Photo of the Day, Etc. is Moving

Photo of the Day Etc. is moving to http://photoofthedayetc.wordpress.com/

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.