May 11, 2006

Lost Glove #86

glove on the ground by a hedge by a building

Posted by jeffy at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #85

glove across the street from a sunlit high-tech building

Posted by jeffy at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2006

Suckers for sunshine

two cats sitting back to back on a sunny windowsill
The babies do not object to the warm sunny weather we've been having. Not even a little bit.

Posted by jeffy at 11:49 PM | Comments (1)

April 21, 2006

Whiskers

cat overexposed by flash

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:24 PM | Comments (2)

April 20, 2006

Lost Glove #84

glove in the middle of a bike lane

Posted by jeffy at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2006

Lost Glove #83

gray rubberized glove disappearing into roadside detritus and dandelions

Posted by jeffy at 09:12 PM | Comments (1)

April 14, 2006

Watering hole

Cat drinking from bathroom faucet
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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2006

Enfolded feline

Cat sleeping in folds of a blanket
I'm not sure if Theo knocked this blanket from the chair onto the floor before or after he climbed inside.

Posted by jeffy at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2006

Lost Glove #82

cloth glove on a fence rail

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.

two gloves on a fence rail, a parked xtracycle, and a cyclist

Posted by jeffy at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #81

blue rubberized glove in parking lot outside Home Depot

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

Posted by jeffy at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2006

Lost Glove #80

red and black glove near a puddle with reflection of sky and power lines

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.

Posted by jeffy at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #79

bright blue glove alongside trail behind split rail fence

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.

Posted by jeffy at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2006

Sticking together

two cats curled on a couch
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!)

Posted by jeffy at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #78

green glove with gripper dots on grey gravel

Posted by jeffy at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2006

Lost Glove #77

inside-out glove under a freeway overpass
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".

Posted by jeffy at 08:43 PM | Comments (1)

March 07, 2006

Lost Glove #76

blue rubberized canvas work glove on a divided highway

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2006

Sleepy babies

sleepy kittens

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!

Posted by jeffy at 02:17 PM | Comments (3)

Lost Gloves #75

pair of black knit gloves entwined and surrounded by gravel and dead grass

Posted by jeffy at 03:53 AM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2006

Lost Glove #74

blue ski glove on a plastic bus-stop bench

This glove missed its bus.

Posted by jeffy at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2006

Lost Glove #73

glove in the middle of the road at night

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

Posted by jeffy at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #72

bluegreen rubber glove on pebbly sidewalk
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.

Posted by jeffy at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2006

Feline human departure avoidance tactics

cat lying on a backpack
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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2005

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.

cat051230c.jpg
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.

cat051230b.jpg
In some households all this stuff might go right into the recycle bin, but then where would the kitties sleep?

cat051230a.jpg
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!

Posted by jeffy at 08:13 PM | Comments (3)

December 28, 2005

Lost Glove #65

gunk-encrusted cloth glove behind caution tape

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.

Posted by jeffy at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2005

Rorschach cat

cat with chin resting on mac power cable seen from above
I see Thelonious Monk. What do you see?

Posted by jeffy at 11:52 PM | Comments (3)

December 01, 2005

Bike-cam

ultrapod strapped to bicycle handlebar stemOne 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.

Posted by jeffy at 01:04 AM | Comments (2)

November 29, 2005

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.

Posted by jeffy at 02:39 PM | Comments (3)

November 11, 2005

Have at you!

cats playing at fighting

Posted by jeffy at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2005

Why isn't it moving?

cat peering intently upside down at windows mouse pointer
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.

Posted by jeffy at 02:35 AM | Comments (1)

October 29, 2005

Cozy just doesn't quite cover it

cat on legs of woman reading (other one on the back of the couch)

Posted by jeffy at 12:09 AM | Comments (2)

October 14, 2005

Looking up

Cat looking up

Posted by jeffy at 11:55 PM | Comments (3)

October 09, 2005

Cat in the box

cat dozing upright in a shipping 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.

Posted by jeffy at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2005

Lost Glove #62

black rubber glove in a bike lane
This specimen was right in the middle of one of the few bike lanes in Issaquah.

Posted by jeffy at 02:44 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2005

Found gloves

disposable gloves on a dirty keyboard
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.

Posted by jeffy at 02:17 AM | Comments (3)

October 01, 2005

Balance is everything

cat in a shoe box

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.

Posted by jeffy at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)

Socks!

hand-knit 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.

Posted by jeffy at 07:06 PM | Comments (2)

September 28, 2005

Lost Glove #61

well-worn glove on dirty, spray-painted sidewalk

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #60

white knit rubberized glove on pavement with cars and sky in background

Posted by jeffy at 12:25 AM | Comments (1)

September 24, 2005

Lost Glove #59

glove050924.jpg

Posted by jeffy at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2005

Cozy boy

cat curled up in a cat tree

Posted by jeffy at 11:19 PM | Comments (2)

Lost Glove #58

knitted glove with fake fur cuff

Posted by jeffy at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2005

Lost Glove #57

rubberized canvas glove on a freeway onramp

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

Posted by jeffy at 09:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2005

Lost Glove #56

Glove on brick walk by tree near post office
Saw this on Saturday. Today it was gone. At least one of my readers may recognize this non-Issaquah location.

Posted by jeffy at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2005

Glove anniversaries

flattened, tattered, and worn garden glove on pavement

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.

crumpled knitted glove with gravel and clover
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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2005

Golden-eyed girl

head shot of golden-eyed alice the calico cat
After Theo got a close-up, Alice wouldn't leave me alone until she got one too.

Posted by jeffy at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2005

Waiting for dinner

cat sitting on chair at dining room table

Posted by jeffy at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2005

Lost Gloves #55

pair of knit cotton gloves, palms up, thumbs and index fingers overlapping
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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:24 PM | Comments (2)

August 12, 2005

Fur circle

cat050812.jpg

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2005

Too darn hot

It's been sooo hot that the cats have been thiiiisssss long.
panoramic view of two cats presenting maximum cooling surface to the air
That's not a bright orange fez on Alice's tummy, it's a (underexposed, off-white) lampshade in the background.

Posted by jeffy at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2005

Sunny side up

cat on egg carton in the sun

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

Posted by jeffy at 03:29 PM | Comments (1)

July 22, 2005

Double decker

cat tunnel with cat inside and cat on top

Posted by jeffy at 11:13 PM | Comments (3)

July 15, 2005

Cat carton

cat sitting in egg carton

Yes, he's staring at a blank wall.

Posted by jeffy at 11:18 PM | Comments (2)

July 10, 2005

Lost Glove #53

white glove crumpled longitudinally

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

Posted by jeffy at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2005

Sun sponge

kitty with feet curled under casting shadow in the sun

Posted by jeffy at 11:38 PM | Comments (1)

July 07, 2005

Lost Glove #52

glove in rough with spray painted pavement

Posted by jeffy at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2005

Green-eyed boy

extreme closeup of Theo's face showing slit-pupiled green eyes

Posted by jeffy at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2005

Sun worship

cat sprawled in sunshine

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2005

Lost Glove #51

glove on pavement forming a fist

Posted by jeffy at 02:15 AM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2005

Personal grooming

alice licking her brother

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

Posted by jeffy at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2005

Nap time

cat on chair next to cat on cushion on chair

Posted by jeffy at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2005

*Kill* the monster!

cat attacking toy

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

May 27, 2005

Bad day for a fur coat

cat lying in front of box fan

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

Bag boy

cat in cloth grocery bag hanging from doorknob

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:06 PM | Comments (4)

May 17, 2005

Lost Glove #50

blue glove in crosswalk

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2005

Lost Glove #49

yet another blue rubberized work glove

Posted by jeffy at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2005

Tome cat

cat reading Return of the King

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

Posted by jeffy at 10:51 PM | Comments (2)

May 12, 2005

Lost Gloves #48

nice black leather motorcycle gloves in the middle of the road

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2005

Synchronized siblings

Two seated cats in a window looking to your left

Posted by jeffy at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2005

Blanket burrow boy

cat curled up in blanket

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

Posted by jeffy at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2005

Spinny kitty

kitty on spinning office chair
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.

Posted by jeffy at 07:55 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2005

Lost glove #47

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

Posted by jeffy at 08:24 PM | Comments (1)

Lost gloves #45 & #46

leather work glove in a bike lane

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.

leather work glove with a red plastic bead on its adjuster

Posted by jeffy at 01:34 AM | Comments (0)

Lost glove #44

blue glove in the middle of a crosswalk
This one's from a couple of weeks ago. Cat blogging took precedence that day and then I forgot about it.

Posted by jeffy at 01:09 AM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2005

Oblivious to spring

cats curled on cushions ignoring flowering trees outside

Posted by jeffy at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2005

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.

light rail bridge over the Fraser River in Vancouver, BC

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.

two sea otters basking in the sun

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.

totem poles against Vancouver, BC skyline

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

indoor courtyard outside the entrance to the Vancouver Public Library

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.

Posted by jeffy at 03:33 PM | Comments (1)

April 09, 2005

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.

Jon Dee Graham

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.

Alejandro Escovedo and most of his band

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.

Posted by jeffy at 02:24 AM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2005

Defending the homefront

kitties on a window sill glaring at exterior usurper wannabe
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)).

Posted by jeffy at 08:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2005

Lost Gloves #43

pair of gloves on the sea wall at Stanley Park, Vancouver BC

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.

Posted by jeffy at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #42

glove with retracted fingers

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.

Posted by jeffy at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2005

Birthday present

two mostly white cats on clean black jeans
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!

Posted by jeffy at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2005

love of tunnel

cat plugs 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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:09 PM | Comments (1)

March 18, 2005

Boy beholds bees

cat050318.jpg
Our baby boy was bemused by this bottle brimming with buzzing bees.

Posted by jeffy at 09:59 PM | Comments (2)

Lost Glove #41

glove in the gutter

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.

Posted by jeffy at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

Packing it in

cat asleep on shredded paper in a cardboard box
Some call it trash, others recycling, but in the spirit of reuse, you can't beat Alice's repurposing of this packing material.

Posted by jeffy at 10:31 PM | Comments (2)

March 02, 2005

Lost Glove #40

glove on garbage can alongside walking trail

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2005

Siamese couch

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:55 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2005

Watching the British come ashore at Normandy

cat on inverted egg carton

Posted by jeffy at 10:36 PM | Comments (3)

February 11, 2005

Undercover cat blogging

cat050211.jpg

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

Posted by jeffy at 10:53 PM | Comments (2)

January 31, 2005

Lost Glove #39

glove in the gutter near a man hole cover

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:39 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2005

Friday Copy Cats

small cat in smaller box

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.

bigger cat in same small box

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.

Posted by jeffy at 01:04 AM | Comments (1)

Lost Gloves #37 & #38

tan leather work glove on a fog line

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.

tan leather work glove becoming one with the verge

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.

Posted by jeffy at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #36

soggy glove with leaves

Saw this one on Monday.

Posted by jeffy at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2005

Lost Glove #35

rubberized work glove on paved shoulder alongside cracked concrete road surface

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.

glove, yellow curb, XXX drive in

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:41 PM | Comments (3)

January 21, 2005

Another week, another cat picture

cats.  cute ones.

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.

Posted by jeffy at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2005

All cat blogging, all the time

big cat in a little egg carton

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:

slightly smaller cat in same egg carton

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:01 PM | Comments (3)

January 07, 2005

Got it!

Alice catching tail on scratching post

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.

Posted by jeffy at 08:13 PM | Comments (2)

December 24, 2004

Cat blogging

three white paws peeking

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.

Posted by jeffy at 06:55 PM | Comments (3)

December 14, 2004

Lost Glove #34

wet leather work glove in roadway

Posted by jeffy at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2004

Lost Glove #33

glove on fencepost

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2004

Lost Glove #32

foreground: leather work glove, background: receding roadway, flyover freeway ramp, forested hillside

Posted by jeffy at 11:19 PM | Comments (2)

November 15, 2004

Lost Gloves #30 & #31

white knitted work glove with blue rubberized palm on paint-spattered pavement

Last week the Bridge of Lost Gloves claimed another pair.

Run! It's alive!!!

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

Posted by jeffy at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2004

Lost Glove #29

fuzzy light green woman's glove on a sidewalk

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:40 PM | Comments (1)

Lost Glove #28

glove and fire hydrant by streetlight

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2004

So lonely...

lonely.jpg

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

Posted by jeffy at 12:50 AM | Comments (1)

October 04, 2004

Lost Glove #27

glove040930b.jpg

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:43 PM | Comments (1)

Lost Glove #26

glove040930a.jpg

Posted by jeffy at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2004

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.

knit glove nearly embedded in sandy soil

Posted by jeffy at 11:04 PM | Comments (1)

September 06, 2004

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.

four fingers and the folded-in thumb of a cheap garden 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.

squirrel's eye view of a glove in a ditch

Posted by jeffy at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2004

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)

Posted by jeffy at 03:53 PM | Comments (5)

July 20, 2004

Lost Glove #22

glove040720.jpg

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.

Posted by jeffy at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)

July 19, 2004

Lost Glove #21

glove040719.jpg

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.

Posted by jeffy at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2004

Lost Glove #20

glove040709.jpg

Posted by jeffy at 10:07 PM | Comments (1)

June 21, 2004

Lightning

light040617_1.jpg

light040617_2T.jpg light040617_3T.jpg light040617_4T.jpg light040617_5T.jpg

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.

Posted by jeffy at 12:45 AM | Comments (1)

June 04, 2004

PF: Landscape

landscape040604.jpg

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 09:24 PM | Comments (0)

Lost Glove #19

glove040604.jpg

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!

Posted by jeffy at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2004

More Black and White

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

sign on Pickering Trail

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.

35 MPH: Troll's eye view

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

big cat in small box

Posted by jeffy at 01:00 AM | Comments (2)

May 28, 2004

PF: Black and White

bwflag040528.jpg

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2004

Lost Glove #18

striped and spotted glove on an antique vanity

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2004

PF: Macro

macro020729.jpg

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:00 PM | Comments (1)

May 14, 2004

PF: Parts

parts040514.jpg

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 09:42 PM | Comments (1)

May 07, 2004

PF: Play

play040507.jpg

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2004

Lost Glove #17

glove040502.jpg

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2004

PF: Junk

parking lot

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2004

Lost Glove #16

glove040421.jpg

Posted by jeffy at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2004

Crow vs. Eagle

crow harrassing immature bald eagleRiding 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).immature bald eagle
Posted by jeffy at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2004

Lost Glove #15

glove in a gutter

Posted by jeffy at 09:24 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2004

PF: Self Portrait

guy on a bike

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 10:52 PM | Comments (3)

April 09, 2004

PF: Discovery

roots040409.jpg

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 06:35 PM | Comments (2)

March 26, 2004

PF: Neglect

don't ride a train on these tracks

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 05:45 PM | Comments (3)

March 19, 2004

PF: Morning

Half a donut

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

Photo Friday

Posted by jeffy at 10:50 PM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2004

PF: Clean

beaver-chewed fallen tree

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

My first entry for Photo Friday.

Posted by jeffy at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2004

bootleg neon

theatre lobby 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.
Posted by jeffy at 11:54 PM | Comments (1)

March 08, 2004

Yellow

urban wildflowerIt's dandelion season.
Posted by jeffy at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2004

Lost Glove #14

glove040219aT.jpgMight 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.

Posted by jeffy at 08:48 PM | Comments (3)

February 08, 2004

Lost Glove #13

glove040208T.jpgA 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.
Posted by jeffy at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2004

Lost Glove #12

glove040114T.jpgFirst 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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:53 PM | Comments (1)

January 12, 2004

Ornamental vegetable

purple kaleIn the Puget Sound region, in the winter, kale isn't a vegetable, it's a landscape ornamental.
Posted by jeffy at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2004

Not a shy siskin

pine siskin on a thistle feeder pine siskin wing detailThe 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.

Posted by jeffy at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2004

Evidence of visitations

quacker trackscoon tracksAn 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).

Posted by jeffy at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2004

An unexpected fountain

fount040106T.jpgSo 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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2004

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.

squak120.jpgThis 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.

Rosalind pointing with the pointy-haired kingThis is a 640x480 (ish) crop from a 2304x1728 original. That's Rosalind with the pointy finger and the pointy-haired finger puppet.
Rhiannon, Rosalind, jeffy, and CarolineThis 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 laughing at off-screen kittiesRosalind again.
Moet & Chandon capMacro mode shot hand-held with available light.
jeffy playing with new camera in the darkThis 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 signDecaying 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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2003

A short eternity

Pentax Optio S4 as photographed by a Largan ChameleonThat'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.Optio vs. Chameleon sides (shot by Kodak DC290)Optio vs. Chameleon fronts (shot by Kodak DC290)
Posted by jeffy at 02:03 AM | Comments (1)

Honor the flag

tattered old gloryThere'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.
Posted by jeffy at 01:27 AM | Comments (3)

December 21, 2003

Birch bark cherry

birch bark cherry trunkI 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.birch bark cherry branch
Posted by jeffy at 11:41 PM | Comments (4)

Lost Glove #11

glove in the grassI 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

Posted by jeffy at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2003

Lost Glove #10

glove in the roadglove in the road at nightAnother 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

Posted by jeffy at 07:44 PM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2003

Self in dimness

me in Red SquareI'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).

Posted by jeffy at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)

Water, water

water under the bridgeIssaquah 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.leaves in water
flooded trailThe other end of the bridge under-crossing with the swollen creek rushing beyond the thin screen of trees.
Oak leaves fallen in curious symmetry.twinned oak leaves
Posted by jeffy at 02:37 PM | Comments (1)

Rose hips


rose hipsmore 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?

mule deer eating rose hips

Posted by jeffy at 01:19 AM | Comments (1)

November 08, 2003

Lost glove #9

rubber glove on a sidewalkI 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

Posted by jeffy at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

High water mark

20031108000T.jpgBack 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.
Posted by jeffy at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2003

old sign

old Owl Cigars sign 5 cents?!  Nothing costs 5 cents! old wood, old paint layers
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.
Posted by jeffy at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2003

Ahhhhh

The rain is finally back.
Posted by jeffy at 11:05 PM | Comments (4)

August 25, 2003

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 ;-)
Posted by jeffy at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

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.
Posted by jeffy at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)

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.
Posted by jeffy at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2003

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:

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.

Posted by jeffy at 07:13 PM | Comments (2)

August 07, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

August 06, 2003

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

Posted by jeffy at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 01:39 PM | Comments (2)

July 26, 2003

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

Posted by jeffy at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2003

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?

Posted by jeffy at 11:47 PM | Comments (8)

July 04, 2003

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

Posted by jeffy at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2003

Lost glove #6

yet another lost gloveThis 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

Posted by jeffy at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2003

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.

Posted by jeffy at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2003

Origami Friday

paper cubesStarted 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.

Posted by jeffy at 06:10 PM | Comments (1)

June 05, 2003

Snake!

slithering snakeThis 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.
Posted by jeffy at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2003

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.



Posted by jeffy at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2003

Lost smokes

pack of smokes in the gutterA 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.

Posted by jeffy at 09:17 PM | Comments (1)

May 27, 2003

Cottonwood season

cottonwood seed podOn 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.

cottonwood seed drifts

Posted by jeffy at 08:33 PM | Comments (1)

May 26, 2003

Dog speak

bilingual (English/Dog) park signCory 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...
Posted by jeffy at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2003

Stone cosmos

ringed planet mosaicWe 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.

Posted by jeffy at 05:41 PM | Comments (1)

May 09, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2003

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

Posted by jeffy at 09:04 PM | Comments (1)

April 30, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

Lost sock

Parking lot outside Staples
Posted by jeffy at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2003

Lost glove #4

Lost pair.

On SE 51st Street just before Siemens' driveway.

#3 | #2 | #1


Posted by jeffy at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2003

Lost Glove #3

This one is just off Gilman Blvd behind the caboose.

#2 | #1

Posted by jeffy at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2003

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

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.
Posted by jeffy at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2003

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).

Posted by jeffy at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2003

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.
Posted by jeffy at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2003

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.

Posted by jeffy at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2003

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2003

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2003

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.

Posted by jeffy at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2003

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.

Posted by jeffy at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)