Tuscan Sun is putting on some nice blooms, and the sun was a ball shining through the clouds on the way home this afternoon. On the 20th of this month, there will be a full solar eclipse, and Albuquerque is the prime location to see it. I ordered a solar filter for my 600 mm lens to photograph the eclipse, and some new welding goggles to observe it with.

Today is my 365th post since I switched to WordPress and my 527th post since I started Photo of the Day, Etc.

We dropped by Jericho Nursery on the way home to see what roses they had. While we were browsing through the roses, it started sprinkling, and the sprinkles soon turned into a down pour, which forced us to seek cover. Well! Wouldn’t you know it. The covered area happened to be full of Painted Tongue, Calendula and other beautiful flowers, some of which hopped onto our cart and came home with us. The fly was on our Double Delight this morning. I was curious to see how the X-Pro 1’s “macro mode” would perform on a fly.

The nurse had to give me a double roto-rooter before he got blood return from both sides of my port this morning.  At least he didn’t make me do a song and dance before he ordered two rounds of Cathflo. After injecting a syringe of saline solution into each port, pulling back on the syringe and the port simply sucking the stopper back to the top of the syringe, he said “There’s no way! We gotta do a roto-rooter!” If my PET scan at the end of June is good, I’m going to ask the doctor if I can have the port removed. If port maintenance is going to now require double-rounds of Cathflo each month, the Cathflo will start cutting into my cash flow as it more than triples the cost of a port flush.

Mutant Peace is putting out some pretty nice first blooms this year. We call it mutant Peace because it grows 20 foot long canes, and didn’t boom for the first two years after we planted it. The third year I pruned it down to where all the canes were about 2 feet (pruning back a third is considered hard pruning), and figured if it killed it, tough, and then threatened it with shovel pruning if it didn’t bloom after my radical pruning. It has bloomed every year since, but it still puts on 20 feet long canes.

We are seeing a lot of ladybug larva, which is good since we have lots of aphids. Laurie mentioned that she heard someone say that ladybugs were nice because they don’t bite. That person obviously had not had much experience with ladybugs. They do bite and one landed on my arm Sunday morning and started chewing on me. It was too close for the lens I had to focus on it, and by the time I walked over to Laurie to give her the camera, the little nipper flew off.

Osric was on the other side of the fence this morning while I was photographing roses. When he saw me he ran over to the fence and pushed on a slat in the fence, only to discover that I fixed the fence so he couldn’t push out the slat and squeeze through like he could a couple of weeks ago.

 

We are getting a lot of roses for early May. While most are a little rough around the edges, I’m surprised how many are putting on decent first blooms.

 

 

Our yard is becoming a jungle early this year — so far we haven’t had any late frosts so the cottonwoods are in full leaf and dropping cotton already. We have fruit on most of our fruit trees, lions are appearing in the yard, iris we have never seen before are blooming (presumably they froze and didn’t bloom in previous years), and a multiflora rootstock rose I didn’t know we had is growing large and in full bloom along the fence on the eastern end of the property.

When I went out to shut down the irrigation in the late morning, I noticed a lot of white blossoms in the bamboo by the fence. At first I thought they were wild plum blossoms, but then took a closer look because the wild plums have all set fruit, and noticed it was a rose bush with bunches of tiny, white blossoms. I looked it up, and found it is a multiflora rootstock, which I had never seen before. The are lots and lots of Dr. Huey in our yard and all over Corrales (Dr. Huey is used in the western part of the US because it likes alkaline soil), but this was the first time I noticed the multiflora. It’s native to the Near East and China, and prefers acidic soils, therefore, it is more common in the eastern US, and very invasive in southern states. The questions are 1) how did we end up with a rootstock rose not commonly used in the southwest, and 2) why hadn’t we noticed it before today? I’m thinking we probably hadn’t noticed it before because the blossoms probably froze in years past, plus it’s growing by the bamboo on the far end of the property. However, since it’s growing where we would never have planted a rose, the first question remains unanswered.

 

 

 

 

 

We are planting vegetables and corn this year.  In years past the raccoons ate most of anything that survived, so we’ll see what happens.

 

 

 

I had one of those crazy days where I had too many things all going on at once.  The prickly pear is at UNM. I must see it every time I drop Laurie off and pick her up, but hadn’t really noticed it. The light was just right to make me take notice this afternoon.

 

 

One aspect in assessing the quality of a new carry camera is how well it performs in low light at speed or speeding, depending on one’s point-of-view. The City’s construction project to ruin Lead and Coal gave me some photo ops during rush hour.  Lead and Coal were multi-lane, oneway streets with the traffic lights truly timed to the speed limit. They were designed in the late 50’s or early 60’s to get traffic in and out of downtown quickly and efficiently, back when city planner’s believed downtown would remain the prime central business district in Albuquerque.  Lead and Coal were great, because they were about the only streets in Albuquerque that you could drive the speed limit and get all the lights green, making it very quick to catch the major north/south streets when driving east on Coal or west on Lead. But the central planners and traffic engineers apparently couldn’t stand the thought of traffic moving efficiently, so they redesigned Lead and Coal to make the more bike and pedestrian “Friendly”.  I can appreciate bike friendly, having ridden tens of thousands of miles on my bike, but from the portions of Coal that are close to being finished that I drove on recently, the street now seems extremely hostile to cars. After I got on Coal at University heading east, I ended up turning off of it and drove through the neighborhoods to get to San Mateo. I was not the only one driving the neighborhoods to avoid Lead and Coal that day. Maybe once all the construction is complete, traffic will move a little better, but they will never again move traffic as efficiently as they once did.

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t have much time to put my new camera through the paces today, but got my first “drive by” on the way home, tested the macro setting on Double Delight with a shy crab spider, and a normal shot of Cecile Brunner when I got home tonight. The roses are in low light, and all the photos are jpegs, because I didn’t have time to convert the RAW files. The camera is so new that my Adobe products don’t recognize its RAW format, so I’m shooting RAW + JPEG until I get a RAW file update. I’m happy with the results so far.

 

 

I got my new camera, and one of the first photos I took with it is dedicated to a fellow photographer, Giuseppe Grimaldi, who lives in Rome, Italy, and does wonderful street photography. You can see some of his work here: http://giugrim.pixu.com/ and http://500px.com/giugrim. The staff of Cafe Giuseppe next door to our office was gracious enough to pose for the first real photo.  If you are downtown, be sure to stop by Cafe Giuseppe and take a break with a cup of espresso or soda and a light snack. They are on Gold between 3rd and 2nd Streets.

Patrician Design is two doors east of our office at 216 Gold Ave, SW. They got new Internet service today so I went over and set up their new modem and got it connected. Everything went smoothly, until they discovered email wouldn’t go out. The outgoing smtp server was timing out, and once I found the host, a call to their tech support provided me with the updated port info we needed, and their email was whole again. I learned from Patti that it was Liz’s birthday today, so she ended up as the third photo by the new camera. Patrician Design carries a large variety of gifts, beauty products, jewelry and original artwork, with a staff of lovely, knowledgeable women ready to help you choose just the right thing http://www.patriciandesign.com/.

The changes in google maps API is causing me a lot of trouble. So far, I will have to re-code all the mapping applications I developed for a project we are doing for the State of New Mexico, if we continue with google maps.  We have deadline next week, so these mapping issues couldn’t have come at a worse time. Fortunately, I never billed the State for the mapping component of the project because I have a great distrust of google, and suspected that they would start charging for their services or change something. I didn’t expect them to just stop supporting the code-base I am using altogether, but it’s not the first time they have done such a thing. I started writing new apps today with their new code base as a stop gap measure, and we are changing mapping strategies for next weeks deadline, but for the time being I’m not going to rewrite all the apps — google might just change the rules of the game again. We are investigating other options such as OpenStreetMap, and then we would drop google maps.