I was messing around with exposure and depth-of-field while photographing flowers this afternoon,and the first photo ended up looking like the flowers are in a fish tank.

We went to the men’s breakfast this morning and listened to Velia Silva and David Fischman talk about PEP (Partners Envisioning Progress), a program for mentoring incarcerated youth.  Laurie thinks I should mentor a troubled youth since I’m a native New Mexican, dropped out of high school and went on to get a master’s degree, and have a wide-range of interests, experiences and skills.  I’m thinking about it. They really need men to volunteer, and I can see how getting men involved can be very difficult, since I’m not really chomping at the bit to do it.

I studied French most of the after afternoon. I signed up for the on-line French Lab for French 101. The listening exercises are especially difficult. They sound like French to me, and that’s about as far as I get.  Then there’s spelling. I’ve never been very good at spelling, I even have trouble with Spanish that’s totally phonetic, and now this French Lab expects me to spell French correctly. Like right! Many words have far too many letters which they don’t pronounce, and they have accents going both directions plus they use a hat (ˆ), a cédille (ç), and an umlaut (¨), called a tréma in French, on some of the vowels, which seem to make no difference whatsoever in the pronunciation — at least I can’t hear the differences,  which doesn’t really count for a whole lot since I have very poor hearing to begin with.

We also have an assignment to write ten sentences about one of the topics on a French culture website. Writing in French is almost as bad as understanding it when I listen. Sentence structure is often turned around from English, and verbs don’t usually fall in the same places. I always want to put down thoughts that are way beyond my French vocabulary, which is basically phrases like “chat noir”, “c’est la vie”, “les choses sont contre nous”, “comment on dit… …en Francais”, “salute”, “ça va” and a few other words and phrases which don’t usually fit with the assignments.

I’m going to write about “Lincoln”, a comic book character who is a cowboy with no purpose in life. The first book is titled “Lincoln: Crâne de bois” or “Lincoln: Skull of wood”, first published in 2004.  The fact that Lincoln is a cowboy reminds me of Lucky Luke, another French comic book character first published in 1946; but not knowing enough about Lincoln yet, I can’t say he’s anything like Lucky Luke who shoots faster than his shadow, and sees mirages of bars when crawling through the desert in dire need of water (a couple of things I remember from reading Lucky Luke in Spanish when we lived in Spain). Maybe by the time I get enough info to write a few sentences on Lincoln, he’ll be interesting enough for me to think about ordering the first book.

 

Everything had frost this morning, so I did macro shots of icy surfaces.

 

 

One problem with doing handheld closeups with the lens wide open using auto-focus is that the slightest movement causes the focus to change.  Since the depth of field is already super-shallow, confusing the auto-focus often results in soft focus. Tonight I got smart and set the lens to manual focus which worked pretty well.  Even though most of the subjects are soft or blurred due to the shallow depth-of-field, the areas I focused on are sharp. The roses in the bouquets I got last week are drying nicely, and the edges of an orchid made a nice shape.

We put Laurie’s Master’s Thesis on a poster for a math conference in Lubbock, TX in March.  We plotted it today and were looking at in on the counter, when Rosencrantz decided he needed to check in out and then help roll in up by providing resistance while Laurie rolled it up. He rolled with the rolls and managed to stay on the paper to the very end.

 

I went to work before sunrise this morning the birds were stirring in the semi-darkness. One crow landed on the left-turn arrow to help direct traffic at Alameda and Corrales Road. On my way into downtown on Lead, the pigeons were lined up like insulators on the the power line. On my way home there was a five car pileup on 528 in front of Cibola High School. I could only fit 4 of the 5 cars in the frame, as the fifth car was blocked by the tree on the left.

 

 

 

Things are against us, and the perfect ending to a rather annoying day came when I got to the Walmart pharmacy a few minutes before closing to pick up a prescription for Laurie and they didn’t have it. The dentist had called in the prescription and left a message, then called a few minutes later, got a person, and asked how long it would take for the prescription to be filled — “an hour and a half” was the reply — so Laurie called me at the office  and asked me to pick it up on the way home.  For whatever reason, the message didn’t get through and there was no prescription.  I picked up two bottles of cream and a half gallon of milk, and got in the “10 items or less” line. Walmart was a zoo with people of every “challenge” imaginable swarming the Valentine’s isles.  When the woman in front of me got to the checker and stood beside her cart to unload it, I noticed she had well over 10 items, mostly multiple fruit she hadn’t bagged. I suppose if she had bagged the fruit like a normal shopper, she would have had ten items, but loose she had more than twenty. Even worse, the checker weighed and entered the code for each individual piece of fruit, even though there were only 4 different varieties of fruit.  If there is a hell I can imagine it would be an eternity of standing in line behind people who don’t bag their fruit and checkers who can’t assemble and weigh like items.

 

Snow was falling under a uniform gray sky, laying down a thin white blanket in the subfreezing temperatures, when I got up this morning. The geese and cranes flew to and fro as dry flakes gathered loosely on the plants, falling off with the slightest movement caused by wind, bird or beast.  The temperature slowly made its way above freezing, so by 10:00 am no snow remained.  Puck played with a wood chip after rolling in the dirt where the mulch had washed away, while sparrows and finches scratched in the driveway taking refuge on a far post and thick branches when I approached them.

 

 

 

 

 

I got a couple new bouquets of flowers when I was at Costco today.  They had a fresh shipment for Valentine’s Day, and I couldn’t resist the combination of daisies, roses and carnations in these bouquets.  BTW. A flash ring is a flash that fits on the end or the lens for doing flash with macro (close-up) photography.

 

 

 

I got a ring flash for my macro lens. These are my first photos with it. I still need to do a lot of experimenting with exposure, but I’m happy with the results so far.

 

 

 

This installation is in a yard at the top of our road. When it was installed around Christmas, I thought it was decoration for the holiday, but tonight I gave it a closer look and realized it is an installation of night art.