No-wax, easy maintenance, bacteriostatic, and anti-slip.
Friends,
I trundled down the hill to attend my nephew (and godson, btw) William’s first birthday. The birthday boy was pretty happy about the whole thing, even if the cake decorators may have been phoning it in…
…but the party favors were laid out with care…
Even the birthday boy’s sister was in fine form…
…right up until the bubbles I brought ran out.
Happy birthday, William!
– (uncle) bob
Friends,
Hey, lookee here. I took some shots last Sunday before the latest snowfall and forgot to get them off the camera. It’s a quiet time in my little burg, early in the morning before the shops open and people wipe the syrup and pancake crumbs off the corners of their mouths and get out in it.
The automatic locks at the post office clicked open and let me in to get my mail, but the market was still closed. Only minutes remaining to buy beans and tomato sauce for Super Bowl chili. Plenty of time for another shot…
The cloud layer has changed, foretelling the snowfall later in the day. Maybe. Or they’re moving in the wrong direction.
Much prettier than a drive to Hemet, at any rate. Just saying.
– bob
Friends,
You may have heard that we had a little storm up here in the gateway to America’s Cleanest Forest (more on that later). A modest amount of snow fell…
And now that I have a set of snow shoes, I don’t get a lot of frozen, wet intrusion in the top of my boots. That makes getting nice shots much easier…
I found that this was important to get quick snaps before the next storm rolled in…
What better plan than to work from home last Friday? The roads weren’t plowed regularly, but when they were, the ice sheet was exposed. Forget it, I thought. Time to light a fire and use my bandwidth instead of the failed network at the Festival of Dirt.
My DSL stayed up at this Secret Alpine Laboratory, but the genius monopolies of AT&T and Verizon combined to allow the big pipe at work to fail. Oh, and they decided to take the weekend off and got around to working on the problem today. Towards the end of the day, the connection came up but they didn’t tell us. “Just figure it out yourselves. By the way, we really value you as a customer.”
Of course they do.
– bob
Friends,
As promised, but very late, here are a couple nifty shots of tiny brand new baby Esme (no accent acute? -ed No, sorry. I’ve been corrected. That’s too pretentious.). I haven’t heard an update, but I’m guessing that she’s now forty pounds and four feet tall. Maybe more!
I’m going to go edit Wikipedia right now because there’s the new definition of cute. You’re welcome, internet!
– bob
Friends,
I haven’t found any answers to the question of the murky haze layer covering Southern California. The first two pictures aren’t of my latest chest x-rays, as you might expect, but document my camera’s struggle to deal with the low-light landscape this morning…
These two were taken a little later in Garner Valley. The fingers of gunk seem to be wrapping around the neck of the Coachella Valley, ready to squeeze the life out of the Festival of Dirt. Happy Friday!
Bigger versions are available with a click. Gianter versions are available on request.
Feel free to speculate on the nature of the bad air quality. Real or imagined answers are welcome.
– bob
UPDATE: From the Town Crier blog comes word from Cal Fire that the smoke is from the La Brea fire [warning: PDF link] 21 miles East of Santa Maria. That’s an awful long way for smoke to travel, isn’t it?
Friends,
The skies above my charming (and enticingly temperate) hamlet seem to be threatening rain. We’ll take that, of course, but the scenes on offer a little after 5:00 have been pretty fantastic as well. As always, click the thumbnails to see a giant version in another window…
Your pal,
bob
Friends,
I’m afraid that this shot in the Sunrise Series just doesn’t capture how grand the view was this morning.
Click on the thumbnail above to open a larger version in a new window.
Cheers!
– bob
Friends,
A friend at work (who has refused to drop by the comments – *cough!*) has requested more photos from the trip to convince her son that the nation’s first park might merit a visit. Message to “Sparky”: you must go. It’s a phenomenal place to see.
…just don’t step off the walkway onto the “fragile crust” surrounding the geysers. As a side note, they pull boiled bison out of those pits with truck-mounted winches. Just so you know.
– bob
Friends,
One of the most entertaining parts of the trip was a lesson in the wisdom of the crowds. Once in the park, people feel free to stop their vehicles whenever (and I mean whenever) they see something neat to photograph. The passengers pile out, cameras in hand, and take happy snaps. Then then next car comes and also stops, presuming that the driver of the first car must be on to something. Once the third car arrives, the sighting becomes an event. Now everybody stops to see what all the fuss is about. All of the passengers of the all of the cars begin to mingle “Did you see that? That was amazing!” fills the air.
It’s like a tiny festival on the side of the road that I believe should be recreated more often. I propose that you keep a camera in the car and stop to take a picture whenever you see something interesting. Maybe you’ll attract a crowd…
Couldn’t hurt.
– bob
Friends,
We’re back from a little volcano in Wyoming and have some pictures to prove it. See?
There’s about six hundred and fifty more, but I thought these were pretty good to share right now. There’s a bear somewhere in that pile…
– bob
Friends,
I have to be honest. The sunrise scenes during my morning commute just haven’t been all that interesting (or easy to grab with my little brick of a camera). Until today…
By the way, you can click on this picture to see the full-resolution version in a new window. It’s reasonably large though, so if you have a slow connection it might take a while.
Enjoy!
– bob
Friends,
Really I had no choice. I had to stop for a few shots of the sunrise this morning…
I haven’t done any color correction at all, but the camera might’ve underexposed the view a bit. Here’s a shot taken less than five minutes later…
If you click on these thumbnails, by the way, you’ll be able to see much bigger versions. This isn’t recommended for slow connections though, since the originals are relatively large.
Happy Friday!
– bob
Friends,
Yes, yes, yes. Easter was yesterday and what I did for the hippity-hoppity occassion was really next to nothing. Saturday, however, was a very different story. You could say that it was my niece’s birthday and you’d be pretty close, plus or minus a couple days. You could also say that it was a good day to view my brand new nephew, and you’d also be right. Despite what everyone else has been saying, you’re pretty clever after all!
Here are a couple of cute little kid shots:
Here’s the birthday girl on the swing in her backyard. Her cousin, who had been pushing the swing, decided that something more entertaining demanded her attention. Kinda cold, no?
And this, is young master William. In this particular shot, he’s waving off your humble paparazzo. They teach them that very early in Los Angeles.
I should have more pictures up this afternoon as appendices to this post. Until then…
Your pal,
– bob
Friends,
It was a lovely day here on the Hill today. The nice thing is that I could actually enjoy the day as this flu thing begins to abate.
– bob
P.S. Here’s another picture. Imagine if you ask a dog “would you like for me to take your picture?” and the dog says “no, not really.” Enjoy!
Friends,
This is one of my favorite photos. I’d played on the G&H Pools team for a few games in their ’73 season when I broke my arm at school. My teammates were thrilled, considering my roughly .025 batting average and the mountain of unforced errors I’d racked up during my time in right field. This shot was taken very soon after I’d parked my skinny butt on the DL that year.
Dad took time off work for the photo shoot and you can tell. Work boots, pack of smokes in the breast pocket, lit cigarette in his hand. Me? Oversized glove (didn’t help), vinyl cleats with plastic spikes that were so high as to make me wobbly during normal walking (running was nearly impossible), utilitarian Toughskins, and my jersey number obscured by the sling.
That number was thirteen. Surprised?
There’s at least one more photo floating around. The fabled “rookie card” shot. Once I find it, I’ll put it up here and on Facebook.
– bob