Sharing photos, videos, vintage images I've discovered, and -- occasionally -- commentary and thoughts from retired life and travels.

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Tight sqeeze and short on time

February 4, 2008

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I’m not a small guy — and I guess I’m not as small as I used to be. Our oldest daughter took this picture of me going down into the after torpedo room on the USS Razorback, a submarine permanantly moored in the Arkansas River at North Little Rock. The Razorback is a WWII era diesel submarine, commissioned toward the end of the war. After its service in the U.S. Navy it was sold to Turkey for another couple of decades of service. After it was decommisioned by Turkey, it was sold to North Little Rock and is now part of a growing maritime museum. It’s named after a type of fish, not the mascot of the University of Arkansas. This was my second trip through this sub. The first was last year and was the first time I had been on a submarine since I stepped off my boat, the USS Casimir Pulaski, thirty years earlier.

This was a pretty full weekend and, with going back to work all of a sudden, I’m finding it a little difficult to squeeze things into the reduced amount of time that I now have. I’m only working 40 hours a week, with no overtime, but, with travel, that’s about 45 hours a week that I had for other stuff before last week. I’m getting up early to go to the fitness center, but the workouts are a little shorter.

However, it is just for a short term contract — 26 weeks — so it won’t be long till I’m free again, plus, we should have some of our recurring bills eliminated, so financially this should be a plus.

It’s bedtime, I’m tired, and I’m starting to babble on, so it’s time to close — I will endeaver to keep up with this blog. We’ll see.

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My Wife’s Insanity

January 28, 2008

InsanityKaren calls one of her quilt projects Insanity. The quilt uses patterns from a book called “Dear Jane” and is based on the civil war quilt of a New England lady by the name of Jane Stickles. Every block in the main body of the quilt has a unique design as does every colored triangle shaped block in the borders and the four corner blocks. To this point, the quilt has 4,253 pieces and, when done, will probably be over 5,000. On February 23, she will have been working on this project on and off for three years. Insanity!

Karen blogs occasionally at Quilts…etc.

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A FUN digital image — 4 bugs in one

October 9, 2007

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One of the things I really like about my digital camera is the ability to shoot multiple pictures rapidly. I sometimes use this capability to “paint” or “sweep” a composite image. I sweep from side to side and up and down, capturing as many as 20 or 30 images in a short period of time, which I can later assemble using Autostitch.

This photo was a bit of serendipity. I’ve had a few composite “sweeps” where there was something or someone moving. Sometimes this results in a person or thing being stitched out of the image. Sometimes, there will be a ghost image. On my first attempt with the green VW, I ended up with this image.

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To get the final result, I cropped each of the original images so that the background behind the car was unique in each cropped image. Thus, when the four images were merged, the portion of the image where the car didn’t get blended into a common background.

A larger version of the image is scheduled to be published on my photo blog on October 21st

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That’s our sweetie!… I think.

October 7, 2007

thats-our-sweetie.JPGAt about noon yesterday, I went up to check the mail. All we got was a catalog from Lands’ End and some junk mail. When I got back down to the porch, I handed the mail to Karen, knowing the first thing that she would do.

Sure enough, she started paging through the catalog looking to see if there were any pictures of our granddaughter in it. You see, our granddaughter occasionally models kids clothes for Lands’ End and she’s been on a few local photo shoots in Wisconsin for a couple of other companies.

Before long, Karen tells me, “I’m not sure, but I think this little girl might be Cia. It’s kind of hard to tell looking at her from the back.”

When I saw the picture, I was pretty sure it was her, but wasn’t entirely positive.

Of course Karen had to call our daughter, Jes, to find out for sure. Except Jes didn’t know because she hadn’t gotten that catalog yet and she didn’t remember the layout that Karen described to her. Of course, the parents aren’t always on the set for the shoot, so it might be something she hadn’t seen.

We scanned in the photo from the catalog and sent it to our daughter.

Before long we got a message, “That’s my sweetie!”

That’s three different Lands’ End catalogs that Cia has been in — and this time Karen spotted it before our daughter had a chance to.

Note: Cia only does these shoots occasionally and she will only be doing them as long as she continues to enjoy it. After costs, the money is being put away for college.

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Blast from the past — Sidearms at work

September 29, 2007

Note: This article was originally published January 31, 2006 on a blog I am in the process of retiring. It harks back to the times when I worked for a living — at a nuclear power plant.

It seems just wrong.

Lots of men and a few women in the building that I work in and a lot of them are packing… guns.

The one that was the strangest is the cowboy — complete with boots, jeans, western shirt, big hat and a pistol on his hip. The last time I saw him, he was leaning up against the wall down the hall from my office.

It just seems wrong — especially where I work — unless you know why they are “packing.”

The reason it seems wrong where I work is that guns are prohibited, appropriately, for everyone but the security force, except, of course for special circumstances. It’s literally a federal offense for possession of an unauthorized weapon — and rightly so.

Of course that wasn’t a problem today. If there had been an unauthorized weapon, there was plenty of “authorities” on hand for this “federal offense,” from several different federal organizations, as well as from the state and county.

So why are there so many pistol toting folks in my building today? Well, I really don’t know the details because I’m not involved with it, but it has something to do with homeland security and an assessment and familiarization of our site’s capabilities.

There sure were a lot of folks with guns in my building today, a lot more guns than I’ve seen in a very long time.

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Today sure didn’t go as planned, and I didn’t get some of the photos I thought I had — but that’s okay!

September 17, 2007

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Read how I got this photo of this female Bighorn below in this article.

Today was our last trip into Yellowstone, at least for this year.

Our plan was to go over to Tower Falls and hike down to the base and then go over to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Along the way, I thought we’d check out Norris Geyser Basin.

Once we got to Norris, we decided to take the Back Basin Trail, which is a 1.5 mile loop. The air temperature was just above freezing, but I was comfortable in a sweatshirt. The steam rising from all of the springs in the cold air was really pretty, though it obscured the the details of individual pools, springs, geysers, and mud pots. There was several spots where I was able to compose some really great landscape shots that had clouds in a blue sky with white steam rising against backgrounds of either green forest, a stark landscape of dead soil, or both. There several good shots of gnarled remnants of trees killed by the thermal activity. It was a good photographic hike.

After we left Norris, we headed toward the Canyon Village junction. Along the way, I saw the road to Virginia Cascades, which we had not been on. It’s a relatively short 1-way road that parallels the main road, with views, of course, of Virginia Cascade. Shortly after we got on the road, I went to take a photo of some fall color, I believe, and noticed a message on the LCD screen on the back of the camera. It said that the camera didn’t have a memory card in it.

Needless to say, it upset me more than just a little bit. None of the great images that I had snapped in Norris Geyser Basin had been captured. The camera works just like always — sounds just like always — whether there is a card in it or not, and there isn’t any message that pops up in the viewfinder warning that the card isn’t in the camera — though I’d probably ignore it if it did. I’m generally looking at composition and focus and don’t pay any attention to any of the other indicators in the viewfinder unless I’m operating in other than full automatic. I always use the camera’s viewfinder and seldom look at the LCD screen, so didn’t see the warning message until I had snapped quite a few nonexistent photos.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened to me before. A whole evening’s shoot in North Platte’s Cody Park was lost last month and back in the 80′s I shot an entire roll of film in the Ozarks before discovering the film had not engaged on the camera’s sprockets.

Karen suggested that we go back to the campground to get the card — which was still plugged into the card reader for downloading. However, that would have been a 50 mile round trip and I had another camera that had a small SD card — 256 mb — that I could use. So we continued on.

However, the day’s frustrations weren’t over.

At Tower Falls, our anticipated hike to the base of the falls was cut short when the trail ended in a barrier. It was closed due to erosion. If we had known that, we would have not driven the 14 or so miles from Canyon to Tower over narrow winding mountain roads. Oh, well.

Since we were that far and had more time than we thought we would have, we decided to drive out a ways on the road to Cooke City. Along the way, the battery in the larger camera died.

So I moved the 256mb card back over to the camera it had been in originally — which is what I used to shoot the picture of the female bighorn sheep stepping over the edge.

She was actually stepping off of a rock wall along the road and I was sitting in the drivers seat of my truck, but that shot made my day when I saw it on the computer — even after the batteries in the second camera died and I thought I had lost all of the pictures when they wouldn’t open on my computer.

When in difficulty — reboot.

It worked!

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