Judgement day comes tomorrow at 6:00 pm according to Harold Camping, an 89-year-old former engineer turned doomsday soothsayer. He has calculated tomorrow’s date and time from the book of Ezekiel. Interestingly enough, I saw another calculation done based on Revelations that puts judgement day tomorrow and the end of the world on October 21, 2011.

As a natural skeptic and chronic crank, I don’t believe the world will end tomorrow, unless some extremists decide to use the doomsday scenario to start nuking their enemies. I wouldn’t be surprised if extremists use the idea of Armageddon and the Arab Spring as an excuse to attack Israel.  Kind of like Jones Town and Heaven’s Gate, there are sure to be extremists who will try to make it happen no matter what. Unlike the suicide cults, the extremists will try to take as many innocent people as they can out, along with themselves.

I’m right and the world doesn’t end tomorrow, what should be done with Mr. Camping? It seems to me that soothsaying of this degree should have consequences if his prediction doesn’t come to pass.  If you are wondering why I’m not referring to Mr. Camping as a prophet, it’s because Biblical prophets did not foretell the future.  Fortune telling was sorcery and still is.  By the way, Moynihan told Nixon in 1970 that New York City and Washington, D.C. would be under water in 30 years because of global warming. Thirty years have passed, and both cities are high and dry. I had a book called the Doomsday Myth that countered all the doomsday predictions through the late 1980’s. So far the doomsday predictions have all proved to be myths, and all the soothsayers have gotten off scott free. There was a time when soothsayers were put to death if their predictions didn’t come true. Death is a little extreme, but fines, jail, public humiliation, if that exists anymore, might be fitting.

I go more with the idea of a “world without end” as sung in the ending line of one of the Methodist doxologies. Therefore, I included photos of dramatic skies I photographed this afternoon, another new iris, a clematis and a honeysuckle in tonights photo lineup. Yes. I am an optimistic chronic crank!

Stretch could be a comic. He’s always talking to me and doing funny things. He also likes to argue with me; for example, whenever I take a bath, he goes on and on explaining how silly it is for me to get in all the water, when all I need to do to bathe is lick myself like a cat. I try to explain to him that if humans were meant to bathe by licking ourselves, we would have been given long, scratchy, opposable tongues instead of opposable thumbs that allow us to use washcloths.

“Your thumbs and washcloths are all well and good.” Stretch counters, “But I can go out, roll in the dirt, lick myself clean, and I smell better than you when you are done with your bath!” Hmmm! I can’t argue against that. Cats can get themselves incredibly clean and don’t have body odor, even after rolling in nasty old dirt. When people go out and roll in the dirt and don’t bathe, they get pretty disgusting. Kitties are definitely “green” on water usage to cleanliness ratio.

Other than Stretch sticking out his tongue at me when I was photographing him through the window, I got a couple of America roses, Berries ‘n Cream, peonies and a new iris that bloomed this afternoon.

Bueno Foods celebrated their 60th year in business today on the 4th Street Mall in Downtown. They had a mariachi group playing and gave away Bueno bags with green chile, tortillas and coupons.

The news was there and someone scheduled a conga line flash mob with a couple dressed as red and green chiles leading it. I didn’t stick around for the flash mob, but got a photo of the chilies waiting to go into flash mob action. Actually, the ice cream vendor was more interesting than the chiles.

I’m irrigating tonight and was looking forward to being done before 10:00; however, the water was coming in pretty slowly, so I might be up tending to it a little later tonight.

The temperature has dropped considerably since I got home. It’s cloudy and windy, but doesn’t seem like it’s going to rain. We could sure use rain.

The kitties are happy tonight. Laurie’s been home for two days in a row, so they have been able to go out and in during that time.

Now that we are getting a few roses and can put roses in Stretch’s water bowl, he seems to be drinking more. That is great since he has kidney problems.

I found some old negatives and positives of photos I did several years ago the other night and decided to scan a couple of them. My old scanner is retarded. It deals with 35mm negatives and slides very well, but when it comes to medium format (6X6 cm) film it flips out! It came with a 6X6 cm carrier, so I assumed it could deal with medium format, which make up the vast majority of my slides and negatives. But no! When I tried to preview 6X6 film in normal or professional mode it told me it can’t find the it. So I tried it on full auto.

On the B&W negative of my bicycle racing memorabilia, it scanned the negative as a color photo, so I got a normal scan of the negative which is a negative image. Easy enough — I reversed it in Photoshop, cleaned it up and got it close to the original. The slide of a night scene downtown is a different story. The software said it detected a B&W negative, but simply scanned the carrier with the slide. I thought it made an interesting photo, but it certainly was not the result I was looking for.

Speaking of mutants, the third photo is an Iceberg rose on a bush that is supposed to be White Ice Berg, but gives pink blooms. It’s either a mutant, or they got a Pink Iceberg mixed in when they shipped our white, moonlight garden several years ago.

The black iris is still blooming and a B&W photo of it shows off the blackness pretty well. The last photo is of Pink Cascade that is blooming right outside our front door.

The moon started peeking out from behind the Sandias at 8:08:32 this evening. The sun had set four minutes earlier, but the bright moon in the waning light made the exposures difficult all the same.

On my way out to the bosque tonight, I stopped to photograph an iris with my Lumix GF1 and the battery died. I ran back in a got Laurie’s Lumix FZ35, which zooms to 480mm, and headed back out to the river. It’s too bad the battery died on the GF1 because I had planned to use a 400mm lens on a tripod to photograph the moon with it tonight. The GF1 has manual settings that are easy to adjust, whereas, the FZ35 is not easy to use on manual settings.

The first photo of the moonrise is done with the FZ35 at 480mm. The photo is done hand held, but I turned off the image stabilization. I was going to put it on the tripod, but  since I rarely use that camera, I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the aperture and shutter speed on the manual settings.

The second moonrise was done using my Lumix L10 with a Leica 28mm to 100mm zoom lens. I turned off the image stabilization and hand-held the camera. I was able to expose for the moon without completely blacking out the river, bosque and mountains. The problem is everything but the moon is still underexposed, and the moon is small with the lens set at 100mm, but it is still has good detail for hand held with image stabilization turned off.

The reason I’m turning off image stabilization on my stabilized lenses is because I’m not sure it helps. I’ve always left stabilization turned on on those lenses, and should have gotten crystal clear photos, all the time, but that has not always been the case. My 40mm f1.7 lens, my macro lens, and Le Long Lens, that I rented, are not stabilized and I get very clear photos with them, even at slow shutter speeds; therefore, I’m testing turning off the image stabilization on my stabilized lenses to see how they do un-stabilized. So far so good.

I did the photo of the black ant with my macro lens. The ant looked like it was dancing or doing a touch down prance. I’m tempted to photoshop a foot ball in it’s left ant hand.

If you put down a box or a basket, a cat materializes in it instantly. We pulled down the basket we keep flour, sugar, etc, in, pulled out the flour and Stretch appeared instantly where the flour container was. I think cats have figured out Star Trek’s transporter — Rosencrantz seems to beam himself through walls.

We have a mini rose in a basket that we got from Costco last year that has very nice form. We have no Idea what it is, other than red.

The Harley was parked in front of Bed Bath and Beyond. If I get enough interesting Harley photos, I might put together a Harleys in Albuquerque book.

I did several setups and photographed them tonight. I have several clips of bullets I was given for an M-1 Garand, even though I don’t have an M-1 Garand. With all the recent politics, I’ve been thinking about doing some set ups, and finally got around to it. The first one is on a map of a world projection I drafted back in the day when cartographers still drew maps by hand. The second setup features a collection of antique cameras.

I added a menu to the side bar that allows anyone to order photos from the blog through AdoramaPix, although there will be a delay between when the photos are posted on the blog and when they are available on AdoramaPix. I upload the images as large files to AdoramaPix so they can generally be printed as large as 20X30 inches, but it takes a long time to upload because they are huge files, and we have stone age speed DSL in Corrales.

After the wind blew all night, we ended up having a very nice day today. If the wind is going to blow, I prefer it blow at night, even though it woke me up several times during the night. We got some gardening done today, cleaned the house, and then I had to make an emergency run to the store to get a new wok to cook dinner in.

Tristan came out this afternoon and prepared Thai curry from our “Fine Cooking Magazine.” Our old wok was coated and the coating was wearing off. I intended to order a think cast iron wok to replace it, but never got around to it. So when it came time for Tristan to start cooking we had a wok crises, and the only option available was for me to speed out to the store to get one. I ended up with a carbon steel wok because  it was beyond Bed Bath and Beyond’s ability to stock thin cast iron woks. I’m not really going to complain. They had the carbon steel wok and it was half the price of a the thin cast iron woks I was looking at on-line.

The dish was fantastic and Laurie made a “Glorious Sponge Cake” from the 1950 “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book.” The cake is light, spongy and very lemony, and wonderful with fresh whipped cream.

The lead photo is a profile of a house spider that’s been hanging out on the “cat magnet” fleece blankets we have on the couch. The fleece in macro makes it look like the the spider’s on a cloud. I also included a profile of America, and macro of another fruit fly. The fruit flies are so tiny I have a hard time getting the camera to focus on them. I tried manual focus, but that made it more difficult as my movements and the fly’s movements made it impossible to keep a focus. I finally changed my camera settings to only focus on the center point of the lens and that helped.

The profile of Rosencrantz shows off his Egyptian kitty look, and the last photo is another view of the black iris.

A black iris finally bloomed. It’s purple in the back lighting, but it’s definitely black. I also included a white and yellow iris that had very nice form. There are a few iris that have survived the frosts and they will be done blooming in a week or two.

Café Giuseppe finally opened next door to our office. Currently he offers espresso, breakfast burritos and a few other breakfast and lunch type items. I think he is going to offer gelato, also, but i didn’t notice on the menu.

Fruit flies are invading now that it’s warming up. I got the one tonight on the white orchid. They are really tiny and hard to focus on in the low light, with my slow macro lens. I had to send back Le Long Lens this morning. Giuseppe’s place, the Indian jewelry store and photo of Heritage I posted this morning are the last photos taken with that lens.

Since eBlogger is still down and deleted my entry from the 11th, so now there will be two days missing from my blog, I set up a WordPress blog very quickly this morning.