My place holder when I first set up Photo of the Day, Etc., getting ready to switch from Caring Bridge, was a photo I call Cranes in the Mist. A year later I got geese in the mist. On December 1st, Photo of the Day, Etc. will be a year old.

I went for a walk at 6:30 this morning and the river had a nice mist rising off of it in the pre-dawn light. A great blue heron was perched like an undertaker on the far bank of the river. It stayed in place in the thick mist coming off the water, which made it difficult to get a clear photo. Then the mist thinned out for a few seconds, giving me enough time to get a fairly clear view of the heron before it noticed me and flew off. I’ve been trying to photograph the herons for a couple of years, but they are very skittish and usually fly before I have a clear field of view.

The temperature read 18 degrees F on the deck this morning, which means it was 13 or lower  in the garden. The garden was frosty white, but the morning sun melts the frost on the roses almost as soon as it hits them; however, the frost puts up a fight on the strawberries.

I walked out of the house shortly after sunrise, and hadn’t quite made it to the middle of our frost covered garden, when I got buzzed by a couple of low flying cranes. Since I have learned not to leave the house without a camera in hand, I was able to get a couple of photos of the kamikaze critters. If you were thinking a Flying V is a guitar, well, you were right; however, nature has its feathered version, which is just as noisy.

 

Entering the 3rd week of Movember, my ‘stache doesn’t look a whole lot different from last week. But no matter how slow the mo is, onward, downward and outward it grows. My Movember page is at http://mobro.co/Elcheo.

The neighbor’s horses where horsing around while I was photographing them, but when the sorrel decided to come over and check me out, the gray horse bit him. The runt coon came begging at the door, and unlike the other raccoons that always look mean, the runt has a sweet, sad look about him. He gave me a similar look back in July when his mama and siblings left him stranded on the deck https://photoofthedayetc.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/i-want-my-mama/.

The OGS approved Laurie’s thesis and she got copies of the grading sheets from her committee members. Her committee has some of the hardest graders in the Math Department, and they gave her mostly “excellent’s” with a couple of “very good’s” on her substance, methodology, style, originality and the work as a whole. All the comments were really positive, and one committee member wrote “The work is original and elegant.” which is high praise from a well-respected mathematician.

To make up for my lack of photos yesterday, I went out and got the cranes in action, a panorama of the stormy Sandias, and Rosencrantz and Diné snuggled up on the bed.

We think we finally got Laurie’s thesis submitted and all the forms in. There always seems to be one more form that we should have noticed on an obscure page of the Office of Graduate Studies (OGS) website. We spent most of yesterday putting the final touches on the thesis and then submitted it to the Lobo Vault by filling out online forms and uploading a PDF of the thesis (that’s how one submits theses and dissertations these days).

Not long after we submitted her thesis, Laurie got an email saying we forgot to put the “Thesis Approval” form in the front matter, page i, of the thesis. We had to find, download the form and fill it out; but when I put the PDF in the front matter of her thesis, it messed up the page numbering. The LaTeX stylesheet we are required to use for the thesis had a place for plain text where the thesis approval is supposed to go, but no associated tags for inserting a pdf or adding any formatting tags in that area of the script. After spending 3 hours dinking around with formatting options, going through the stylesheet’s code, and reading all the documentation on the OGS website, I finally gave up and had Laurie email OGS and ask if we could just copy the contents of the thesis approval and let it be in plain text on page i. After getting approval, we resubmitted her thesis, and we are now hoping everything is in place.

With the overcast skies drizzling rain on and off most of the afternoon, I noticed the cranes stayed in the cornfield along Dixon Road when I went out to get kitty food. After I got home and unloaded the car, I went back out with telephoto lenses and got as close to the cranes as I could before they took flight.  The photos are low contrast because of the low light from the cloud cover and, in some of the photos, the birds blend into the background; however, with the various shots of the cranes in flight and a few where they are walking around, mostly watching me, I believe you get a pretty good idea of what Sandhill Cranes look like on the ground and in flight.

All I was able to get photographed today was a bowl of butter.

I was going to put in a moon shot tonight, but since the sky is overcast, I had to settle for another coon shot instead. The photos of freeze dried Mothers Rose and a remaining bud on Royal Wedding were done in the soft light of the overcast sky this afternoon.

Laurie successfully defended her thesis, “Closure Operations on the Submonoids of the Natural Numbers”, this afternoon. She practiced it for the cats last night, but Guildenstern got bored and walked around on her computer before walking off to find something more exciting like lying on the floor. Puck came in late and slept the the rest of the presentation. However, Rosencrantz stayed alert and payed close attention during the entire presentation. I think Stretch would have enjoyed Laurie’s talk, but he was too busy hiding in case I was going to waterboard him.

Laurie’s defense went very well today, so now she will have a Master of Science in Mathematics and will continue working toward a PhD in Pure Math.

A BNSF locomotive crossed my path at 6th St. on my way home tonight. I cross those tracks daily during the week, and that is the first train I’ve seen crossing there. I figured since the sawmill had all closed down in that area many years ago, the tracks weren’t used anymore, but obviously I was wrong.

Romeo, one of Laurie’s parents’ cats, was posing for me tonight, and not long after we got home, there were little knocks at the door to the sunroom, followed by little growls that sounded vaguely like trick or treat. I went to investigate and found the raccoons at the door looking for handouts. I told them Halloween was almost two weeks ago, but they argued that I was wrong because tonight is the full moon and that raccoon Halloween was on the penultimate full moon of the year. Right! Clever, but those masked bandits didn’t get any handouts from me.

The last photo is the view to the west from the third floor of the Science & Math Learning Center at UNM.