Pictures
drorzel | October 24, 2015As noted yesterday, I'm visiting my sister for a few days, since I was on the West Coast anyway. Being here in Southern California, it seems appropriate to jack Kevin Drum's style and do some cat-blogging, and luckily enough, my sister is the Cat Person in the family. So, here they are:
My sister's cats. Clockwise from top left: Tate, Topher, Mona, Calliope, Oberon, Molly.
SteelyKid was really into the idea that we should get a cat for a while, though she's kind of cooled on that, but she'll probably like this photo a lot. Emmy... not so much.
I'm flying home tomorrow, leaving at an…
drorzel | October 23, 2015Having successfully given two talks in Sacramento, I'm spending a few days visiting my sister in Riverside, CA, because it's not often I'm on the West Coast at all. She had to work this morning, so I went on a bit of a hike up and down Mt. Rubidoux, where the city has built a really nice paved trail that winds around the mountain:
Part of the Mt. Rubidoux trail, coming down from the top.
I went out at around 9am, which had the advantage of being relatively cool and pleasant for walking. The disadvantage is that there was a ton of fog, making it hard to get good photos from up on the…
drorzel | October 22, 2015Having a slow morning here in Sacramento, because yesterday started before 4am and ended after 1am, according to my internal clock. This provided the opportunity to take some nicer pictures than just the obligatory hotel-window shot, so I went for a walk on the bike path by the American River. Where I saw Fire Sheep:
Animal grazing fire fuel reduction in progress.
OK, technically, according to the signs they had up, this is an "animal grazing fire fuel reduction" program, but I think "fire sheep" sounds cooler. There was a pretty sizable herd of sheep wandering around the side of the path…
drorzel | October 21, 2015I'm in California for a few days, to give a couple of talks in Sacramento. I'm told that it's traditional to commemorate such travel by taking a photo of a hotel parking lot, so here you go:
The obligatory hotel parking lot photo.
There are, in fact, palm trees around here, just not any that are visible from the hotel room window.
And now, I need to be horizontal for an hour or so, because OMG, long travel day.
drorzel | October 19, 2015We've had a serious cold snap over the last few days, with temperatures dropping from the 60F kind of range down to 40F. And with that comes, well:
Frost on the windshield of my car.
Happily, it's going to warm back up over the next couple of days, but it won't be long before I need to extend nearly every morning's routine by a few minutes to clear a thick layer of frost off my car. For the moment, though, I can still enjoy the novelty of the cool spikes and stuff.
Oh, and here, have an earworm:
drorzel | October 18, 2015Every Sunday, I take the kids down to the Schenectady Greenmarket, which from May-October is held outdoors, on the streets around City Hall. This puts it right next to our local independent bookstore, The Open Door, which is kind of popular with the kids:
SteelyKid and The Pip running into our local independent bookstore.
We have a standing agreement that they can each get one book every week, and SteelyKid can use her allowance to buy a toy if she chooses. We're amassing quite the collection of picture books, and The Pip will buy absolutely anything with superhero branding-- this week, he…
drorzel | October 17, 2015Another Saturday full of kid stuff, chiefly a rather brisk soccer game-- around 45F at game time, with a stiff breeze. It was interesting to see how different kids reacted to the cold. One or two got hyper, and ran around crazily to stay warm, while some others just disengaged from the game. And a couple had so many layers on that they appeared to be having difficulty running.
I was solo coaching today, so no action shots this week. I did, however, take a picture of these flowers by our front walk:
October flowers.
They're very pretty, as you can see, and you should admire them while you…
drorzel | October 16, 2015It was kind of an annoying week in a number of respects, which called for something frivolous and morale-bosting. Thus, this:
Dr. Brown is horrified to discover who's been funding Dr. Red's research on the Philosopher's Stone.
The shiny rocks are from a collection of "Gold and Diamonds" (i.e. pyrite and quartz) SteelyKid got at a local farm "mining" thing last weekend. The Legos are from the extensive collection in Chateau Steelypips.
That's about it for me. Have a great weekend.
drorzel | October 15, 2015In addition to a bunch of work-related stuff, I'm trying to devote some time during my sabbatical to fixing various problems that have piled up around Chateau Steelypips over the last few years when I was too busy to deal with much of anything. Thus, today's photo is this fairly unremarkable shot:
Jury-rigged extra shelves for the spice cabinet.
This exists mostly to document my recent reorganizing of a bunch of stuff in the kitchen. These cabinets above the stove are somewhat awkwardly located, and serve to hold spices and other cooking stuff. They're a little too deep to be ideal for…
drorzel | October 14, 2015One side effect of this photo-a-day business that I probably should've anticipated is that I spend a lot of time now looking at stuff and saying "That's make a good photo..." Which is annoying when I'm out and don't have the camera with me, so I've started throwing it in the car when I go out to run errands.
This paid off this morning, when I took The Pip to day care, and was greeted by this:
Rainbow over the entrance to the JCC this morning.
That's his day care sitting right at the end of a rainbow. Which is a lovely metaphor for either the value of having access to excellent pre-school,…
drorzel | October 13, 2015I'm helping coach SteelyKid's soccer practice tonight, but that's no problem for the photo-of-the-day blog, as I got that out of the way early:
Scene from this morning's walk with Emmy.
This is what it looks like when Emmy and I go for our morning stroll these days, a little after 6am. Which is sort of pretty, maybe, but it's a little depressing to realize it's not going to be substantially brighter than this until next March, give or take...
drorzel | October 13, 2015For the 42nd installment of this photo-a-day thing, it seems appropriate to try to do some SCIENCE! to get an Answer. So, here's a composite of a bunch of images I took yesterday in order to investigate something:
Graph paper shot with several different lenses, to look for distortion of the images.
OK, this needs some explanation...
So, I do a lot of shooting with moderately wide-angle lenses (either a 10-18mm zoom or the 24mm fixed "pancake" lens), because SteelyKid and The Pip tend to want to be right on top of me a lot of the time, and it's hard to get good pictures with them fully in…
drorzel | October 11, 2015'Tis the season when things get all colorful:
Colorful leaves on a tree in the front yard of Chateau Steelypips.
Not much to say other than that, really. This is the tree next to our driveway, shot with the 50mm f/1.8 lens. I spent a while shuffling around underneath the tree finding just the right angle-- getting the in-focus leaves against the sky and clear of the background ones-- but I'm pretty happy with how this came out.
drorzel | October 11, 2015Rhett is off at some sort of football game, but don't worry, I'll step up to make sure the Internet has pictures of kids playing soccer:
SteelyKid in action at rec soccer.
I'm assistant coaching the team (and the only coach for every other game), which makes it hard to get photos of SteelyKid, but I brought the camera to yesterday's game, and managed a few good shots. I try to avoid posting photos of other people's kids on the Internet, though, and this being second-grade soccer, it's not easy to get any photos near the ball where the frame isn't kind of crowded. So this cropped shot of…
drorzel | October 10, 2015Friday was yet another heavy kid-wrangling day, as the Pip had a minor surgical procedure in the early morning, which required general anaesthesia. This was done before 9am, but we had to keep him home from school for the day to watch for ill effects. Of which there were none, so he and I went out to the local science museum for a bit, to break up the cartoon-watching that was the other primary activity of the day.
I've posted a bunch of cute-kid photos already, though, so here's one that's just science museum stuff:
Smoke tornado at MiSci.
That's the artificial tornado exhibit-- a…
drorzel | October 8, 2015In yesterday's crude astrophotography post, I mentioned that the conjunction of Venus and the Moon would be closer this morning, but I took a shot of it yesterday because there's no telling with the weather here this time of year. When I first went outside this morning, though, the sky was beautiful and clear and I said "Wow, that'll be a great shot after all."
Then I went inside to eat breakfast, and when I came back out, clouds had rolled in.
There were occasional breaks, though, and I did manage to get a fortuitous alignment of two of those with the bodies in question. which let me make…
drorzel | October 7, 2015One of the few problems with the new camera is that the Canon software that talks to it only runs on my laptop, not my home desktop. This is an issue partly because the laptop has less disk space (I got it with the biggest SSD available a few years ago, which is small compared to the spinny-disk drives in the desktop), but a bigger issue for image processing is the display, which shifts colors dramatically as you change the viewing angle. This isn't a big issue for daylight photos of the kids, where the camera does pretty well already and the GIMP auto-level tool handles the few color issues…
drorzel | October 6, 2015The difficult-to-spell name "Schenectady" (where Union is located) derives from a Mohawk word meaning "beyond the pines." The pines in question are an extensive region of pine barrens between Albany and Schenectady, a small bit of which survives as the Albany Pine Bush Nature Preserve. They've got a nice little nature center and some trails through the pine bush, and I took The Pip down there this morning, because his day care was closed again for the last of the fall block of Jewish holidays. Here's a shot to give you an idea of the landscape:
Plants in the Pine Bush Nature Preserve.…
drorzel | October 5, 2015Another fall day, another holiday closing at the JCC. I was home with The Pip for most of the day, which was the usual mix of fun, exhausting, and puzzling. For example, while I offered several times to go out to a playground before lunch, he refused. But then insisted that we walk to the store to buy... something. I got this picture with my phone:
The Pip's bike in the rack at the Co-Op.
Because it amused me to see a bike rack with just a little red tricycle in it.
We did go to a couple of playgrounds later, and I shot some video that I'll use for physics-y stuff at some point. But this…
drorzel | October 5, 2015A big chunk of Sunday was lost to a wretched cold-- despite a two-hour afternoon nap, I was asleep by 10pm-- but I did get the camera out for a bit while doing some late-season grilling:
Pork chops on the grill.
Not the most amazing photo, I know (though it does take deliberate work to get those cross-hatched grill marks...), but it pairs well with this:
Thermal camera image of pork chops on the grill.
Which is the same basic scene in the infrared. Because I have a thermal camera, so why not?