Mad Times

Lost Glove #86

Lost Glove #85

Suckers for sunshine

The babies do not object to the warm sunny weather we've been having. Not even a little bit.

Whiskers

I'm running out of interesting cat pictures. Need to dress them up or something. We had to do a last minute photo shoot for this one. Theo is trying to figure out why I'm shining a flashlight at him (so the camera can get a focus lock) and then setting off bright flashes in his face.

Lost Glove #84

Lost Glove #83

Watering hole

Alice much prefers fresh water from the tap to her boring old bowl. Often when we walk in to the bathroom she's already sitting on the counter waiting for us to turn the water on for her. Sometimes she drinks like this directly from the faucet, others she sticks her paw under the stream and licks the water off (you can see water drops on her paw in this picture even) Sometimes if she feels she's been waiting on the counter too long she will shout at anyone in earshot to stop whatever pointless activity they're involved in and give the cat her water. Usually the pointless activity in question is sleep. Good thing she's so cute.

Enfolded feline

I'm not sure if Theo knocked this blanket from the chair onto the floor before or after he climbed inside.

Lost Glove #82

This one is along the same stretch of trail as #79. In fact, the good samaritan who laid it across the fence rail picked up #79 too.

Lost Glove #81

I wonder what portion of the lost gloves in Issaquah come from here?

Lost Glove #80

We were out for a walk today and saw this. Went back by bike with my camera and took a bunch of pictures. There are several puddles around it so it was fun playing with the reflections.

Lost Glove #79

I kept riding by this one when I was in a hurry to get to work and didn't have time to stop to get its picture. It's so blue! This is along the newly opened East Lake Sammamish Trail.

Sticking together

When mom and dad are running around the house like crazy people, the kids have got to stick together. Early picture this week cause we're in party-prep insanity mode (which would be a thousand times worse if our amazing friend Marilyn weren't doing most of the work!)

Lost Glove #78

Lost Glove #77

Becky pointed this one out for me and got to watch as I walked all around it looking for a picture that wasn't just "glove on pavement".

Lost Glove #76

I think these "divided highway" signs are a relic of the days when this stretch of Gilman Blvd was part of the highway that became I-90. If I'm right then they're older than I am.

Sleepy babies

Been playing with the scanner so here's one from the archives. This was within a day or two of our bringing Alice and Theo home in May of 1997. Oh, the cuteness!

Lost Gloves #75

Lost Glove #74

This glove missed its bus.

Lost Glove #73

It's been a pretty sparse glove winter so far.

Lost Glove #72

This one kind of creeps me out. Even apart from the rubber glove ick factor, the way it seems to be stretched out of shape is just too organic.
A UPS delivery guy saw me taking this one and thought I'd be interested in the guy he saw elsewhere in the parking lot sitting in his car with the engine running, tossing his McDonalds wrappers on the ground outside his window. The UPS guy was pretty appalled, but I couldn't help thinking of Edward Abbey's comments to the effect that roads are so ugly and wasteful that a little litter doesn't really make much difference.

Feline human departure avoidance tactics

As soon as I'd unpacked my backpack from our recent trip to CA, Theo parked himself on it presumably to prevent its being used again.

Catching up with Alice

My apologies to all my cat-junkie readers for the silence of the last few weeks. Here are a few pictures of Alice to make up for the dearth.

Usually Alice covers the vent up completely, but on this day she was feeling generous and let a little warm air out for the rest of us.

In some households all this stuff might go right into the recycle bin, but then where would the kitties sleep?

With all the uncertainty surrounding the water-tightness of our roof we never got around to getting a Christmas tree this year. So I put lights on the cat tree. I don't know if you'll be able to see her, but Alice is peeking out of there.

Oh yeah, comments are back on. I still don't know what went wrong, so it may break again, but for the moment it seems to be working okay.

Happy new year, everyone!

Lost Glove #65

This was in Lincoln City, OR where we spent Thanksgiving weekend. If the sky weren't completely blown out you could see the Pacific Ocean about even with the fence by the bushes in the background.

Rorschach cat

I see Thelonious Monk. What do you see?

Bike-cam

One of the hacks in O'Reilly's cool Digital Photography Hacks book made me want to get an UltraPod mini tripod, so when I saw an Eddie Bauer branded one at the outlet store in Lincoln City over the weekend I snagged it. As you can see, it very nicely straps to the stem on my mountain bike and allows me to do timelapse movies of bike rides like I've been wanting to do for a long time. (Yes, I am a big dork. Why do you ask?)

Today I tried it out and took this movie (38 second 6.2MB AVI video Beware of that link if you're on a dialup connection (this means you, Mom)) of my daily commute route. There's a little surprise about half-way through that should be amusing to my regular readers.

My camera (Pentax Optio S4) takes 1-minute video clips but it has a feature to spread that one minute out over 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 minutes of real time. This movie was shot in 20x mode. 10x wouldn't be long enough for my commute unless I rode a bit faster than I tend to, or took a more car-filled route.

Flying House's flying roof

A big gust of wind blew a third of our roof off last night! I stuck some pictures over on flickr. We didn't get too much water in the house thanks to Larry and Ann loaning us their car so we could run to Fred Meyer to buy a big honking tarp before they closed. And if that weren't enough heroism for friends and neighbors, they also helped us put it up in the 38-degree rain at 11pm and schlepped concrete blocks around to keep it from blowing away too.

Have at you!

Why isn't it moving?

Sometimes Alice just can't get enough of the mouse cursor.

And yes, that perl script does generate an awful lot of warnings. Works, though.

Cozy just doesn't quite cover it

Looking up

Cat in the box

Late again. On Friday we went to see Don Quixote at Book-It! with friends (don't bother. It's way too long a book to survive the Book-It! treatment intact.) and got back late enought that I didn't feel like hunting down a picture to post, then yesterday I had a little computer fast. I'll try to plan ahead for next week and get back to Fridays.

Lost Glove #62

This specimen was right in the middle of one of the few bike lanes in Issaquah.

Found gloves

At work this weekend I was doing some maintenance that required me to visit a large number of my coworkers' computers. I started laughing when I got to this one and saw the pair of disposable gloves draped across the keyboard. There's some ambiguity about whether the gloves were intended as a comment on my glove habit or as a prophylacitc measure against the grungy keyboard. I suspect it was a little of each.

Balance is everything

I was working late last night so we've got Saturday cat blogging. One advantage to having enormous feet (and it's good that there's at least one) is that Theo can comfortably fit in the boxes my shoes come in.

Socks!

Our friend Wendy made us socks! How cool is that? I wouldn't have even realized that socks were something you could make except Tara makes them too.

Lost Glove #61

Wow, it's been a bonanza week for gloves, eh? This one is satisfyingly well-worn unlike most I see which look like they were practically new before they were lost.

This one also gives me an opportunity to vent a little. It's sitting on the sidewalk in a construction zone that's been making my ride home from work each night an adventure. This is one of the streets between work and home and it's been closed to traffic all this week. The other street between work and home is open, but the sidewalk and right lane are closed and torn up with other construction. If I were driving it wouldn't be a big deal, but biking a busy street that's been funnelled down to one lane is not a recipe for happy fun time. Hopefully all this night work will get the job done soon.

Lost Glove #60

Lost Glove #59

Cozy boy

Lost Glove #58

Lost Glove #57

Saw this on my way to dinner through one of the least pedestrian-friendly areas in all of Issaquah.

Lost Glove #56

Saw this on Saturday. Today it was gone. At least one of my readers may recognize this non-Issaquah location.

Glove anniversaries

This glove appeared in this spot a year ago today and hasn't moved more than a few inches since. You'd think it would be in some out of the way spot, but it's right in the middle of the driveway for a local motorcycle shop. It became one with the pavement almost immediately.

This one, on the other hand, reappeared last week. I first saw it back in July of last year. It sat in the gravel driveway to a water pumping station for a while and disappeared as the weeds grew up around it. Last week they came through and mowed and there it was in pretty much the same spot.

Golden-eyed girl

After Theo got a close-up, Alice wouldn't leave me alone until she got one too.

Waiting for dinner

Lost Gloves #55

My friend Marilyn clued me in to the location of this pair about which she said "They look like a happy couple."

I about had a heart attack riding my bike up the enormous hill on whose slope they were resting in their conjugal bliss. I tried to take a picture that depicted how steep the road was, but you can't really tell. Plus, I liked the tire tracks you can see in this shot. I'll shoot the others up to Flickr for the curious.

My descent was as harrowing as the ascent was strenuous. I kept my speed under 35 through nearly continuous application of the brakes, but my brain always presents me with images of blowouts whenever I go fast on two wheels. No mishaps to report, fortunately.

Fur circle

For more cat-bloggy goodness, check out Junku's flickr set of airborne cats. One of them is the spitting image of our Alice, and if I had a better camera I could take such pictures of Alice. Though Theo tends to do more flying.

If you're bandwidth challenged, just look at this one.

Too darn hot

It's been sooo hot that the cats have been thiiiisssss long.

That's not a bright orange fez on Alice's tummy, it's a (underexposed, off-white) lampshade in the background.

Sunny side up

I must confess that I did place that egg carton in that patch of sunshine fully expecting that a certain cat would not be able to resist its charms. And, hey look, cuteness!

And if that isn't enough cuteness, Lance Arthur has written some very funny (and extremely profane) songs for his cat, Paris: Paris Songs and Songs for Paris

Double decker

Cat carton

Yes, he's staring at a blank wall.

Lost Glove #53

We went to a friend's art installation on Beacon Hill and saw this on the way from the bus to the gallery.

Sun sponge

Lost Glove #52

Green-eyed boy

Sun worship

I've started using flickr more lately so if you want to see some of my recent pictures, visit my flickr page.

Lost Glove #51

Personal grooming

Sometimes, when Alice has absorbed enough lappy goodness, she forgets to be aloof with her brother long enough to clean his ears for him.

Nap time

*Kill* the monster!

This was taken a couple years ago, moments after Alice unwrapped a new toy from her grandma. You can't really tell from this picture, but it's a little plush green froggy sort of thing with a compartment in its belly for a little teabag-like pouch full of catnip. Alice claimed it immediately (as you can see) and still plays with it quite often. We know this because when we put their toys away her monster (as we call it) is always one of the first things to begin mysteriously moving from place to place in the house when we're not looking.

Bad day for a fur coat

The record high temperatures we've been subjected to these last few days are not welcomed by the kitties. At all. Theo keeps yelling at us and we can tell he just wants us to turn down the heat. The flash makes the fan look stopped. It really is blowing on him. Even as I type this.

Bag boy

Theo likes to ride around in bags. Or just hang around.

Lost Glove #50

This is almost surely the other half of yesterday's.

It's also the same kind of glove and in almost exactly the same place as #44.

Lost Glove #49

Tome cat

Another of Alice's standard poses. Not very conducive to Becky's reading.

Lost Gloves #48

These are the nicest gloves I've seen lost so far. This street serves only one office so I think it's likely that their (the gloves') owner will go through here again soon and find them.

I had my 35mm camera with the 28mm lens on with me so I took some shots with that too. This picture is from the OptioS4.

Synchronized siblings

Blanket burrow boy

No human intervention is required to get Theo into this sort of pose.

Spinny kitty

One of Alice's favorite games is to get on the office chair and then be cute until someone comes along and spins the chair for her. Usually when you get her spinning pretty good she takes a bath. This girl loves the trippy stuff.

While our kitties are pretty cute it's still hard to imagine a kitty cuter than this one.

Lost glove #47

It must be spring, gloves are defecting right and left. This is just 20 meters from yesterday's pair (which were gone this morning).

Lost gloves #45 & #46

I was just thinking the other day that it had been a while since the Bridge of Lost Gloves (1, 2, 6, 10, 14, 30 & 31) had claimed any. And now here's a pair.

Lost glove #44

This one's from a couple of weeks ago. Cat blogging took precedence that day and then I forgot about it.

Oblivious to spring

Vancouver, BC

We took a short vacation to Vancouver the week before last. We took the Amtrak Cascades from Seattle. It left at 7:30 in the morning which is pretty brutal for us, but the views along the water made it worth the pain.

One of the reasons we went to Vancouver is that we could get there without using a car (this was even back when we still had a car ;-), and Vancouver is dense enough that we could do lots of things without needing a car when we got there. In the end we didn't use any cars or buses on the trip (except for Rachel shuttling us to and from the station in Seattle). We walked just about everywhere and used their Skytrain light rail system to get us from the Amtrak station to within walking distance of our hotel.

We've vacationed in two northwest cities with light rail now (Portland was the first), and every time it makes us wonder why people resist it so much in Seattle. It's a wonderful way to get around. The trains come by every few minutes since they don't have to fight with cars for right of way. That frequency makes them immeasurably better than buses where if you miss your bus you're in for a half-hour wait or even longer especially out here in the suburbs. If you miss your train, you wait five minutes and get on the next one.

Plus, in Vancouver, light rail resulted in this beautiful bridge we saw as we came into the city on the train.

We stayed at the Buchan Hotel which is in the West End neighborhood only a few blocks from Stanley Park and 8 or 10 blocks from downtown.

I was excited to stay in the West End since I keep hearing about it as a model of high-density living in the northwest (mostly from Northwest Environment Watch). I've never been anywhere with as many high-rise apartment buildings. All these people living in close proximity has all kinds of good side effects. It makes for a thriving commercial district with uncountable good restaurants, and shops. It makes transit viable so there are numerous bus routes that run frequently making it easy to get places without a car. The transit availability and business proximity make it possible to not even own a car so you need less area devoted to parking and roads, and the whole area gets quieter because there are less engines and tires moving through. It seems non-intuitive to anyone raised in the west that more people can mean fewer cars, but it's true.

Since we were so close to Stanley Park we spent one whole day there. We started off at the Vancouver Aquarium. We happened to be there during spring break so there were some lines to get in, but it was worth the wait. The most unique draw of this aquarium is their Beluga Whales (White arctic whales. The link is to the aquarium's real-time beluga-cam.), but their less flashy exhibits are all top-notch as well.

It was a nice sunny day when we were there (though windy and cold), and these two otters were just basking in the sun. The one on the right is holding on to the other's back foot to keep them rafted together and was in charge of thrashing his tail about to steer them back into the sun when they drifted into the shade.

Another of the attractions of Stanley Park is their collection of First Nations totem poles. Most of them are fairly modern reproductions, but they're a fascinating art form and these are nice examples.

Another day we went to the Vancouver Art Gallery. We started off with their current exhibit Real Pictures: Photographs from the collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft (running through May 29), which has photos spanning the history of photography, over 300 pictures in all. I was all ready to buy the catalog until Becky pointed out the $85 cover price and sticker shock allowed me to escape the building without the big heavy book I would have had to carry home. We also saw their collection Emily Carr: Art, Place, Culture (ongoing) which highlights Carr's later work painting northwest forests and native culture.

On our last day in the city we bought day passes for the light rail and rode around a bit to see some more of the area. Our only major stop was at the Vancouver Public Library Central Branch, which opened in 1995. It's a really cool building. The library itself occupies a rectangle set within an ellipse forming the outer part of the building. All the seating and study areas are in the curvy outer portions of the ellipse with open air galleries running the full seven floors of the building. They have a spiffy self-guided architectural tour of the building (pdf) that we followed. We didn't use the library as patrons would, but based on our wandering around it seemed like a really wonderful library building.

The building complex includes a multi-story office building at one end of the ellipse which houses some government offices. One of the long sections of the ellipse has small shops and food vendors. I was enjoying a hot chocolate from one of those vendors when I took this picture

The main entrance to the library is just to the right of this shot. We were happy to have a dry place to sit and enjoy a warm drink on this only rainy day of our trip.

We got back to the Amtrak station with plenty of time to catch our train home. Becky bought a book in the station shop which we realized as we were filling out the customs forms was the only thing besides postcards and food that we bought on the whole trip. The immigration check was handled right in the station in Vancouver before we got on the train. For some reason they X-rayed our bags. There was no baggage screen at all leaving Seattle. Then when the train crossed the border at Blaine, WA, the customs check was handled by agents from our Department of Homeland Security who worked their way through the train randomly questioning our trainmates. They barely glanced at our paperwork, just took it and moved on. Maybe it's just the name of the department that made them seem so odious. No matter how polite you are, the presence of a gun on your belt makes you kind of menacing.

We had a great time on our trip and will probably go again. It's a super-easy vacation from Seattle. I really recommend the car-free vacation. It's so much easier to negotiate a new town when you don't have to guide your own vehicle and find a place to put it and pay to park it and worry about it getting broken into. On foot you have the luxury of taking your time and moving through the city at a pace that lets you notice the details and feel the pulse of its life.

Alejandro Escovedo at the Tractor Tavern

We went to the Alejandro Escovedo show tonight at the Tractor in Ballard. Oh my gosh!

Jon Dee Graham opened. He came out in a suit and tie looking like a respectable businessman, and then proceeded to blow that image completely away as soon as he started to play.

Graham's voice is Tom Waits gravel with a quiet tenor authority. He played acoustic guitar and sang heart wrenching lyrics, joking between tunes that "every teaspoon of pain makes me stronger!" It was a short set with wild dynamic range from rocking raucous blues all the way down to whispering ballads barely audible over the chatter of people arriving for the headline act.

After maybe a ten minute break (long enough for us to talk the friend who brought us to the show into fighting through the crowd to the sales table to snag all four of Graham's albums (two for us, two for him)), Alejandro Escovedo and his band came out and played a two-hour set with a fifteen minute encore. Graham plays lead electric and lap steel guitar for Escovedo so we got to hear more of him. The rest of the band is visible in this picture.

Keyboard, cello, Alejandro on rhythm/lead guitar, percussion, violin (you can see her arm), and bass.

Their music is hard to categorize. It's rock and roll but with lush arrangements using the strings, keyboard, and Graham's guitar to build a landscape of sound as a setting for Escovedo's forthright singing voice to deliver potent lyrics. I can't think how to describe it further. It was an amazing night of live music to make you grin until your cheeks hurt.

They're playing again Saturday night. See them if you can.

Defending the homefront

I need to try to take some more active pictures. Our kids are pretty sedentary, but not quite as much as the last few weeks' pictures make them seem. Here they are in a standoff with the neighbor cat who loves to sit in our carport and stare at them (our kitties are strictly indoor (well, except that Theo gets to go out on a leash once in a while)).

Lost Gloves #43

Our first full day in Vancouver we did some walking in Stanley Park and spotted this pair (which I'll count as one glove since they were right together) on the sea wall.

Lost Glove #42

We went to Vancouver B.C. last week, and five minutes after getting off the train I spied this subject in the middle of a jogging trail. I would have tried for a more interesting picture, but we were tired (we had to catch the train from Seattle at 7am for crying out loud), hungry, and starting to get cranky in the rain carrying all our luggage and not exactly sure where we were going.

Birthday present

Our babies turned 8 today, and what could be a better present than a pair of black jeans fresh from the dryer? Not only do they get to be all cozy and warm, they also get the added pleasure of coating my outfit with cat hair before I've even had a chance to put it on!

love of tunnel

I was going to try to explain why this little cat tunnel is upside down and situated where it is, but it's a long story and it's not that interesting. I would try to explain why Alice decided to curl herself into a tiny tunnel-filling ball, but I'm afraid it surpasses understanding.

Boy beholds bees

Our baby boy was bemused by this bottle brimming with buzzing bees.

Lost Glove #41

Riding home from dinner in the dark had to screech to a stop and park the bike to catch this guy in the gutter pretty far off my usual routes.

Packing it in

Some call it trash, others recycling, but in the spirit of reuse, you can't beat Alice's repurposing of this packing material.

Lost Glove #40

I assume this glove got a lift to this perch from some samaritan. It's been about a week since I took the picture and it's still there.

Siamese couch

Some days it seems like Theo and this couch cushion are joined at the hip.

Watching the British come ashore at Normandy

Undercover cat blogging

Yes, that rug is there to keep the ottoman free of cat hair. Theo didn't get the memo.

Lost Glove #39

This one is about 15 feet off of my commute route. I wouldn't have noticed it except I drove through this intersection a couple of days ago and it caught my eye. Sought it out for a picture on my way home tonight.

Friday Copy Cats

Alice is a tiny little cat, but she is still significantly bigger than a DDD box.

Theo is a big strapping lad so there's just no hope at all. Not that that stops him trying.

In case you hadn't guessed from the rash of picture postings, our wireless is working again. Once you've been able to post from any old flopping spot in the house, having to sit at the pc in the office is just no fun anymore.

<rant>
I ended up just upgrading to the newer qwest router which has integral wireless since they insisted there was nothing wrong with the old router despite the fact that it clearly didn't work the way it once did. Lo, the new one allowed me to undo all the kluged settings they made me do to get connected through the old one. Nothing wrong with it, not a thing.
</rant>

More book reviews this weekend, I promise, Dan. I have a few other things in the works too.

Lost Gloves #37 & #38

The left was straddling the fog line and as soon as I got off the bike to take its picture I saw its mate in the ditch.

There are a record number of gloves out on my routes right now. #23 from back in September is still there becoming one with the pavement. #33 reappeared recently after disappearing under a pile of leaves for a while. Then #35, #36, and these two haven't had time to move too far yet.

Lost Glove #36

Saw this one on Monday.

Lost Glove #35

Sometimes I think I should call these Pavement Snapshots instead of Lost Gloves. I liked how the composition came out on this one, but the one below is more fun despite its flaws.

This glove is from back on January 5th. Since these shots were taken, it has moved about 20 feet to the NW.

Another week, another cat picture

This one's a rerun for anyone who got our Christmas letter this year. Sorry.

I have a few book reviews queued up. Maybe I'll get around to writing one or two before next Friday rolls around. Time has been absorbed by some other stuff I'll write about one of these days.

All cat blogging, all the time

Another from the archives (I've got a million of em, you'll see). Egg cartons are irresistible, especially when they're precariously balanced atop the recycle bin. I've got another picture from 10 minutes later with Alice in the same pose. Ah heck, here it is:

I assure you that no human intervention was involved in these poses.

Network is still limited to one hardwired windows box hence I can't bring myself to do much blogging (input or output). Next week doesn't look good for working on it either, alas.

Got it!

Second in the occasional Friday Cat Blogging series. That's Alice playing her favorite game: Catch the Tail. The picture is old, from November of 2000, but she still does this any time she comes across a precarious perch, the higher off the floor the better.

BTW, I don't have a good reference monitor at the moment. Leave me a comment or send me email and let me know whether that picture is too light or too dark or just right in your preferred viewing environment.

Wow, it's been quiet around here, hasn't it? We drove to CA the Monday after Xmas to see family and returned this last Monday. With Rachel and Becky and me all taking turns behind the wheel, the 14-hour drive is almost (but not quite) tolerable. At least we were blessed with decent weather in both directions.

Read on for more tales of woe...

When we got back our phone was out. I did the usual troubleshooting and discovered that there is no phone box on the outside of our house. It might be in the crawl space, I'll have to check the next time I'm down there (not soon, please!) Anyway, Qwest came out and found that the problem was at their box where one of our wires had corroded away and broken.

Unfortunately while the phone service came back, the DSL didn't. I got on the phone to their support line and we were able to get the windows box to talk to the network by changing the TCP/IP settings to use 10BaseT instead of the default. Qwest is not interested in determining why this was necessary, nor in determining how to get my wireless access point to talk to their router again. The only way they could get the iBook to talk to it was to hard-wire to the router and use a fixed IP address. The support weenies contend that the fact that these kluges will let my computes talk to the internet proves that there is no problem with their systems and that I should leave them alone and surf the net over a cable like a good little luser. I don't think so!

Anyway, that's all by way of pointing out (unnecessarily, I'm sure) that I've been spending way too much time playing amateur network engineer and way too little playing at being a blogger. Hopefully I can get this junk sorted this weekend and maybe be able to post a couple book reviews and a glove or two in the near future. And catch up on the hundreds of posts in my aggregators.

Cat blogging

Some blogs have a custom of taking a break from their usual content to post pictures of their cats on Fridays. I like the idea (though in my case it will be a break from my usual lack of content. And gloves.), so here's the first in a possibly regular occurrence of Friday Cat Blogging. Those are Theo's toes, BTW.

Oh yeah. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Lost Glove #34

Lost Glove #33

One of the things I like about taking photos of lost gloves is that there is nothing intentional about a lost glove. The only intention in these pictures is what I contribute myself as I frame the shot and click the shutter.

In this case I'm not sure that's true since it seems unlikely that somebody carefully set their glove on the top of this fence post (it's actually the handrail of a foot bridge across the North Fork of Issaquah Creek, but it looks like a fence post) and then failed to retrieve it. I suspect someone saw the glove on the ground and set it here so its owner might find it more easily. But maybe not. Who knows?

I chose this particular picture because it reminds me of the Bush as Post Turtle joke.

Lost Glove #32

Lost Gloves #30 & #31

Last week the Bridge of Lost Gloves claimed another pair.

I would have posted them before now, but there have been computer issues around here for the past week. More about that later.

Lost Glove #29

On the sidewalk outside Shanghai Garden where I got my lunch today. (Szechuan Chicken in Hot Garlic Sauce. Yum.)

Lost Glove #28

Last Thursday we went to the Seattle First Baptist Church to see and hear author Wendell Berry read from his latest novel. Readers of Mad Times may recognize Mr. Berry's name from the header of this very blog since it was a line from one of his poems that led me to my title.

Berry reads with a soft, slow Kentucky accent that could lull you to sleep if it weren't also making you relish every phrase. The reading was delightful.

And it was well worth the logistical hassle of getting me to Capitol Hill from downtown Issaquah without a car in time for the 7:00 reading. I was hiking up Madison from 4th Avenue where I got off the 554 bus. I'd detoured half a block north to check the menu at Star Thai and decide whether I had time to grab a bite (didn't). Walking back to Madison, I saw this glove.

Life goes on.

So lonely...

Apologies to anyone who's seen Team America: World Police

Lost Glove #27

I'm trying to decide how obsessive to get about this whole lost glove thing. So far I've posted a picture of every glove I've seen since the first one back in January of 2003. Well, I decided not to post the rubber glove I saw last week.

I think it would help if I posted some non-glove pictures to mix things up a little. Maybe soon.

Lost Glove #26

Lost Glove #25

We went to my father-in-law's place in eastern Oregon over the weekend. On Sunday I wandered up the road to visit the site of LG#8. I didn't expect to find the glove since we'd already heard the tale of the towing of the truck on whose running board it had been perched. Sure enough it was nowhere to be seen. I wandered around the locality a bit looking at the junk that accumulates in out-of-sight corners of rural properties, and as I turned to head back toward the house I looked down. At my feet, another one.

Lost Gloves #23 & 24

I was walking from home to work to get my bike which I'd left at work last week so I could drive the car home which I had left there because my keys were locked inside. Quite the transportational comedy. Anyway, look, a glove.

After shooting it I resumed my walk and had only gone 30 feet before I spied its mate down in the ditch. People have started making fun of me for taking these. I have a whole rationale for why I continue to find meaning in photographing misplaced handwear. I'd probably make fun of me too.

Photologger group show

tyd has set up a gallery show for a handful of eight Seattle-area photologgers.

The show is at the White Dove Gallery at 5934 88th Street SW down in Lakewood, WA, south of Tacoma. There will be an opening reception this Saturday afternoon from 2-4:30. tyd has more info.

I've got five pictures in the show. 2 lost gloves , a landscape, and a couple of outdoor still lifes. Three of the pictures have appeared on this blog. (lost gloves #15 and #16, and the second picture in this post)

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone else's stuff!

I plan to be at the reception. Be sure to introduce yourself if you come!

(post updated 8/20 14:50 to improve signal to noise ratio)

Lost Glove #22

Lost glove with lost penny.

I'm pretty sure this wasn't here last night when I photographed #21 just 50 feet away. I walked back and forth between them to confirm that they were not a complete pair, but two different lost singles.

Lost Glove #21

On Gilman at the entrance to the stub of Rainier that goes to Zetec and is being contemplated as a third freeway crossing for our macadam-obsessed town.

This is about 20 feet from where glove #3 was.

I need to make a map while I can still remember where I saw them all.

Lost Glove #20

Lightning

Last Thursday night there was a doozy of a thunderstorm in the Cascade foothills. It ran for several hours with multiple lightning flashes per minute. Other parts of the country might take this kind of thing for granted, but around here this is an event!

When it was obvious that the storm wasn't going to slow down I decided to try to take some pictures. My new camera (Optio S4) doesn't have the ability to take anything like a long exposure so I dropped back to the old Kodak DC290. Set up the tripod on the back patio and set it for its longest exposure (16 seconds) and started clicking away. Mostly I got dark frames with a scattering of noise from the ccd, but when a flash was in frame it did all right. The thumbnails don't render the bolts very well so click through if you've got the bandwidth (or time).

The storm was so far away we didn't get much thunder (or rain), but the light show sure was fun.

PF: Landscape

Photo Friday

Lost Glove #19

Was late for a meeting this morning cause I had to stop and shoot this glove in the bike lane on East Lake Sammamish Parkway. Gotta have your priorities!

More Black and White

I was having fun with the black and white. This one made Becky laugh:

I was looking for stuff that actually had black and white in it even though I'd set the camera to shoot in grayscale. It amuses me to take assignments overly literally.

Theo moved right after I shot this one or I would have tried again without the flash.

PF: Black and White

Photo Friday

Lost Glove #18

Saw this in a local antique mall. Neither price tag nor mate was in evidence.

PF: Macro

I took this a couple of years ago with my Largan Chameleon (super-cheap 640x480 fixed-focus digital camera) and inadvertently left the macro mode switch on. I liked the impressionistic effect and have used this as the background picture on my laptop ever since.

Photo Friday

Three weeks with nothing but Photo Friday posts. Sigh. I've got a bunch of stuff to write up, I just need to get off my duff. Soon.

PF: Parts

Photo Friday

PF: Play

Photo Friday

Lost Glove #17

A non-Issaquah glove. Down the street from the Crest movie theatre in Seattle.

PF: Junk

Photo Friday

Lost Glove #16

Crow vs. Eagle

Riding to work today along the Pickering Trail I noticed an immature bald eagle being harrassed by a crow. I watched and followed them around along the trail and through the underbrush and into the Costco employee parking lot and took a bunch of pictures. The eagle kept landing in trees and resting. The crow would fly around and wait him out. When the eagle took off again the crow would go back on the attack. The other people on the trail didn't seem to even notice the drama going on above their heads. Both the shots here are cropped from the originals. Click the thumbnails for all the resolution I've got (not much).

Lost Glove #15

PF: Self Portrait

Photo Friday

PF: Discovery

Photo Friday

PF: Neglect

Photo Friday

PF: Morning

When your idea of "morning" is 12:00 noon, this is all that's left of the donuts.

Photo Friday

PF: Clean

A beaver has started the work to clean away this fallen tree.

My first entry for Photo Friday.

bootleg neon

I had to post this one because the boy at the movie theatre got on my case for taking a picture in their lobby. He claimed that the studios get all bent about people taking pictures of their promotional materials. Huh? They don't want their advertising to be seen more widely? Whatever. So here you have it, stolen neon.

Yellow

It's dandelion season.

Lost Glove #14

Might be the same glove as #11 which might have been the mate of #6. If it is the same, it has moved halfway from the spot where I saw it first to the spot where I saw its possible mate first. Or it could be that someone around here considers this flavor of glove disposable.

Lost Glove #13

A couple of weeks ago I was late for a meeting at work and took the shorter, but higher traffic way to work and as I rushed by I noticed what I thought was a glove. I went out for a purely recreational ride today and coincidentally ended up passing this corner with enough time to snap a shot.

Lost Glove #12

First lost glove of 2004. First lost glove with the OptioS4. I was spoiled by the fixed focus on the Chameleon. I haven't mastered the idiosyncracies of the Pentax's auto-focus yet. And sadly even at maximum enlargement on the lcd, it's hard to tell if you've gotten a sharp picture in the field. More practice is needed.

Anyway, this glove is in the gated fire lane behind the King County Courthouse in Issaquah.

My friends are starting to tease me about my glove fetish. I just keep seeing them. It's strange what you see around you if you adjust your focus. It's bizarre that so many gloves are lost in the three miles between my house and my job. Only two of the gloves I've posted so far (#7 and #8) have been outside of this tiny area. I should make a map while I can still remember them all.

I gave the gloves their own category so I don't have to keep putting in links to previous entries in the series.

Ornamental vegetable

In the Puget Sound region, in the winter, kale isn't a vegetable, it's a landscape ornamental.

Not a shy siskin

The pine siskin have been sucking down the thistle seed in our feeder pretty fast. I was out filling it up and when I went to hang it back up I noticed this siskin sitting two feet away from me on the other feeder waiting impatiently for me to get done. I had my camera in my pocket, so I pulled it out and snapped a few pictures one-handed. It was completely fearless, not even twitching as I fired the flash at it repeatedly. After a couple of minutes of this it got even more impatient and flew to the feeder I was still holding in my other hand! I hung the feeder up with the bird perched on it the whole time and took a few more shots including the one here. The first picture is full frame in macro mode with no zoom at all. I had the lens just a few inches away. The second is a full-resolution detail from the same picture.

I was worried that the bird was injured as it was holding its wing kind of strangely, but after sitting and eating on the feeder for ten minutes while I did some other chores in the yard it flew away seeming fine.

Evidence of visitations

An un-looked-for side effect of our recent snow is that it makes it harder for some of our more stealthy visitors to avoid leaving a trace. The thumbnails on these two are mostly useless, so click for the bigger versions. The first shows that the local flock of resident mallards played in our yard sometime in the last two days. The second reveals who has been tormenting our indoor cats from outside the patio door (looks like a raccoon to me).

An unexpected fountain

So you might have heard that we got a bit of snow today. The fun part is that the snow came after a couple of days of clear, consistently cold weather. This means there was a lot of ice around before the snow started falling. In particular, our rain barrel had a layer of ice across the top.

I started getting worried this afternoon when the snow turned to rain. The problem was that the drain pipe descends several inches into the rain barrel. I was afraid the bottom of the downspout was embedded in ice and the runoff from our roof would back up the pipe.

What actually happened is much more interesting. It seems that the pipe went deep enough into the barrel that it was below the ice on the top. This was only slightly better than my worst case scenario because there was still nowhere for the water to go and it was running over the top of the drain pipe and down the wall. The fun part is that the pressure created by that pipe full of water managed to find an outlet through several small holes in the plug of ice in the top of the barrel creating the little fountain in the picture. I made a little movie of the fountain too, but while the sound is cool, the picture's pretty dark. Need to figure out how to manipulate these AVIs.

I went out and bashed the plug out with a hammer after taking the picture so our poor roof will be able to drain without drenching the wall.

Progress

The reviews will keep on coming for another couple of days. While they're all written, I generally don't remember character and actor names well enough so I have to go through putting names in based on the IMDB (and adding the imdb links and poster shots) which takes some time. Plus I don't want to swamp my regular readers with reams of prose. About 16 movie and book reviews left to go.

In other news we got some snow over the weekend. About an inch fell here in Issaquah over the course of a couple of days. And it's so cold outside that it's staying around. The rest of the area didn't get very much. We drove over to Ballard to run an errand for Rachel today and there wasn't any snow to be seen west of Lake Washington.

Here's what downtown Issaquah and Squak Mountain looked like yesterday afternoon.

This picture was taken with my new Optio S4. I took a similar picture at each supported resolution. Click the thumbnail to see a 640x480 version (140kb) (same resolution as the max resolution on the Chameleon) Or for the bandwidth- or time-rich, click one of these other resolutions: 1024x768 (263kb), 1600x1200 (597kb), or 2304x1728 (1.36MB). These are all at the medium jpg compression level. These aren't the greatest test pictures, but they'll have to do for now. I plan to shoot at maximum resolution and shrink them to 640x480 for posting, so if I post a picture you'd like to see the original of, just give a shout.

Here's a few other pictures just for grins.

	This is a 640x480 (ish) crop from a 2304x1728 original. That's Rosalind with the pointy finger and the pointy-haired finger puppet.
	This one and the rest are full frame 2304x1728 shrunk down to 640x480. (Well, the thumbnails are 120x90, but you get 640x480 if you click on them.) That's Rhiannon in the foreground with Rosalind and Caroline being read to by Uncle Jeff.
	Rosalind again.
	Macro mode shot hand-held with available light.
	This is using the camera's night-scene mode where it does a long exposure with a flash somewhere in the process so you get people as well as nighttime background. I set the camera on a picnic table to take it. Focus is bad in the full-size version. Might be from me moving around during the long exposure...
	Decaying corrugated plastic towing sign in Ballard.

I'm really enjoying this camera's feature set. Especially entertaining is the movie mode. It takes 60-second clips at 12 frames per second (320x240, I think). But the big fun is the "high-speed" option that lets you do timelapse, stretching that 60 seconds out to 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 minutes. I shot a movie of the view as I walked to the hardware store the other day, I'd put it up here but it's about 8MB of AVI and you'd get seasick watching it with the high-speed amplification of my gait bouncing the camera around. If you're really bored, here's a 1.1MB clip of walking around our living room. I need to figure out a way to secure the camera to my handlebars for recording rides. Probably want some sorbothane or something in there to damp out any vibrations. Design suggestions accepted.

A short eternity

That's how long it took for the battery for my new camera to charge this morning before I could start playing with it.

Back in August I was pining for a better pocket camera

The main thing holding me back was the price tag (oh and my usual obsessing about which one to settle on).

Five months later, the Optio S had dropped to as low as $275. But wait, the Optio S4 with 4mp resolution is out too. And available for $327 delivered. And an anonymous donor made a sizable contribution to my camera fund.

I tried out the controls at a local chain camera store and they seemed usable. Placed my order last week at a place with a good price and decent ratings, and it arrived today.

The Chameleon has served me well, but it's getting handed down to Becky's purse and my new pocket camera is this little wonder. Have to create a new category on the blog though since 4 mega-pixels isn't exactly low-rez...

Here's a couple of comparison shots (taken with the old warhorse Kodak DC290) with the Optio S on the left and the Chameleon on the right. They're actually pretty close to the same size, but if you compare features, the Pentax is relatively enormous.

Honor the flag

There's lots of reasons to fly the flag. We've got a pretty good country here, and displaying Old Glory is a good way to assert our pride in it. It bugs me that the flag is largely synonymous in popular usage with support for US military action. It makes me crazy that some of our representatives waste our time with their efforts to make burning the flag illegal. The treatment the flag in this picture has received seems more disrespectful than burning it would have been. But I wouldn't make this illegal either.

Birch bark cherry

I thought I remembered reading that these trees, which are planted along Rainier Boulevard here in Issaquah, were called "Birch Bark Cherry", and a quick google confirms it and further provides the Latin name Prunus serrula.

Lost Glove #11

I wonder if this is the mate of LG#6 from back in June? It's a half a mile away and six months later, but it is the right (left vs. June's right) hand and same basic flavor... Hmmm.

Previous lost gloves:

#10 | #9 | #8 | #7 | #6 | #5 | #4 | #3 | #2 | #1

Lost Glove #10

Another victim of the Bridge of Lost Gloves. The picture on the left was taken on my way to work, the one on the right on the way home. In seven hours it had moved about 10 yards to the west, but was still in the same location in the same lane. Maybe I could get a grant to study glove migration patterns...

Previous lost gloves:

#9 | #8 | #7 | #6 | #5 | #4 | #3 | #2 | #1

Self in dimness

I'd never tried the self-timer on this camera before. It works. Beck and I went to see Grupo Corpo, a Brazilian dance company at the Meany Theatre at UW on Friday night. After the show the stairs down to the parking garage were clogged so we went outside for a bit. This is about a three-second exposure (metered by the camera) of me standing in Red Square. I bumped up the brightness, but it's otherwise straight off the camera. Click the thumbnail for the full-size version if you actually want to see anything.

The dancers were fabulous. Strongly recommended if you get the opportunity to see them. There's a little video clip of them doing an earlier piece at this site. The group seems to have registered grupocorpo.com, but there's nothing there yet (except one of those annoying domain registration ads).

Water, water

Issaquah Creek flooded the path under NW Sammamish Road again after nearly 3 inches of rain fell on November 13th. Hopefully the city will be quick about clearing the mud and muck as they were last time.

These leaves were drifting in the water lapping on the trail at the flood's highest extent.

The other end of the bridge under-crossing with the swollen creek rushing beyond the thin screen of trees.

Oak leaves fallen in curious symmetry.

Rose hips

While these look like cherry tomatoes at first glance, they are actually rose hips, the fruit of the rose plant, in this case some sort of wild rose that grows in great profusion along Pickering Trail. I was not the only one showing interest in the rose hips on this day. The doe below was accompanied by her antler-clad pal (when classifying a deer buck as "n-point", does one count all the points on both sides of said deer's rack, or only one side? I saw at least three, maybe four on one side on the fellow who sidled into the brush before I could take his picture.) A friend told me that the farther north they grow, the higher the vitamin C content in rose hips. Do deer get scurvy?

Lost glove #9

I don't know if you can really say that a disposable glove is "lost", but this one was sitting alone in the middle of the Rainier Trail on a recent sunny day. Previous lost gloves: #8 | #7 | #6 | #5 | #4 | #3 | #2 | #1

High water mark

Back on October 21st, Issaquah got over 5 inches of rain. Issaquah Creek didn't flood as badly as it has in past years, but it still rose enough to inundate the Pickering Trail where it passes under NW Sammamish Road leaving behind several inches of smelly muck. It's smelly because we're in the midst of the salmon run and a large constituent of the muck is bits of decaying salmon. Yuck. The trail is open again now which makes me happy since it makes my bicycle commute several minutes shorter and cuts out a crossing of a busy street.

old sign

The city of Issaquah actually owns this old building if I'm not mistaken. Not sure why they were taking off the newer siding which operation revealed this cool old sign.

Ahhhhh

The rain is finally back.

Larry's new toy

My friend Larry just took delivery on his dad's 1956 Chevy 2-door station wagon. For a car, it's pretty cool. The primer patches are a byproduct of an adventure with a thief who started turning the car into a hotrod thirty years ago. The car was reclaimed before any further damage was done, but the hood ornament and other brand plates were lost. If, by some freak of coincidence, you know where these parts might be found, let me know and I'll put you in touch with him ;-)

Insect industry

These ants have been conspicuously busy along one of the seams of the path I ride on to work each day. Today I saw what seemed like the same crew along a seam in a parallel sidewalk 30 feet away. They are more active than I'm used to seeing ants be.

Scenic shopping

I went to the outlet mall a couple weeks ago to buy some clothes that actually fit me unlike the stuff I already had. This is the view over the parking lot of Mount Si.

tiny camera lust

I've become less and less satisfied with my Chameleon low-rez micro camera. Like all things, it has pros and cons:

Pros:

• small so can carry all the time
  
• cheap so don't have to worry about losing or breaking it
  
• super-low power consumption so batteries last months
  
• decent macro mode
  

Cons:

• 640x480 max resolution
  
• fixed focus
  
• lens quality you'd expect from a cheap camera
  
• no lcd, so can't review images
  
• control beeps can't be disabled
  
• requires custom software on desktop to download pictures (and no removable media so a card reader won't solve this)
  
• flash is worthless
  

The indispensible Digital Photography Review reviewed three different 3-megapixel ultra-compact digital cameras back in May. They are:

• Casio EXILIM EX-Z3
• Pentax Optio S
• Canon PowerShot SD100

Drool drool drool!

They all have some features in common:

• approximate size of a pack of smokes
  
• $380 street price (ouch!)
  
• lcd display with rich user interface
  
• 3-megapixel resolution
  
• good quality optical zoom lenses
  
• limited, but decent flashes
  
• lithium rechargeable batteries with 2.5 hour run time (pretty good, really)
  

This size forces some tradeoffs too, and they all have some different ones.

The Canon has a 2x optical zoom (35-70mm) compared to the 3x (35-105mm) on the Casio and the Pentax (which have the same lens system). (This brings up my big gripe with all the snapshot cameras I've looked at (digital and film), they never go wider angle than 35mm. I'd love to have 28mm!) The Canon also has the worst macro performance of the three.

The Pentax seems to have some weaknesses in the controls that would probably drive me nuts (power button where shutter should be, fiddly navigation control for menus).

The Casio doesn't have USB output, but instead relies on a computer-connected cradle which also serves as charging stand. There's no A/V output even from the cradle.

Of course it's not like I'm actually going to spend the money right now, but... I guess I'd lean towards the Pentax, but I'd need to play with the controls on one first to see if they'd bug me or not. Please comment if you have an opinion. Please send email if you have $400 you want to give me ;-)

Update: For another $50, there's the Canon PowerShot S400 with 4 megapixel resolution, and a 36-108mm zoom in basically the same form factor as the SD100 (the S400 is 4mm thicker). Hmm.

A girl and her fishie

Alice got this little catnip-stuffed fish from her grandparents a couple of Christmases ago. She loves it, but she still hasn't written a thank-you note to Grandma.

Lost Glove #8

This one's on the running board of a 1940s International truck parked out back of my father-in-law's place on the North Fork of the John Day River in Eastern Oregon. #7 | #6 | #5 | #4 | #3 | #2 | #1

Bad idea

If you have a choice when walking in your front yard at 2am in bare feet helping visiting family members to unload their car I would strongly recommend that you not step on one of these. Ouch.

Lost Glove #7

In Seattle waiting for a light at 50th and Stone Way, saw this glove a couple of cars away. My camera isn't really up to this shot, but if you click through to the full-size version you can just make out the thumb sticking up. #6 | #5 | #4 | #3 | #2 | #1

Draw Bridge

Coming back from a concert at the Woodland Park Zoo (impressive URL), we had the opportunity to watch the Fremont Bridge do its draw thing to let a sailboat head out to the Ballard Locks and Puget Sound. This shot is at about 80% of maximum rise. The neon in the tower on the right is a depiction of Rapunzel with her long golden hair going down the side of the tower.

Cool spot

It's been hot. The cats are pretty good at finding the cool spots in the house (As long as you ignore Alice's tendency to hang out in the hottest spot in the house about half the time...). They were taking turns stretching out in this spot at the conjunction of two hallways and two rooms. I tried it out and it was pretty cool, both for the air moving around down on the floor and for the view up towards the ceiling with all those door jambs pillaring up.

caterpillar

Bright yellow caterpillar with a black racing stripe. I struck out trying to find it in Google (but got an amusing number of tractor sites ;-). Neither of our field guides to butterflies has a single picture of a caterpillar. Anybody know what this pretty little guy is?

Independence Day

Spent most of July 4th out at Howdy Acres, the home of our friends Kate and Mark.

	Here's Mark and me (left to right) geeking out. I had to do some work so we were trying to get my windows laptop configured to talk to Mark's wireless network. Between windows, the lame cisco software, and my company's paranoid configuration of my machine, it took us (both pretty computer savvy guys, Mark especially) 15 or 20 minutes to get the stupid thing set up so I could VPN into work. As you can see from the picture, Mark has at least partly switched to macintosh and OSX. He says all he had to do to get the mac to talk to his wifi was click "ok" when it asked if he wanted to talk to this nice network it had found lying around. Sweet.
	Here's Chewie (yes, it's short for Chewbacca) in what Kate calls his "hood ornament" which he had to wear to keep him from tearing out the stitches that resulted from a nasty gash on his chest from unknown causes. Chewie is pretty entertainingly dippy even without the cone head effect, but with it, he's a barrel of laughs--and a little sad.
	Vine Maple (Acer circinatum)
	The pinky gold color in this is purely an artifact of the late afternoon sunlight and the limitations of the chameleon ccd, this tower is the same silvery grey that all such towers seem to be.
	SPECIAL AREA REFER TO SPECIFICATIONS AND/OR OPTIONS
	Some foxglove which really was pretty much that shade of pink.
	Chewie betraying his ostrich heritage

Lost glove #6

This is at the same spot as LG#1 and LG#2. Hereafter, this location will be known as the Bridge of Lost Gloves. #5 | #4 | #3 | #2 | #1

Experience Music Project

We went to see Book-It!'s adaptation of Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons on Friday night and had dinner beforehand at the Turntable restaurant inside the EMP. These shots were all taken up towards the ceiling from our table in the restaurant except the last one, obviously, which is looking at the back side of the building past the Seattle Center carnival rides.

Small escape

A little bit more about our trip to Lopez.

	We took the Washington state ferry Sealth from Anacortes to Lopez.
		We drove all around the island just to see what was what. Here's a few shots from Agate Beach down at the South end.
	Saw this caterpillar on the railing of the deck at the cabin.
	At the ferry terminal waiting to leave Lopez, we saw this busy little sign assemblage

That's pretty much all the pictures I took.

Origami Friday

Started off with an easy cube made from six business cards (via Boing Boing) (on the right in the picture)

Then I found another cube made from 12 business cards which was quite a bit harder (getting all the 12 identical pieces put together without the whole thing exploding back to its component pieces was a challenge) (on the left)

An escheresque sculpture of 5 interlocking tetrahedra inscribed within a regular dodecahedron will have to wait for another day, but it's extremely cool.

Snake!

This little guy (about a foot long) was soaking up the warmth in the middle of the road under I-90. He wouldn't hold still enough for me to get a macro shot, and I barely caught this shot as he made a dash (doesn't seem like quite the right word) for the verge. I've been told that there are no poisonous snakes in Western Washington, and as I've only ever seen garter snakes (like this one) here, I've no reason to disbelieve.

Lost book

Weird how much of my lost stuff is from this little stretch of NW Sammamish Road. Today, a book. Torn in two pieces. The first on the left. Two views of the second on the right. Usually with lost things, I don't disturb them, but in this case, I collected the book bits and added them to our recycle bin. It appears to have been a FedEx driver's rate reference before it was torn asunder.

Inset

Driving to the airport to pick up Becky, I had the window down and my arm resting on the door and saw the reflection of my arm in the mirror with the little wide angle mirror looking like a window through my arm. Dug the camera out (while driving the twisty road with one knee on the wheel) and played with the idea. None of the pictures turned out exactly as I desired, but I like this one pretty well with all the various layers.

Lost smokes

A few years ago this would have been a find for me. Free smokes! But I have reformed myself to the point where after picking up some wayward Camels from the side of another Issaquah street a few weeks ago, I haven't broken my fast. They're sitting on my bookshelf at work and I haven't really been tempted.

Even when I was a smoker, I was a light smoker, addicted to the process and the cool of it more than the nicotine. In the jobs I've held for the last 14 years or so, termed "exempt" by the HR people, nobody takes breaks but the smokers. For them, every few hours give or take, that little itch starts up that tells them it's time.

For me it meant a break from sitting in a chair, typing on a keyboard, staring at a CRT. Grab my makings and stroll through the maze of beige cubicles, down the stairs and out the door. Step out of the climate-controlled building and experience weather. Feel moving air. Variations of humidity. Heat and cold. Smell the constantly changing stew of aroma that is masked by indoor stagnation.

At our building, smokers are banished to a patch of gravel access road that circles a storm water settling pond. It's a hundred feet from the building, and completely unsheltered from the elements.

Once in the "smoker's lounge" I would take out my packet of tobacco and paper. Peel a folded paper off the pack and hold it between my fingers. Open the tobacco and pinch out a reasonable quantity, feeling the coarse texture of the leaves, smelling the loamy aroma like the soil of the bottomland where it was grown. Place the curling strips of leaf into the stark white of the paper and with thumbs and fingers coax and persuade it into the semblance of a cylinder. Lick the adhesive edge of the paper and perform the final roll that transforms paper and dried brown leaves into a cigarette. A little ritual craft project resulting in an artifact, a physical accomplishment in the midst of a day of abstract bit twiddling.

But then comes the best part: fire! The magical flare of a lighter pulling flame out of nowhere or the alchemical wonder that is a match flaring in an instant of violent consumption, fading to a steady glow of yellow, red, orange, blue heat and light. Software engineer turned to caveman harnessing the elemental force to his will, touching fire to tinder, producing smoke and a glowing ember.

Draw the smoke, product of my labor into my body, absorbing the mild stimulant of it, altering my awareness ever so slightly. Breath made visible, made tactile, the miracle of inhale exhale sustaining life. Transforming the ubiquitous involuntary action of breathing from background to foreground. Feel the air moving in and out. See it. See how an exhalation doesn't instantly blend into the homogeneity of the atmosphere, but retains its identity for a time, moving out from lungs, drifting away from the body that it has sustained, still connected in a chain of molecular presence leading in and out and out and out into the world.

The artifact of the cigarette is slowly consumed. Paper and leaf and fire transformed into smoke and ash and dust.

This is what I miss about being a smoker. This little drama of making and unmaking. The echo of creation and destruction. The connection to the world of basic physical reality.

And then after the fire is out I would go back inside the sealed containment of the building, back to the beige cubicle, back to the modern ritual of qwerty and crt, back to the abstract shuffling of constructs with no physical manifestation.

Cottonwood season

On the left is a cottonwood seed pod. There's probably a few hundred seeds in among all that white fluff. (the wad of fluff is about 2 inches long and an inch in diameter.) On the right is the fuzzy white line the path has acquired of drifted seeds. Last year I wasn't moved to do a cottonwood seed entry until May 30.

Dog speak

Cory Doctorow blogged a similar sign from Vancouver, BC. I pedalled down to the end of the block to take this picture of Issaquah's version. The Vancouver ones seem to be the originals. I wonder if Issaquah got Cameron Stewart's permission...

Stone cosmos

We went to the Museum of History and Industry on Thursday night to see (hear) singer/songwriters Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell. They each did a set and sang and played on a couple of each others' tunes. We knew Kaplansky going in, but Shindell was new to us. He writes odd, strangely touching songs that are mostly like short stories. He talked almost as much as he played, giving background on the songs. His guitar playing was fascinating, sounding and looking like he had a third hand somewhere out of sight picking out the melody. Kaplansky played mostly dark sad tunes, but that's sort of her field. It was a good show. Being there, though, we forgot all about the total lunar eclipse which was pretty close to totality at intermission when I took this picture of a mosaic in the lobby of the theatre at the museum. By the time we went out to the car after the second set, the moon, peeking through scudding clouds, looked just odd enough to remind me of the eclipse with a little divot out of one edge all that remained of the transit of our big shadow across its face.

Native slug

The banana slug is our only native slug. The rest of them all oozed over from Europe or Asia or Alpha Centauri or something. I need to practice some more with the macro on this camera, I don't quite have the focal range internalized. That's a pen in the foreground of the first picture for scale.

Lost glove #5

Under the 1-90 overpass along Rainier avenue. (here) I'm not making any special efforts here to find these gloves, they're just turning up along my normal commute routes. At this same spot there's a pair of rubber gloves that I'd guess were discarded by a graffiti tagger (the taggers are in a constant give and take on this overpass with the painters from the DOT), but I decided that since they weren't "lost" in the strictest sense of the word they didn't qualify for this series. #4 | #3 | #2 | #1

Tolerable pink

The woman who lived here before us was a great lover of the color pink. We don't have anything really against pink in moderation, but there's just so much of it that it becomes kind of cloying and overwhelming. We're slowly getting rid of a lot of the pink things, but we actually like this pink dogwood in our front yard. It seems like the blossoms (not really blossoms, but whatever) are coming out really late this year, but it sure is pretty.

Lost sock

Parking lot outside Staples

Lost glove #4

Lost pair. On SE 51st Street just before Siemens' driveway. #3 | #2 | #1

Lost Glove #3

This one is just off Gilman Blvd behind the caboose. #2 | #1

Low-rez Benaroya

We went to Benaroya Hall with some friends to see Chucho Valdes on Monday night. I didn't bother even trying to take pictures during the show, but here are a few shots of the building. The first two are in the lobby, the second two inside the hall. Benaroya is home of the Seattle Symphony and opened to great fanfare a few years ago. This was our first visit. It's a lovely room, and the sound seemed as good as the hype about the place. But then Valdes and his quintet (usually a quartet except on the four tunes his sister came out to sing on) are so hot they'd sound good in a high school gymnasium. It was a phenomenally good show.

Lost glove #2

Rachel was entertained by my last lost-glove picture (from my pre-"Mad Times" photo log) so when I saw another one I thought I'd start a series. The weird thing is that this one is in almost exactly the same spot as the last one.

Lichen landscape

On my way to work on Tuesday I saw a guy with a camera with a foot-long lens on a tripod set up about a half an inch away from this boulder which sits behind a dumpster which sits behind the Pickering Barn. I thought about going and taking a picture of the guy taking the picture, but I was late for a meeting so I just went to work. On my way home, it still being light, I swung by the rock to see what he'd been snapping at. I think it must have been this little landscape of lichens and mosses. Probably his picture is better than mine. Still, it makes me think of the little garden down in the corner of Escher's Waterfall

Update: Becky and I bicycled to the Farmer's Market at the Barn (too late, it turned out) and I showed her the real-life scene. She thought I should point out that the little white tubule thingies in this picture are only about 3/8-inch high (one cm).

Design and food

Here's about as odd a selection of photos as you're likely to see in close proximity.

The door handle cluster in the back seat of a Toyota RAV4

A slug snacking on a springtime dandelion. Go, slug, go!

Salad with feta cheese made by Becky who's on a low-carb diet

The score computer at Sun Villa Lanes bowling alley taken at my last league bowling session for the season.

Strange day

On part of one of my normal routes to work today I noticed that signs have been added banning bicycles from what has been a multi-use path. There's another sign like this one at the other end of the trail. It's weird because this is the principal bike route for West-bound traffic along SE 56th street since the on-street bike lanes go away for this stretch. I need to make a call to find out what the story is.

Today was my birthday and Becky had this great basket of plants sent to me at work. How cool is that? I guess she likes me.

Daylight driving

We drove over to the tri-cities (which in this part of the country means Richland-Pasco-Kennewick, but probably means something completely different elsewhere) to see Rachel on Friday night. Had a fine time mostly eating and watching movies with a brief interlude of gardening. We took a few snaps on the drive back along highways 82 and 97 and 90.

Springtime critters

These first two shots were taken at downtown Issaquah's sheep pasture. It's easy to not know these sheep are even here, but their field is nestled in between Interstate 90 and Gilman Blvd. If you know the area, it's just West of Pogacha behind the antique store. In the first picture you can see two adult sheep. The second shows a mama with her two little black lambs (not that you could tell that's what that black smudge next to her is if I didn't tell you so)

This shot is in the parking lot at work where a couple of Canada geese were hanging out in a couple of puny little puddles. Lots of nice chemical-laden grass for them to graze on nearby, so I guess that tells you something about a Canada goose's priorities.

Sign of spring

This is the blossom of what I believe is a "Star Magnolia". It's just a little bush in our yard, but there's one a few blocks away that is full-fledged tree size. This is one of my favorite spring flowers.

Seattle landmark

We went to a play (the Book-It! production of Dickens's Hard Times) at Seattle Center, and on our way out I snapped this shot of the Space Needle. If the lighting had been brighter you'd see the track of a roller coaster looping through the foreground.

Old low-rez snapshots

I started taking pictures with this cheesy little camera in 2002. You can see all the pictures I took that year (at least all the ones worth enough to push them to the web) at my old daily photo page.