Cats & Concert Sunday

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The cats were in winter mode most of the day. Even though it was sunny and a blistering 40º F (4.4º C) outside in the afternoon, Guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Diné chose to lay around on our bed most of the day. We went to the West Side Chior’s Christmas concert Saturday night, and Jerri had me help record the concert. I didn’t think of it, but I could have taken equipment and shot a video of the concert Saturday night. Well, they had another concert on Sunday, so I shot a video of it with my Canon 5D and a stereo mic. The video and sound are great, but it’s going to be a lot of work putting the hour long concert altogether into one video.

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All Your Chair Are Belong To Us

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Every time Laurie gets up from of her chair at the end of the table, Guildenstern gets in it. Once she moves Guildenstern off her chair and sits back down, René bombs his way over to her, flying from chair to chair (three chairs in all) to get across the counter and finally onto the table and over to Laurie.  I didn’t have the best lighting for capturing René in flight in these shots, so I set up a flash and tried to get him to do is chair to chair flight again, but he would have nothing to do with flying to the chair with that new fangled light source off to the side of it.

I adapted today’s title from the video “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”, a video that goes back to 2001. The title of the video was taken from a line in the 1991 introduction to an adaption of the arcade game “Zero Wing” that had really bad Japanese-to-English translation. Around our house, whenever you get up from a chair, a cat or a bird is likely to occupy it because to them “all your chair are belong to us!”

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Christo Style Construction

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When I saw the old Audio Express building that is being remodeled into some kind of restaurant all wrapped up in plastic, I thought of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who are well known for wrapping islands, trees, rivers and creating other large wrapped environmental installations. We heard Christo speak many years ago when we were art students. I don’t remember much of what his talk was on, but I’ve always been impressed with his work. The construction workers created a nice piece of art, wrapping the building out of necessity to keep the fresh plaster from freezing. They didn’t understand what I saw in the plastic wrapped building that was worth photographing.

On the other side of the parking lot, the strings of red chiles and surroundings had a “wrapped” look of their own through my telephoto lens.

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Route 66 and All That

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The last time I photographed the Route 66 Diner, I believe three years ago now and the wall at the entrance off Central Ave. (old Route 66) didn’t have all the old signs and Route 66 memorabilia nailed to it. The mess of signs makes for an interesting collage under the distorting eye of my 17mm lens.

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Cat

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Rosencrantz stepped on my iPhone that was laying on the counter next to my computer. He activated Siri, which asked him what he wanted. He meowed, and when I looked at the phone Siri had brought up the Wikipedia for cat. I tried to photograph it with Rosencrantz stepping on the phone, but I got too much glare of the phone’s surface, so I had to prop the phone up against my coffee cup. Rosencrantz still wanted to step on it, and stuck around for the photo. Rosencrantz is also a bit of a magical cat as he can apparently go through walls. We’ve let him out and then all of a sudden he’s back in and vice versa. It the second photo I got him half way in and out of the screen.

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