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
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?
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?
Monday, 14 October 2019
…spider. Duh. Secondarily: the sparkles in the web.
…potted plant. Secondarily: the geometric pillows.
…riotous autumnal shapes.
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.
Thursday, 10 October 2019
Played tag with the fog, as we did yesterday.
Fog_n_flag.
Bright, but valley-fog persists.
Sky clears, but impediments in the roadway.
Clear view of Vermont’s capitol. You’ve heard of tiny houses. This may qualify as a tiny capitol.
Spent hours with good friends who live far away from our home-base(s), in this house behind three brilliant maples. We had a lovely time together, short yet powerful. 💖 💚 💓 🍀
Wednesday, 9 October 2019
Fog mostly obscures bridges over the St. Lawrence River as we leave the “national” capital. You may think it’s Ottawa, but in this province it’s Québec City.
We escaped the dense fog, but continued to see it in valleys for some time.
Finally: clear and colorful.
Pair of facing wood figures by the tracks in Lac-Mégantic. Lac-Mégantic is where a 74-car train derailed and exploded in July 2013 killing over 45 people and destroying more than 30 downtown buildings. We saw many new buildings and more empty spaces. Land along the tracks remains unbuilt, and is now a park with signs detailing the history, nice plantings, and public art.
Metal art by the tracks in Lac-Mégantic.
We approached Mont Mégantic from the SE. That’s the rim of what looks like a crater, but officials indicate is a monadnock. Reasonable signage in the visitor center. Like much of the signs in the province they are in French only. I take this as great sarcasm (or something) on the part of French Canadians, who made the rest of Canada post bilingual signs and official displays.
View from the “rim” to the east. Those bumps on the horizon are northern outposts of the Appalachians.
Mont Mégantic from the SW. Love the quick transition between the lower deciduous forest and the upper pines.
We crossed an international border. Some slight confusion about why people from Georgia are in this part of the world, but that’s to be expected.
We have been seeing moose signs since soon after we crossed into Canada. Or: moose signage. No moose. Thankfully! [They are huge beasties!]
And, unusually, we’re overnighting in a resort that echos a Mrs. Maisel complex without the entertainment facilities, other than…
…fishing and a dock and boats. You’re on your own to enjoy the fresh air. And the moon!
Saturday, 5 October 2019
We started out under cloud cover, with a low line of light in the west that we drove toward. It wasn’t as dark as it looks here, even through my sunglasses.
See it’s clearing and brighter. We saw several ponds in low spots the glacier sculpted in the bedrock of the Canadian Shield sporting beaver houses, like this (left). The rock mostly dates to the long-ago and enduring Precambrian.
We stopped in North Bay because it is used for many locations for “Cardinal,” a Canadian police detective from books by Giles Blunt, made into a TV series starring Billy Campbell as John Cardinal, also with the excellent Karine Vanasse.
This was historically known as the Rapids of the Upper Ottawa. The many rapids in this section of the Ottawa extending to the west made it time consuming to use this river route (through Lake Nipissing and into Georgian Bay) as a bypass to going all the way through Lake Erie, Lake St Clair, etc. This section was particularly troublesome, and many died in the rough waters. In 1950, these rapids were tamed by the dam at Rapides-des-Joachims some 30 miles downstream. They look placid now, ¿no?
With dusk, the half-moon is brilliant. Pardon. [Nous sommes au Québec maintenant.] La demi-lune est brillante.
Thursday, 3 October 2019
I am proud of my tolerance 😀 for today’s murkiness (never any sunshine). I am glad to hear that the high of 98°F that Atlanta and many other places in the Deep South endured today will be tempered within a week or so.
Wednesday, 2 October 2019
Overcast this morning yielded to a bright sunny afternoon, perfect for spending time on the porch and a visit to the beach (no swim, though!).
Gulls or ducks? I’m betting gulls. They are…productive. And there was small flock floating out a ways, white heads made brilliant by the…sun!
Apples are ripening here. Here, after all, is an orchard.