Musings

Building (a)symmetry

Speaking of perspective and lens gyrations (see yesterday), how to crop? Follow horizontals (as I did), or align to verticals? Or, be a renegade and do neither, resulting in crazy angles everywhere. Whew.

Lens…pairing

Sometimes, I am annoyed that wide angle comes with keystoning. BTW, look at the cloud shape variation!

Night sky in my pocket

I’m assuming the hardware contributes, but I suspect it’s the software in my phone-cam that makes the night sky look like this—stars! How does it capture starlight so clearly?

Updating

We became Big Consumers today…only for today…and very Apple-y at that. My 4+ year old watch brought $90 for trade-in, which is darned amazing IMHO. Now, I have a brighter screen (yay! aging eyes, you know), and a more durable battery—I’m told.

Photo with new iPhone. Yup.

A bit of a tremble

The wind fought me, and made this three-second exposure a bit blurry, especially on the right. This fits the Sunday pace of life, I think.

Applewhine

Nice sunset glow today.

Changing topics: my wrist device no longer counts flights of stairs with any degree of accuracy. It used to be a bit off; now it gives me two or three each day, sometimes four. A more accurate number would be two to three TIMES that many. …Not that it’s a metric I, eh-hem, set my watch by. 🤣

Hello Helene

We got a burst of rain about 12:20 this afternoon, then it stopped. It started back up about two hours later, and hasn’t stopped. So far, the wind’s not kicked up; that’s what I dread most. It’ll be an unsettled night. We’ve got all devices charged up…including the car 🤣.

Surgical knee magic

I just read (okay: skimmed) a WaPo article by Andrew Zaleski that describes a new operation for people with knee cartilage problems. Surgeons put a pellet of calcium carbonate derived from coral exoskeletons (yeah, the reef kind) in the bone. Over time, the pellet is absorbed and the body makes a gooey substance that acts rather like real cartilage. It’s a fast operation, albeit with a different recovery curve than knee replacement. Zaleski describes two other new approaches with good results.

I’ll try to remember this. Right now my knees are okay (knock on wood), but they have had issues, and I baby them frequently.

Date: 17 Sept 2024. Title (that I saw online): Not ready for a knee replacement? You might be able to fix your cartilage instead.

Good luck with the fine print

Gravity is a dependable engineering principle. Oh, wait. Apparently it’s not a force, but a curvature of spacetime. Yikes.

Evidence

Here at the cottage, unlike at the city house, we have a garage; however, it is not electrified. So, we charge the plug-in hybrid from the cottage, like this, then relocate the car to the garage when juiced.

The orange light on the ferns is from the porch (this was just a few minutes ago), and you can see that rain+unpaved_road means the car is again muddy. We are so glad to be here, even so.