Cat Three

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I had one of those disgustingly productive days — I removed the roof from the “catio” but left the fencing around it intact. The kitties were supervising, and they thought I was a pretty cool cat working up on the roof, balancing on vigas, hopping between cross beams, and making quite a mess at the same time. They didn’t realize what I was doing until we all came it for the night and found the cat door to the catio blocked. Now my being on the roof all day doing dangerous things is like very un-cool among the cats.

The reason I deroofed the catio is that Laurie started reorganizing everything, and that turns into repurposing spaces. The roof over the catio was originally a shade structure to protect our bonsais and other plants from the intense sun we have in New Mexico. I later put a tin roof on it, but there was really no way to seal the edges against the house to make it useful for anything but plants, weights and cats without redoing the roof. So a roof redo is underway so I can seal the sides that are against the house and make it a more useful space. The last photo is the roofless catio taken through a very dirty window.

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The Living and the Dead

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“Ghetto scans” of 4X5 photos I took of a couple of churches and a graveyard on New Year’s day. Between the scanning technique, and the paper texture that gets picked up by the scanner (I place a piece of paper on top of negatives to help distribute the light more evenly), “ghetto scanned” 4X5 negatives end up looking like really old photos.

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Hot Wheels

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The weather was sunny, with no wind and a high in the 50’s, so I took my cameras out for a walk around downtown. As I was crossing Central Ave. (Old Route 66) at sixth street, the guy in the blue car with big wheels started honking his horn. When I looked in his direction, he was making a gesture for me to take a photo, so I grabbed a quick shot as the light turned green, just before he drove off up Central. He looked pretty happy that I got the shot. The second photo is a little “abstract reflectionism” on Gold Ave. And then I got a “drive-by” photo of the moonrise over the Sandias as I was turning onto Coors Rd. on my way home.

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Dog Day

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I went out to photograph an old wood mill in the north valley, and as I got to the top of a rail spur there was a dog gnawing on an old carcass. He was so involved at first that he didn’t notice me. After a few shots, he heard the shutter in my camera and looked up. He was standing his ground and then started coming sideways towards me half snarling and licking his chops. I didn’t push my luck by trying to cross the dog’s path to get down where I could get better shots of the buildings. I got a few shots of the mill from standing on the rail spur and then a shot toward the mountains as I walked back to the car. I presume the dog went back to gnawing the carcass.

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Rail Yard Cats

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Merry Christmas! You have probably heard of “junkyard dogs” — rail yards have cats. I stopped by the yard where the Santa Fe 292 locomotive is being restored, and there were lots of cats in the rail yard. Most of the cats hid when they saw me approaching the fence —  one cross-eyed kitty was curious, two sat at opposite ends of an old loading dock, while two others watched me from the safety of a stack of railroad ties.

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Love on the Seine

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The sky was overcast and gray all day for solstice, which reminded me of Paris. Looking through my photos taken from a riverboat on our last day in Paris back in June, I noticed that there was lots of love along the Seine despite the gray sky and rain.

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Fire Watchers

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When I saw the people standing in the openings in the parking structure watching the building burn, the image reminded me of a scene from a Fellini film. Then there’s the three arson investigators that are reminiscent of Van der Weyden’s “Decent from the Cross.” The last two photos are time lapses of sorts. The penultimate photo is the tile mosaic façade of the burned out building at 12:08 PM and the last photo is what’s left of the tile mosaic façade of the burned out building at 5:13 PM.

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