Feeling a strong sense of blog ennui. Work is part of it. After five months of largely fruitless effort, my trees are showing signs of budding and maybe eventually bearing fruit. After a holiday slow down, things are heating up, so my attention is focused there.
And as I’ve mentioned before, this new position has a lot of communicating—it’s really a combination of architecture and project management—and it tends to dry up my usual urges to communicate. Sculpting a blog post too closely resembles the careful sculpting of work communications.
So this post has a bunch of pictures instead of words.
The sun’s been shy lately, but today it came out for a while (before the snowfall began). I was able to finally get a picture of its progress. It’s reached the point of shining past the overhead into the kitchen.
I can now stand inside my house and be in direct sunshine!
Yea!!
As you can see from the pics, the sun now peeks below the overhead and bounces off the fridge!
And while the sun may not make much of an appearance during the winter, it is low enough to shine beneath my eaves and hit the crystal I have hanging in the window. The tradeoff is rainbows during the winter and sunshine during the summer. Once the sun is high enough in the sky, I lose the rainbows (the crystal is already hanging only four feet above the floor).
The rainbows drifting along on the walls are nice enough. It’s those occasional glints of pure, bright color that blast into my eye that are especially cool. I managed to position my camera in just the right place to catch a couple.
The lead picture has a nice yellow flash, but I really love this cyan flash I caught later. It takes some timing and luck, because there is a hot air vent below the crystal, and it tends to stir up the air. That makes the crystal move, which makes the rainbows move (which I love!), but it makes it hard to capture the flash. But sitting at my table working, it happens a lot!
Pixels!!
(click for big)
Speaking of managing to capture something colorful with my cheapo (but surprisingly good) digital camera, I managed to get a fairly good shot of the red, green and blue pixels on my LCD TV screen.
I mentioned them back in the posts about color (I’ve two more coming to wrap that up once I get over my ennui).
The image is from the weather channel display. You’re seeing the current temperature (which is, gulp, -4). You can see the right end of the minus sign and part of the “4.”
It turns out to be really hard to get the camera to hold its focus (even in macro photo mode), but I finally got lucky. (Man… Geeks sure have a different definition of “getting lucky” don’t we.)
On the other hand, it was surprisingly easy to capture this reverse angle of the sun streaming in through my skylight. When I’ve tried this before, I got massive overloading from the sun and ended up with basically just a picture of white.
Somehow, this time it came out exactly right! I really do love how the sun shines directly into my place. That skylight was actually one of the things that sold me on it.
There’s an interesting tradeoff here, too. In the summer, the sun is high in the sky, but the moon is low (see if you understand why). In the winter, that is reversed.
So in the summer I get the sun through my skylight, and in the winter I get the moon. On nights with a full moon, at midnight, you can read in the light.
And that’s about all I have in me today. I’ll leave you with this photo kiped from a relative’s Facebore wall. A certain someone is on a mission to find my “cuteness spot,” and so far she’s been way off the beam. When I saw this on my cousin’s wall, I thought, “Ah, ha! Now that’s cute!”
The call of the wild!
(And very small and very cute!)
February 2nd, 2013 at 12:40 am
Reblogged this on cftc10.
February 2nd, 2013 at 5:13 am
awww so cute indeed
I don’t have Facebook so probably miss lots of cuteness moments. anyway where have you been mister? if you find it hard to write a blog, just put up a ”hello and wave to miss Sugar” and at least I will know your not off the grid totally ! you take care ya hear? or my redneck woman ways will have to re-surface and kick ya ass ya’ll ) x
February 2nd, 2013 at 11:59 pm
Ah, but that’s me, sugah! Sometimes I fly under the radar, off the grid and fully cloaked with shields engaged!
(Drives my friends crazy!)
February 3rd, 2013 at 7:23 am
Ahh sounds like me with my metaphorical invisibility cloak …I am always around but only the chosen few can see me ! But you never know when I will whap you with my wand
god I talk crap ! Lol ..be good x
February 3rd, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Is that what that was!! Watch where you whap that wand, Wanda!
February 2nd, 2013 at 9:32 am
Completely interesting photographs! I’m betting that full-moon skylight show is awesome.
February 3rd, 2013 at 12:01 am
Sometimes I’m walking by and the moon catches my eye… so I look up to see the reflection of the chandelier in the skylight. [sigh] No moon.
Hey, did you see my Moon post? You might appreciate the chart I made!
http://logosconcarne.com/2012/09/22/sideband-42-half-time/
February 2nd, 2013 at 9:42 am
I love these photos, especially the first one! I always wanted a skylight, glad you enjoy yours!
February 3rd, 2013 at 12:03 am
Thank you! I did get really lucky on that first one; it turned out good! (There’s a reason I led with it! I do like the cyan flash better, but the yellow just looks better. The background, I think, makes it.)
February 3rd, 2013 at 7:46 am
I agree!
February 3rd, 2013 at 12:33 pm
With an attitude like that, we’ll get along great!
February 3rd, 2013 at 1:27 pm
haha!
February 3rd, 2013 at 10:37 am
No sunshine so far today here. We’re locked into a dense fog. But that tells me it’s warming up and, so, I’m grateful for that!
February 3rd, 2013 at 12:37 pm
And if you get a quick freeze, you might wake up to a hoar frost tomorrow. I love those! The white coating on everything is one of my favorite weather sights.
It was sunny when I finally dragged my b-hind outta bed a bit after noon (in my defense: up until 5 am working on my TARDIS). But I’ve been up less than half an hour, and it’s completely clouded over already. Gee, thanks, Weather! Guess we’re headed for an inch of snow tonight, but it’s warming up here, too. We’ve had a number of sub-zero days last two weeks. It was 11 when I got up; it’s 13 now and should get just a bit above freezing later this week.
February 4th, 2013 at 10:00 am
We did have a lovely hoar frost last week. It was particularly gorgeous at night time.
February 5th, 2013 at 9:32 am
At night time, oh, I can imagine! I’ve always found it neat how, when walking to the car from work, when the weather is right, you can see millions of tiny light glints from frost crystals in the concrete. Ice can be a real pain (literally—went down on it just the other day), but it sure can be pretty!
February 6th, 2013 at 7:53 am
Hope you’re okay!! I’ve managed to avoid falling so far. Fingers crossed, knock on wood.
February 6th, 2013 at 9:44 am
I seem to be, thanks. Bruised my dignity mostly. Did hit my head, but fortunately it’s mostly bone. Irony is, I’d made it carefully down my obviously icy driveway to get my trashcan. Having safely negotiated that, I stepped onto what looked (in the dark) like clear asphalt street. Except that it was coated with black (clear) ice. Surprise!!
Ironically, the only other time I’ve gone down on ice was similar. Walking my dog one winter night on what seemed a clear sidewalk. Never saw the thin sheet of ice on that one part. Suddenly my feet just go flying, and I basically landed horizontally on my back. Apparently I take a fall pretty well; no harm done. It was so surprising that I lay there on my back laughing for a couple minutes!