Pictures
drorzel | May 8, 2016There's a discontinuous jump here, if you're paying attention to photo-a-day numbering, but I'm skipping ahead of the cruise-centered backlog to write a more difficult entry.
Back in December, when we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, I had her cremated, and said I'd do something nice as a memorial, once the weather got nicer. We got one reasonably nice day in between bouts of rain yesterday, so I finished the memorial for Emmy:
The Queen Emmy Memorial Shrub.
This is in the weird little cul-de-sac side yard of our house, next to the dining room. For a while I was trying to grow herbs in…
drorzel | May 8, 2016The week leading up to our cruise was crazy busy for me, with a bunch of travel for work. Which means you get a collection of cell-phone snapshots from that week, since I didn't bring the good camera with me on all those trips.
229/366: Man the Barricades
SteelyKid and the Pip behind a wall of sticks.
There are some paths running into the woods near the kids' day care, and the older kids decided to wall one of these off by wedging sticks between trees on either side. Because kids. It's an impressive bit of work, until somebody huffs and puffs and blows it all down.
230/366: Quad
The…
drorzel | April 17, 2016As promised in the last catch-up post, a set of pictures less devoted to cute-kid shots.
213/366: Zone Defense
The superhero-themed "zones" of our house, as defined by the Pip.
The Pip has been making one of his preschool teachers draw superheroes for him. At some point, he cut these out with scissors (or possibly made Kate cut them out), and hung them up in different rooms. So the living room is now the Captain America Zone, the kitchen is the Flash Zone, and the library is the Spider-Man Zone. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but it's a thing.
214/366: Red In Tooth And Claw
A hawk…
drorzel | April 14, 2016A bunch of stuff happened that knocked me out of the habit of editing and posting photos-- computer issues, travel, catching up on work missed because of travel, and a couple of bouts with a stomach bug the kids brought home. I have been taking pictures, though, and will make an attempt to catch up. Given the huge delay, though, I'm going to drop the pretense of doing one photo a day, and do the right number, but grouped more thematically.
This span included Easter, which meant a lot of family time, which means photos of the kids doing stuff. So here's a big group of those.
The Sillyheads…
drorzel | March 20, 2016I didn't take the DSLR to March Meeting with me, but I did throw a point-and-shoot in my bag. A few of these are still just cell-phone snapshots, because I didn't have the bag with me all the time.
193/366: Stadium View
When I checked into the hotel, they told me I had a "stadium view" room on the sixth floor. I was in a hurry to get to a social event, so I didn't really look that night, but they were right:
Football and baseball stadiums in downtown Baltimore, from my hotel room.
194/366: Convention hall
The primary purpose of the trip was, of course, to attend the March Meeting, and that…
drorzel | March 13, 2016One of the surest signs of the imminent arrival of spring is the appearance of these little purple flowers in our back yard in large bunches. I have no idea what they are, but they're kind of photogenic, so...
Little purple flowers.
Having spent much too long on the Internet, I can just about convince myself that this is really a photograph of gargantuan sculptures of flowers run through a tilt-shift filter. This probably indicates that I need to get out more. Fortunately, I'm off for a week at the March Meeting; whether that counts as "getting out more" in the usual sense of the phrase is…
drorzel | March 12, 2016Really not a lot to say about this one. Pretty nice crescent moon last night, still had the telephoto lens on the camera, so: this shot.
The crescent moon dropping behind the trees across the street.
drorzel | March 10, 2016Having done a thematic set of animal photos, it makes sense to complete the catching-up process by pulling together a couple of shots of man-made things.
189/366: Tower
The broadcast tower from the local CBS affiliate.
This is also from my trip to the post office the other day. The tall tower is a broadcast antenna of some sort from the CBS station, which is actually not in the foreground building here, but one behind it that you can't see. The giant flag is associated with a stockbroker. America, f*&k yeah.
190/366: Ghost Plane
A slightly fuzzy plane through a tree.
I like the way…
drorzel | March 10, 2016Sunday and Monday were wrecked by SteelyKid getting sick. She was actually only really ill on Sunday, but that was highly miserable. Monday, she had to stay home from school, and we spent the day watching the original Star Wars trilogy (which she had refused to watch on two previous occasions...). So, there weren't a lot of pictures taken on those days...
Since I'm pulling a couple of photos from other days to compensate, I'll just do a thematic group of shots of wildlife. I slapped the telephoto lens on the camera the other day, and took advantage of the sudden onset of summer weather to get…
drorzel | March 10, 2016I seem to have fallen into a thing where I take pictures more frequently than I edit and post them. I blame the kids-- SteelyKid got sick on Sunday (her third bout with strep in the last five months), and The Pip has decided to get a jump on Daylight Savings by waking up an hour early every day this week. Those both wiped out a lot of time I otherwise would've used for photo processing and blogging.
Anyway, this past Saturday was the big Odyssey of the Mind tournament for SteelyKid and her team. I obviously have a bunch of photos of this; just as obviously they mostly include other people's…
drorzel | March 6, 2016Thursday was a travel day, the less said about which the better. So, while I do have a couple of cell-phone snaps from the day, I'm just going to ignore it, and give you two better photos from Friday and Saturday. These go nicely together, as you can see in the composite that's the "featured image" for this post.
182/366: Dunking Dude:
The Pip hanging on the rim at the Girl Scout carnival.
Friday night, the local Girl Scouts had a "nickel carnival" as a fundraiser for... something or another. SteelyKid is a scout, and Kate's helping lead her Brownie troop, so they had to go, and I brought…
drorzel | March 6, 2016There's a sort of Internet tradition of posting photos of hotel-room views when traveling, so here's a very slightly artsy version of same:
View from my hotel room in Urbana, IL.
The first time I looked out the window, there was a big-ass truck parked directly in front of it. I like this version a little better, though.
Kidding about the accommodations aside, I had a good time visiting the University of Illinois, and my talk there went very well. The travel to and from Champaign was less than enjoyable, but such is the airline industry in the modern US...
drorzel | March 2, 2016I spent Tuesday flying to Champaign, Illinois, which was probably a big mistake. I should've booked a Southwest flight to Midway Airport in Chicago, and rented a car to drive down to Champaign, but I decided that might be annoying on the way home, so opted to fly the whole way. Which meant a United flight into O'Hare, followed by an American flight to Champaign, both in aircraft that felt like scale models of actual jetliners.
And, of course, there was this:
Snow removal trucks on the runway at O'Hare International Airport.
That's from the plane as we taxied to the gate in Chicago, in a…
drorzel | March 2, 2016Sunday was a beautiful day in Niskayuna, so after going to campus to deal with some paperwork, I went off to a park to take some pictures. There's a town park down on River Road that sits on a high and scenic bluff above the Mohawk, so I figured I'd give that a look. And, indeed, the view of the river is pretty.
But there are also these:
Apparently, I live near the set of a cult British SF show.
That's a fat piece of PVC pipe, painted bright green, rising about 7-8' from the ground. And there are a couple dozen of these dotting the hillside in the park.
I don't really have a clue what…
drorzel | March 2, 2016I'm going to stop posting pictures of the Nott Memorial, really I am. But I got the idea a week or two ago of trying to see if there's an angle where the observatory dome and the Nott dome look the same size, so I keep poking at that.
And, in fact, there is such an angle from the conference room in the Physics department:
The Union college Observatory dome and the Nott Memorial dome.
This involved a bit of precarious leaning-out to get clear of the window, but it's close to what I had in mind. There's another window that might be a slightly better angle, but it's sealed with plastic…
drorzel | February 28, 2016I've included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I'm a little hesitant to do another. But here's an angle on it that doesn't show up as much:
SteelyKid and The Pip looking down from the third floor railing inside the Nott Memorial,
We went over to campus yesterday looking for a bigger open space in which to fly SteelyKid's RC helicopter, which turned into something of a quixotic quest-- most of the big open spaces I had access to had students in them studying. But this did get us inside the Nott, where the kids enjoyed the view from the third floor down into the…
drorzel | February 28, 2016Again, random and artsy, but this tree in the garden behind the Reamer Campus Center at Union struck me as interesting:
A very symmetric tree, looking a lot like the veins in a leaf.
Is sort of looks like one of those pictures you sometimes see of oblong leaves where most of the surface has been eaten away, just leaving the delicate vein structure in place. (This kind of thing.) At least, that's what it looked like to me, and why I took a shot of it.
drorzel | February 28, 2016Random artsy shot of the moment:
Tiny lines of snow between the "slates" on our roof.
The wild see-sawing of the temperature has continued this week, so we got a little bit of snow, then it all melted, then more snow, then more melting, etc. This is from a couple of days ago, when it was cold, and I liked the way the light dusting of snow we'd gotten had blown into just the gaps between "slates" on the roof over the front window.
"Slates" gets scare quotes because those aren't really rock, but rubber facsimiles. They're made out of old tires, I think, and we have them on the lower roof…
drorzel | February 25, 2016As I've mentioned a few times, SteelyKid is part of an Odyssey of the Mind team through her school, working on a problem to build a structure from balsa wood and glue that will hold as much weight as possible. They've been hard at work the last several weeks, and completed a test structure last night, shown here just prior to testing:
SteelyKid's OM team's balsa wood structure, ready for testing.
This ended up supporting about 53 pounds before it collapsed, which means it could've held up at least one of the team members. Not too shabby. The kids were very fired up for the crushing process…
drorzel | February 24, 2016The Pip is in pre-school these days, and we have a running joke when I drop him off where I tell him to work hard, and he responds "No, grown-ups do work. You go to work. I'm going to the JCC to play with my friends!"
Of course, his playing does involve a bit of work, in that they do a lot of arts and crafts stuff. And while there was a long period where he wasn't really into drawing on paper, in recent weeks, he's gotten very fired up about drawing, and every day we get a few scibbled-on sheets of paper sent home. Put this together with the steady flow of homework from SteelyKid, and the kid…