A Rainbow of Colors

A Rainbow of Colors is the name of the yellow and white daffodil in the photo of the day. It just bloomed and as it matures the yellow is is supposed to turn pink, but in our alkaline soil, it will probably turn peach. I'll keep an eye on it.

You may notice a couple of changes on the right-hand column of the blog. I now only have our TandLphotos.com under links and I added a "Blogs" widget for the other blogs I follow:

LOLolli is a exercise in creative writing by Ben Lolli who worked for me in 2009 as part of a technical team on an APS project. His blog is very entertaining, and I've even been quoted on LOLolli.

margarine is murder is Tristan's blog about "exploring the astroturf."

My Right Brain features the handiwork of Sarah Tuite. Sarah is another former employee who, besides being a talented engineer, is also a talented craftsperson and makes and sells all kinds of useful things she shows and discusses on her blog.

Patti Says is by Patti Hoech who owns Patrician Designs which is two doors down from our office at 216 Gold. Patti is a very talented interior designer who we have worked with on various projects over many  years. Patrician Designs carries a wide variety of original art, decorative accessories, bath & body items, and jewelry.

Since a couple of photos of yellow and white daffodils may have been a bit of a let down when you were expecting a "Rainbow of Colors", I included a panorama of dawn stretching her rosy fingers over the Sandias this morning.

The amaryllis is still hanging in there and looking great. I included a photo of it taken this afternoon in the low light just before sunset. While I was photographing a hyacinth, I noticed a movement through the lens. There was a tiny little black ant that I could hardly see with my bespectacled eyes. I focused in on it the best I could, and it was doing some pretty strange things with is antennae.

The kitties were all hanging around in the garden and on the deck when I got home, but I didn't get any good kitty photos tonight, so flowers, the sunrise and an ant are the the fare for this evening.

Dawn stretching her rosy fingers this morning

A very tiny ant

Deep Purple

We brought home a "living bouquet" from Costco tonight. I have no idea what some of the flowers are, but they are interesting. The first photo is the bottom of the light purple flowers in the bottom-center of the photo of the bouquet. The spiral bud doesn't show in the bouquet photo, and the fourth photo is a macro of the big bunch of flowers in the middle of the bouquet.  Guildenstern was vegging on the couch earlier, being a feline couch potato.

The English companion to the "Bestiary" illuminated manuscript I got for Christmas came in today. The facsimile is of the MS Bodly 764 that was produced in the middle of the 13th century. It has descriptions, stories and illustrations of animals as the writer and illustrator knew them at that time. The stories and illustrations generally don't resemble the animals as we know them today, because many of the animals had never been seen in 13th century England, so the stories and illustrations are derived from folklore of the time. The facsimile is in Latin, so the English companion makes it easier to read and understand. The facsimile is exquisite, and the illustrations are simply fantastic.

Stretch N Chair

Stretch was peeking at me through the rungs in the chair trying to get my attention. What he was really doing was catting my place mat. I got down a basket from a top shelf to get some noodles, and Stretch was in the basket quicker than the ants get into our sugar if we leave the top off. He's still lying in the basket curled around the packages of rice crackers and noodles.

I can't resist photographing bees on the plum blossoms, the same goes for the amaryllis. The second stalk of the amaryllis bloomed on Sunday. This stalk was smaller, so it has only two flowers, but they are beautiful. The pink hyacinth I planted in the fall was really pretty in the low light of the sunrise this morning, and a large, dried leaf caught my attention curled up on the ground in the low sun.

We learned that Rebecca Black's "Friday" video was taken down this afternoon. I checked, and sure enough it was removed by the owner. I opened it tonight to show Laurie the message and it was back up. It's up to 64.7 million views. People are speculating that is was pulled because it's the most disliked video on Youtube at 1.2 million dislikes on the official video. Justin Bieber's "Baby" with Ludacris is now in second place as the most disliked video at 1.165 million dislikes; however his video has over 500 million views. On the other hand, a song and video that I found truly obnoxious is Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair" it has 47.5 million views with 157K likes and 42K dislikes. Go figure? 

Frankly, I don't see why either Black's or Bieber's videos are objectionable. The words and content are clean, and the videos are well produced.  I guess there are a lot of people who believe that 13 year olds should not be successful. Envy is a strong emotion.

Puck Stumped

Irrigation is such an irritation. The gophers drain our little ditches, and after dark I can hear the water gurgling up through the gopher holes, but I can't find the holes among the foliage in the darkness to plug them. Then there are the coyotes and La Llorona lurking around the main ditch when I go out to lift the main gate in total darkness. But I'm thankful I finally got enough water to irrigate all of the garden.

At one point I went out to check the water and Puck was lying on a stump posing for my camera. Mama Manx was being a gargoyle on a railing among the roses. Then I found a unicorn grasshopper, and had to crawl around on the ground following it before it let me get close enough to photograph it with my macro lens. Diné was torturing grasshoppers earlier, so the unicorn was probably one of her victims.

The sunset through the mostly silhouetted trees shows a little green of an elm that's leafing out, creating a complementary interest against the yellow-orange sky behind the trees. Finally, I couldn't resist photographing another honey bee working the plum blossoms.

Unicorn Grasshopper

Mama Manx in gargoyle mode

Spring Ruffles

 I woke up with a sore throat, so I had to allow a very nice day to simply slip on by. Besides helping Laurie with her LaTeX, I ran drippers, did photos and worked on photos. I went out to the ditch several times today to see if I could get irrigation, but there was really no water, so I gave up after 7:00 pm.

I had ants with my breakfast. Those little boogers manage to get into everything! They are really annoying, but if they get in my food they are going to get eaten!

The photo of the day is a split corona daffodil that would be pink and white if we had acidic soil, but since we have alkaline soil, it comes out peach and white. 

I was stalking a really beautiful black wasp this morning. I was lying on the ground ready to photograph it, when Rosencrantz walked up meowing and scared it off. Kitties! However, I did get another fly on the wild plum blossoms. Apparently, when there is no carrion around, the flies pollinate blossoms along with the bees. This one has pollen all over it. It was too high for Rosencrantz to disturb, but it still took a lot of sneaking around to get the photo.

The elm trees are really just great big weeds, but the emerging leaves were begging to be photographed. The wild plums produce beautiful blossoms. I can see why the bees and flies like them.

I got the sunset plus photos of it casting shadows on the wall, and the sun through the blinds. There's never a dull moment for weird… I mean creative photographers!

Peach Blossoms

The peach trees are blooming, which means they will probably get frozen. I was out looking for insects to photograph when I noticed the peach blossoms. The insects were few and far between, most likely because we had a couple of hard frosts earlier in the week.

The second stalk on the amaryllis is blooming. It's a smaller stalk and only has two blooms, but they are looking good. 

Mama Manx came in earlier with quite a load of dirt. She posed nicely to show off her coat of sticks, leaves and dirt. Later she got really sassy and slipped out in the dark. Laurie tried to get her but she wouldn't let Laurie get close enough to catch her. I went out and called her. She came running like she was going to come in, but swooped by at the last minute. She didn't calculate how quick I am, so I reached down and snatched her up as she was bounding by me. She was disappointed, but snuggled up with Laurie a little later.

The sun was blasting through some storm clouds late in the afternoon. The clouds finally overcame the sun, but they never produced a drop of precipitation.

New amaryllis off the one that bloomed last week

Mama Manx bringing in a load of dirt into the house

Storm brewing

Facial Waxing

I went to the Apple Store today to buy a new iMac for the office. Normally I buy build-to-order Macs so I order them on-line, but in this case, I was buying a standard configuration, so I went to the Apple store. In the past, I'd walk into the Apple Store, find the sales person closest to the door, tell him what I wanted to buy, he'd enter it in his iDevice, I'd pay for it, he'd send the receipt to my email, go to the back, bring out my purchase, and I'd leave — very efficient.  

Not today! I found a tattooed, well pierced young man at the door when I walked in, and I told him what I wanted. He punched my description into his iPad — "Black button down shirt with camera hanging around his neck!" — then he told me a specialist would be with me in a minute. About 20 minutes later another young man with a mohawk came out and asked me what I wanted, I gave him the specs and told him I wanted to do a split tender purchase, and that it was for a business. Well! That required a new genius, but in the meantime he was acting like I didn't know anything about Macs. Then the next young genius arrived. 

They were annoying me by this time, so I told them I had Macs that were older than they were. They looked at me very surprised. I told them if they were born later than 1985 I had Macs older than they were. Whoa! I dropped the bomb on them. Their interest was piqued. I explained that the first Mac we had didn't have a hard drive and we inserted the OS diskette, loaded the OS, then inserted the program diskette, loaded the program, then inserted the diskette that had the data on it. They were dumfounded and couldn't imagine a Mac without a hard drive, let alone a world without the Internet! I started feeling pretty old!

Then I had to call the office, because I couldn't remember the exact amount of a Visa gift card that was given to us instead of a cash refund. I knew it had almost $500, but didn't think to write down the exact amount before I left. Once I got the total and he swiped the card, I had to enter the pin. Okay, out of all the passwords and pin-type numbers I have to remember what did I assign to that card? It only took two tries to get it right. I wanted to use the full balance on the card with one purchase, otherwise they charge transaction fees; doing a split tender with that card and my office charge card made the most sense. I walked out of the Apple store with the new iMac one and a half hours after I walked in. Not the 15 minutes I was used to. It would have cost a fraction of my time to order it on the Internet, which I will do the next time, since the Apple store has become as inefficient and costly to use as any other brick and mortar storefront.

Today's photos include "Facial Waxing" with reflections; sunsets, and a couple of flowers. We got home in time for the kitties to go out, so most of the cats are content. Puck, however, decided to be contrary and instead of coming in with the rest of the cats, he ran down to the other end of the property. He finally came in at 10:30 pm.

Ghost Rider

I drove down Silver to Yale, Central to University, Martin Luther King Jr. to I-25 on my way home tonight. Not my usual route for a Thursday, but I was up by the university helping friends with their computers on the way home. I saw this person on the cutest little scooter, the rider, who was dressed in a black, hooded cloak, started to dematerialize for one photo and had worm holes show on either side of the rider in another. I think the scooter was moving interdimensionally, and I can't swear to you that it was a person riding it.

At Silver and Yale is a Chai Shop that was lighted up nicely and a couple of orbs were hanging outside enjoying the night air. Driving down Martin Luther King Jr toward I-25, a large wormhole and multiple orbs were hovering above downtown. I snapped a photo of the Big-I as I drove under it because it was interesting.

I got home pretty late, the kitties wanted attention and then Laurie's parents and sister came by for a visit. The time flew by and now it's late. As I've said many times recently, there simply isn't enough time in a day for everything.

Spring Robin

I ran out to the ditch as soon as we got home to see if there was water. I had the macro lens on my camera, and didn't think about taking a telephoto lens. The ditch was so low, the ducks were up on the bank foraging thin the weeds. I did a couple of photos of them, with the macro from about 100 feet, but the photos were lame, and didn't make it the blog. As I was walking back to the gate some smarty robins flew up in the tree as I walked by. One let me get pretty close to him, and I managed to get a fairly clear photo of him with my macro lens, even against strong backlighting.

A leaf was stuck in the gate — I photographed it — then I photographed a baby bell pepper while making a salad. It's pictured next to our Japanese chef knife.

Today was one of those days where too many things were happening all at once. I was trying to get so many things done, I was an hour later picking up Laurie than we planned, which got us stuck in heaving traffic driving home. The upside is, we still got home in time to let the kitties out, and we made a big batch of Puree of Sweet Potato & Ginger Soup.  I made green chile stew Monday night, so we have some instant food in the freezer again.

Police Jump

A couple of Albuquerque Police officers were being civic minded, giving a young woman a jump when I left work today. Or at least I assume they were being civic minded — they didn't have her cuffs before I drove off.

Guildenstern was "helping" Laurie with her Math by lying on all the papers she had spread out on the counter. He's so big he can cover a lot of papers.

When I went out to see if I could get water to irrigate (no luck), I noticed the ants had slowed down in the cooler temperature, which allowed me to get a very sharp photo of one ant who was out strolling about before the sun set.

When I picked up Laurie on Monday,  a science class was out working on a project. They were sprawled all over the steps and sidewalk, holding up instruments toward the sky and writing down the results. 

It wasn't as windy today, but it is really cooling off down here and the kitties are eating a lot. I noticed there was a dusting of snow on the mountains this morning.

Guildenstern helping with math

Science Students