More vintage treatment and a couple of different uses of B&W.

 

 

I was messing around with the remote for the camera while the camera was sitting on the counter, and snapped this photo. I thought it would look good as a Daguerreotype, so I applied the effects.

 

When I went out to run one of the drip systems this afternoon, I discovered some of the crocus where blooming. Laurie went out to see the crocus and found some Siberian iris blooming as well.  We got the petunia last year at the end of May and kept it indoors at night during the winter. It has bloomed continually since we got it.

 

 

 

 

 

My Kindle Touch died when I was 80% into the Count of Monte Cristo. It couldn’t have picked a worst time to die on me. Amazon is sending me a replacement, but in the meantime, I lent the book and loaded it on Laurie’s Kindle, since she’s reading an old-fashioned paper book at the moment.

I got finally got our taxes done. I used TurboTax for the first time, since the credit union had a special on it. Curiously enough, after spending almost 4 hours inputting medical expenses, charitable contributions, energy star improvements to the house, education expenses, and other allowable deductions, all of which came in just a few dollars under the standard deductions, Turbo tax submitted a 1040 EZ form using the standard deductions, plus 45 pages of the forms generated by the deductions that didn’t make a difference after all.

 

 

 

We dropped a package by Tristan’s this afternoon and Leo got all excited. He was following us around meowing and rolling around and playing, but he wouldn’t hold still for me to photograph him. Tristan finally picked him up and he gave me a precious look.  The sunset is from last night, and the reflection coming off the bicycle rim on the back door of the office was quite interesting.

 

 

 

Lobo Louie revived. I got a reprieve this afternoon from the task that kept me so late last night, only to deal with a bad video card and another failed HD for much of the afternoon. At least the drive was still under warranty — I sent it to the manufacturer for replacement.

 

 

After a 14 hour day I could use some of Stretch’s I.V. I’ve been working like a dog, and so much so that Lobo Louie finally got worn out watching me, and passed out.

 

 

Tristan got a Chilean rose haired tarantula for Valentine’s Day, but I hadn’t seen it in person until this evening. She’s a lovely tarantula.  The fish were silly tonight.

 

 

I’m still dinking around with extreme close-ups of frost. I’m getting pretty good detail, but I need to pull out the remote shutter release, because I’m getting a little movement when I press the shutter release on the camera.

Today was hardware hell with a drive going out in one of the servers, kernel panics in another computer, and a freaked out monitor that turned out to be the video card going bad.

 

We had way too many things to get done today. I’m still working on finishing the carne adovada stew I started around noon. About halfway through preparing the potatoes, I realized I had forgotten to get red chile. So once the potatoes were done and the frijoles were simmering, I ran out to the store and picked up some red chile. I snapped the photos of the mountains on my way home from my chile run.

I didn’t have time to get back to the French Lab today, but I did get the sentences about Lincoln written. Each sentence was painful to write, and they probably aren’t even grammatically correct. Oh well, that’s how you learn.