before I ventured downtown to check out National Train Day, and give "le long lens" a workout. 

The lens performed wonderfully, capturing lots of indoor and outdoor photos of trains, Harley Davidsons, air-borne BMX riders, kitties and flowers. Not only did the lens perform wonderfully, it got me lots of respect from pretty much everyone. I had several people, including a TSA agent, ask if f I was from the press. When I said no, they asked "so you're freelance?" I answered "Yes!" as I didn't want to prolong the conversations. But I found it very interesting how I was treated differently from the other photographers because I was wielding a huge lens. 

I ran across a professional photographer who was shooting film, and we talked for quite a while. He's a train buff and getting ready to head out on a train journey to California, Seattle, Detroit then back to Albuquerque. 

I stopped by the post office on the way home to get our mail, and heard an announcer and cheering at the Corrales Skate park across the soccer fields from the post office. I ventured over and they were having a BMX stunt competition. The rider in the photo circled his bike 4 or 5 times under him then landed on the pedals. There was much celebration of his conquering the stunt, which included him running around holding his bike over his head, and the other riders mobbing him to hug and congratulate him. I got it all on digital film, but we liked the one of him air-borne the best.

The kitty of the day is Diné and I included a Japanese-like rendition of Austrian Copper.

Train Watching

Austrian Copper

Cherry Parfait

Bruce sent me a video this morning that really helped get me out of my depression over our government. The video is called The Jive Aces present: Bring Me Sunshine and you can see it at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXvJ8UquYoo&feature=player_embedded.

I am renting a new 70-200mm f/2.0 lens for a week to try it out. So far it's wonderful. All the photos, except the ones of the lens on my camera, were taken with the new lens. I got a lot of photos already, but couldn't get all of them posted because the upload speed on our Internet is running at a max of 2.7 KB/s, so files that usually take seconds to upload are taking minutes. Laurie was trying to send a large PDF to her students and it kept timing out. I hope Qwest gets it fixed by tomorrow.

Even though the new lens is huge and heavy, it's so fast that I can get clear photos hand held, under low light conditions. The photo of Puck and Rosencrantz sitting in the window looking out is hand held at f/2.0 at 1/15 of a second. The photo is very sharp, and I'm very impressed with the lens.

While I was lifting weights, I saw Puck jump straight up in the air in my peripheral vision, looked over and saw a snake striking at him. I ran out of the catio to find a fairly large garter snake protecting itself from the cats. I gathered up a couple of the cats, ran in with them, grabbed my camera with the new lens, ran back out and photographed the snake. Then I picked up the snake, showed it to Laurie and released it in an area where it had plenty of cover from the cats.

The light was a little better on the purple and blue iris tonight. The colors are much closer to what we see in tonight's photo, taken with the new lens, but I thinks it's more because of the light that the lens.

Bow Your Head

Reading news on the web makes me feel like the iris in the lead photo today. Do people elect clueless congressmen and presidents because that is what they really want or because there is not a lot of choice?  Often people who run for public office are failures at everything else, but somehow find a place in government where they continue to fail. This seems to be the case with so many of our current elected officials. The policies of the Roosevelt era prolonged the depression for years longer than the depression would have lasted if the government had done nothing and let market forces work to correct the markets. This is well known and historically documented from the various depressions before the "great depression" that were short lived due to no government intervention. 

But what does the current government do? Replay the policies of the Roosevelt era and then act surprised when unemployment gets worse, the housing market continues to tumble and inflation is on the rise. They try to distract us with raids on countries we have no strategic interest in, and say they killed a terrorist who has done nothing for the past 10 years, if he was even alive and present when the raid went down, hoping we will not notice the bad economic news. Murder and mayhem sell well on TV and in the movies, shouldn't that make for a popular president?

On top of all that, the US government has been smuggling guns to the drug cartels in Mexico, and the attorney general says he didn't know anything about it! Right! I guess he's been too busy suing a lady who blocked the door of an abortion clinic to notice the BATF is the largest source of illegal guns going from the US to Mexico. Obama has long held that most of the guns that end up in Mexico come from gun shows in the US, but when not that many guns from the US had actually shown up among the hundred thousand or so guns confiscated in Mexico by the Mexican government, the Obama administration decided they needed to be more proactive to ensure more guns from the US made their way to Mexico to make their case; so the Obama administration started its own smuggling operation called "gunrunner."  It also turns out that the few guns that did come from the  US had been reported multiple times, so the data on the number of guns with serial numbers traceable to the US confiscated in Mexico had be inflated 5 to 10 times by the BATF, until closer scrutiny caught the error.

Then there is the issue of government spending. Instead of reducing spending like most people and businesses do when they don't have enough income to cover expenses, governments are looking for more ways to tax people. California is looking at hiring Internet police to track Californians' on-line purchases and then bill them a use tax. If that goes through, other states will follow since most states have use tax laws that go back way before the Internet. Obama is looking at tax per mile driven on cars, which is simply designed to reduce driving since he thinks we should all use public transportation. The private automobile is one of the single most important vehicles that help people improve their economic status, because they have little restriction of getting better employment when that have the freedom of driving a car. The current government wants none of that!  It is doing everything it can to kill the private transportation.

The nanny state without end is depressing and makes me want to hang my head like the poor, cold-damaged iris.

Here's Looking at You X 6

While I was out inspecting the iris, which are very damaged from the hard frost, and reluctant to bloom again even though it was 80º F today, the crab spider presented herself on one of the wilted irises. The problem was the sun had just set, I had just finished lifting weights, so between low light (shutter speed of 1/15 sec no stabilization in the lens or camera) and being shaky from the weights, I only got a couple of photos of the spider in focus. It was too bad because she was going through all her poses for me.

I went to a medieval lunch and learn at UNM today. While walking from T parking to Mesa Vista Hall, I passed by one of the frat houses they are demolishing. For a long time it was just abandoned, but at noon today it was reduced to ruble and I'm pretty sure the lot is now cleared.

I also walked by a scooter with antlers and various other interesting boxes and nets attached to it. Antlers seem to be a popular accouterment for motorcycles around here.

While I was scanning some stuff for Laurie a moth landed on the screen. When I shined a light on it to get the shutter speed manageable, the moth started vibrating its wings, making it impossible to get a really clear shot.

The Obama administration has made a total mess out of this OBL killing. They can't get their stories straight, and now they won't release photos. Senator Brown said he saw the photos, but then they were determined to be doctored. Democrats who lambasted Bush for pursuing OBL are now falling all over themselves to praise Obama. War and killing becomes okay when it's their party doing it.

B&W Lilies

I'm trying to figure out what the point is behind the supposed killing of Osama bin Laden. For a president who, as a senator, wanted to strip the intelligence services, military, and White House of all the tools used in the reported successful raid on the OBL compound to be celebrating the killing of OBL and his family seems to me not only to be highly hypocritical, but deranged (I read they spared his wife, and were even nice about it by only shooting her in the leg) . 

The media is in a feeding frenzy about how great our intelligence and military are, and hyping up the photos that the White House is preparing for release to prove they got OLB. The press is wringing their hands about whether the photos are too gory for a sensitive American public. It's contrived idiocy. Believe me, most people will have seem way more gory photos either real or CG than the one of OLB with a bullet wound in his temple and left eye. The press is hyping the photos to create lots of views. I already found the supposed photos, and am waiting to see if the "official" release is the same.

If they really killed OBL, I have to ask myself: do I feel safer? No! Has Obama proved to me that he is a leader? No!  Is killing OBL going to turn our economy around, ease the country's debt, or create jobs? No! So I'm still left asking myself what's the point?

On the home front, the temperature was 16º F at 7:00 am this morning and everything was frosty, like the second photo of the Drumstick Allium. The kitty photo of the day is by Laurie of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lounging on the deck after wearing themselves out rolling in the dirt!

1930 Harley

We stopped by the post office on the way home and parked next to a 1930 Harley Davidson.  The owner came out of the post office as I got out of the car, so I asked him about the bike and if I could photograph it. He said he got it in parts from New Zealand and rebuilt it. He said it's also one of the most reliable motorcycles he has. He showed me the process for starting it. He turned on the gas cock, set the spark advance to max, and kick started it. It fired up after a couple of kicks and he was off.

Stretch tested looking in the new window tonight. The screen gives him an interesting soft focus effect. The new windows are well insulated so the kitties can't hear me talk to them, and their meows are silent.

The temperature was 20º F at 7:30 am and there was frost on everything. I photographed on of the Alliums up close with the frost lining its tiny flowers. Snow started falling around 8:00 am and we drove in a snow storm until we got on I-25 at Alameda.

We are sure it will freeze again tonight, so we put sheets and rags on the iris and Laurie put more mulch on the rose bushes. 

Windows Upgrade 2.0

I upgraded two of our windows, which makes it a windows 2.0 upgrade. Long before Microsoft was around, the penetrations in walls with glass in them were called windows. I read several years ago that Microsoft attempted to patent the word windows so that every company used the word or manufactured windows, like the ones I installed yesterday, would have to pay them royalties. I don't believe they got the patent.

We have a single clematis bloom, which got really whipped around in the wind today. I got one clear shot of it. Gypsy Dancer was the second rose to bloom in our garden, with a halfway decent bloom. America put out a rose shortly after Gypsy Dancer, but the bloom was pretty lame.

Puck was checking out the new windows this morning, and seemed to approve. Rosencrantz likes to sit on the handrail by the window and look in, but often he turns the other way and surveys what's going on between the fence and the house.

The wind was fierce and cold most of the day. I noticed the wind calmed down late in the afternoon, but the temperature was still cold. With the wind blowing most of the night it didn't freeze last night, but it will probably freeze tonight.

Gypsy Dancer