April 11 2009 Snowing With a Chance of Rainbows

The weather today was remarkable, cloud cover until you've decided to turn on the lights, then sunny until you let the dog out to play. You stepped outside into the rain only to see snowflakes on your hair when you come back in. On days like today, I always look towards the Mesa, in its magnificence, five thousand foot uplift that creates its own weather. Today it looked as if maybe it shared Mother Nature's indecisive nature with us. And yes, before the sun set over the desert, it left us with a double rainbow vivid and transient in the distance.

It was raining or snowing when I took this photo. Landscape setting at the maximum mechanical zoom, no digital zoom. I think that comes up to 7x, but I'm too tired to check right now.

April 10 2009 Stringing Beads

The string my son threaded is MIA right now, I took a good look for it, but he's asleep and I'm out of ideas of where he could have put it. I'm pleased with the symmetry skills my daughter has developed in these two strands, interrupted only by an extra bead my son wanted added on to the one she gifted him.


I chose to stand on a chair to get far enough away from the subject for flash tolerability. Standing away raised the perspective on the lip of the lid and blocked some of the contents.


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This is post one-hundred, for anyone interested in the milestone.

April 09 2009 Eavesdropping On The Lesson

From the moment she saw the stringed instrument, she was hooked. She wasn't even five yet, and she was all about, "When do I get to play the violin?" After her sixth birthday I told her that if she could do something, anything, every day, because she would need to practice everyday, she could have the violin. Two months later, she had made breakfast every morning for herself and her brother. The violin was ordered, and placed in her tiny hands, and she just glowed. Her teacher is, right now, merely for the introductory "stand right, hold it right, draw this way" sort of instruction. A month later, this tiny girl conducts herself during this lesson with remarkable skill and maturity. She responds perfectly, listens acutely. For a kid who can't carry a tune in a bucket, being a musician is as natural to her as walking.


Zoom of 18x before the violin is put away for the day, from back there, somewhere.

April 08 2009 Seeing The Same Moon

I am here, and he is there, and we are looking at the same moon in the same sky, and mathematically, the angle of him to his moon compared to the angle of me to my moon makes our distance nearly inconsequential.

Setting on night scene with no flash, no tripod, and is that dirt on my lens that does the streaky thing? How can I make the shutter stay open longer?

April 07 2009 Running Errands in Traffic

Always good to find something to amuse oneself while driving around town during the pre-total-rush-hours. I'm not so good at listening to the radio and driving; furthermore, the radio drowns out the sound of my 38-year-old German engineering under the hood, and who would want that? Nah, while I drive, I read things. Like bumper stickers and license plates. I think I am easily amused. This one was fun: I do like to feel someone is being clever, not cursing me, but suggesting that they are cursing me, though they aren't. It's so, well, clever.


At the light, I aimed, zoomed, and shot. It was really nothing special, except I now know why I want to kill drivers on cell phones when they're at lights. People get dumb when they multi-task. I felt so...disoriented.

April 06 2009 Enjoying End-Of-Day Sweetness

My month of April is proving more stressful than I even imagined, especially with poorer sleep than I should be getting. Misplacing ink cartridges (really, I'm confused), being a messenger of information instead of the destination for that information, children feeding off my mood, little bits of frustrations speckled around my day. I make everything pleasant take longer than necessary: a walk to a friend's house for fresh eggs, reading Edward Gorey, a slideshow of the children's photoshoot yesterday, dessert.


Nothing special today, though I did mess with the composition. I read that portrait settings blur the background more. I will try that if I remember next time I take a subject shot.

April 05 2009 Folding Paper Cranes

My cousin-in-law is getting married and decided on the 1000 paper cranes for good luck. We live half a continent away, so we chipped in with our own crane party. Not many of us were brave enough to conquor the steps of origami, but we concluded the evening with 133 paper cranes--the lion's share built by me, a good portion by my neice, and a few by other brave souls.

The photographer took this picture. I was too busy folding.