Circular visuals
Monday, 21 October 2019
New phone did NOT think this was a face; it’s pretty sharp!
I think of dahlias as fall flowers, but maybe that’s what they do in the Deep South, and not in cooler places.
Musings
Dual trios
Sunday, 20 October 2019
Lily pad droplets. Magic of surface tension.
Flower droplets. Lookit that color!
Busy bee.
Wide lens aka “ultra wide” to Apple.
Normal lens aka “wide” to Apple.
Zoom/telephoto lens.
This second trio are cropped to 16×9 aspect ratio, but otherwise unchanged. In the order presented, the lenses are digital-world 13mm, 26mm, and 52mm. FYI
Wide
Saturday, 19 October 2019
Free library in a churchyard. Did not check the titles….
Mild experimentation with wide-angle capabilities.
Minor mysteries
Friday, 18 October 2019
Not sure what to lead with…I choose the seasonal, emotional, and possibly artistic image. Ghoul I thought, rather than ghost. Not sure why. “Ghoul” is from a late 1700s Arabic word for “to seize” that shifted meaning a bit to refer to a desert demon/monster that desecrates graves to eat corpses. That’s specificity; a ghoul is no city-critter.
Now, switch to the merely mildly mysterious. I cannot figure out for sure how this feather got so deeply embedded in the azalea foliage. Wind?
Pattern day
Thursday, 17 October 2019
Ivy leaves. Strain selected for pale pigments (or whatever ivy has). This means reduced chlorophyll compared to the all-green relatives, and a greater risk of poor growth.
Very green ginger bud. No chlorophyll problems.
Artsy mortar joints. Not all grey is (pure) grey. No chlorophyll issues.
Krogerized
Wednesday, 16 October 2019
Yesterday our neighborhood Kroger re-opened. Or, at least, there was a Kroger here, but there’s a totally new building now, complete with two parking garages (one underground), and a high-rise apartment building. Far right is an old building on a different property. We made our first visit this morning. We passed on the Halloween swag, tasted a few of the offerings scattered throughout the store, and talked to several kindly and helpful employees. Two of three referred to a map to tell us where things were—Bob’s Red Mill dried-bean soup mix (one only, but not the one we like); organic fresh Italian sausage (none).
They are trying for a new identifier. Locally this used to be called the Murder Kroger (after a parking lot event, if I have it right), or Wino Kroger by the Guru. One edge of the store is the Beltline, so: Beltline Kroger.
Here’s the view from the Beltline. Note the blue bow on the column, left.
While most bins, shelves, and cases were nicely filled, with all items tidily aligned, this prepared-food section was empty. Someone decided that empty containers with post-its was better than totally empty. If the handwriting had been clearer, I could have browsed the offerings-to-be.
The checkout lady—we did serve yourself—was very helpful with corrections…five packages of 12-oz Starbucks coffee were supposed to be $5.99 each, but they rang up at the regular price ($7.99), not even the sale price (apiece)—$6.49. Plus, we were gifted some onions that weren’t in the menu at all.
We came out with assorted fresh veggies (salad stuff mostly), some uncured pancetta, and a few other grocs (e.g., coffee!!), plus their idea of a “Hawaiian” poké salad (fine, not exceptional; made for a more interesting lunch than we were going to have). We’ll go back….
Change-up
Tuesday, 15 October 2019
This morning I thought my day would be miscellaneous (dull, boring) chores, with the headliner being getting my hair done (D, B subject for a post…). [I’m so Midwest.]
Then I went for a walk and found these droplets spaced like a variation on a flat meniscus situation, and thought, well, that’d be a big improvement on hair salon tedium.
Just about rush hour, things turned topsy turvy. The Guru exercised his traffic mojo and we went “to the mall” Apple store and brought home a new phone for me. Lots of advertising focused (heh) on the three lenses, ignoring the one on the front for selfies. Now I have to study up on how to use all the lenses with technical intelligence and creativity. It was raining and getting darned dark when I made this photo (which would never win a prize of any sort). Still, the fancy algorithms produce an interesting image, no?
It’s about the…
Monday, 14 October 2019
…spider. Duh. Secondarily: the sparkles in the web.
…potted plant. Secondarily: the geometric pillows.
…riotous autumnal shapes.
Homeward (no angel)
Sunday, 13 October 2019
Proof that we’re southbound. Also, proof that it was sunny early on.
We drove into rain, and never out. Some stretches had incipient rain, but the perception was that rain would restart any moment.
We made the NC transportation museum our big stop. It’s centered on a roundhouse, but I even saw a dugout canoe and motorcycles. My digital dictionary indicates cow-catcher is hyphenated; coulda fooled me.
Wagon hub. Looks like a fancy locking pin.
Have no idea why forty men and eight horses.
Dusty, chrome-laden car.
Aha! Stone Mountain.
Aha! Atlanta traffique.
Mall walking plus
Saturday, 12 October 2019
Urban travel today is likely to involve routes underground, whether you are in a vehicle or afoot. A tunnel in the central civic-ceremonial zone of WashDC.
Ronald Reagan building parking/security team joke.
A rose to you for getting through the traffic.
How many US citizens under the age of, what?, 40? know what this is…that it’s not just an aesthetic combo of shapes and colors. Often, in my (limited) experience, the eraser would solidify and the bristles would get bent before the eraser was used up.
Our first stop: the Verrocchio exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. Verrocchio has many names in the literature (WikiPee indicates his birth name was Andrea di Michele di Francesco de’ Cioni), but most cognoscenti refer to him as merely Verrocchio, referring to the goldsmith he trained under, poor guy. He was an accomplished goldsmith, architect, painter, and sculptor. One of his mentees was Leonardo da Vinci.
Verrocchio’s Alexander the Great. Is that a dragon on your head, sir?
Love the sandal strap details. Many art historians think Leonardo painted the ghostly terrier.
This is Goliath’s head with David’s foot in Verrocchio’s version of the same moment as the famous Donatello statue of David. We saw the latter in Florence; I like both. Again: footwear detail.
We got lunch in a downstairs museum café, and headed to the mall. Left: view of Capitol Hill. We went that way last time. We went the opposite way this time.
Toward the Washington monument, all sparkly clean and open for business again.
And from the hill at its base, we could see our quarry, the Lincoln Monument. But first, at this end of the Reflecting Pool, the WWII Memorial.
Sobering to see over 4000 stars here, each representing 100 American war dead.
We climbed out, paralleled the pool, and worked our way through the crowds up the steps and into the main room of the Lincoln Monument, which the Romans would have called a cella. Many old guys in wheelchairs…this weekend’s groups of Honor Flight members and their attendees. One group whose members we kept encountering were from “Flag City,” Ohio.
We tore ourselves away from the Abe and visited the Vietnam Maya Lin wall. Sobering also. It’s all about the names, each life lost.
Enough malling, we headed back to our parking garage. [Ended up with 16K steps for the day. Outdoor mall-walking.]
The “island” out there is a sunken ship. There are over 230 of them in shallow Mallows Bay, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, a bit downstream and opposite Quantico. Look at GooSatView and see how many you can count. Many are steam ships and many date from WWI.
We paid $6(!!) to cross this bridge over the Rappahannock, the next big river south of the Potomac, both flowing into Chesapeake Bay. The beams are pretty, and the light was nice, but I prefer the bridge that spans the two peninsulas way NNW of here, plus the crossing is cheaper.