The neighbor’s horses where horsing around while I was photographing them, but when the sorrel decided to come over and check me out, the gray horse bit him. The runt coon came begging at the door, and unlike the other raccoons that always look mean, the runt has a sweet, sad look about him. He gave me a similar look back in July when his mama and siblings left him stranded on the deck https://photoofthedayetc.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/i-want-my-mama/.

The OGS approved Laurie’s thesis and she got copies of the grading sheets from her committee members. Her committee has some of the hardest graders in the Math Department, and they gave her mostly “excellent’s” with a couple of “very good’s” on her substance, methodology, style, originality and the work as a whole. All the comments were really positive, and one committee member wrote “The work is original and elegant.” which is high praise from a well-respected mathematician.

To make up for my lack of photos yesterday, I went out and got the cranes in action, a panorama of the stormy Sandias, and Rosencrantz and Diné snuggled up on the bed.

We think we finally got Laurie’s thesis submitted and all the forms in. There always seems to be one more form that we should have noticed on an obscure page of the Office of Graduate Studies (OGS) website. We spent most of yesterday putting the final touches on the thesis and then submitted it to the Lobo Vault by filling out online forms and uploading a PDF of the thesis (that’s how one submits theses and dissertations these days).

Not long after we submitted her thesis, Laurie got an email saying we forgot to put the “Thesis Approval” form in the front matter, page i, of the thesis. We had to find, download the form and fill it out; but when I put the PDF in the front matter of her thesis, it messed up the page numbering. The LaTeX stylesheet we are required to use for the thesis had a place for plain text where the thesis approval is supposed to go, but no associated tags for inserting a pdf or adding any formatting tags in that area of the script. After spending 3 hours dinking around with formatting options, going through the stylesheet’s code, and reading all the documentation on the OGS website, I finally gave up and had Laurie email OGS and ask if we could just copy the contents of the thesis approval and let it be in plain text on page i. After getting approval, we resubmitted her thesis, and we are now hoping everything is in place.

With the overcast skies drizzling rain on and off most of the afternoon, I noticed the cranes stayed in the cornfield along Dixon Road when I went out to get kitty food. After I got home and unloaded the car, I went back out with telephoto lenses and got as close to the cranes as I could before they took flight.  The photos are low contrast because of the low light from the cloud cover and, in some of the photos, the birds blend into the background; however, with the various shots of the cranes in flight and a few where they are walking around, mostly watching me, I believe you get a pretty good idea of what Sandhill Cranes look like on the ground and in flight.

All I was able to get photographed today was a bowl of butter.

I was going to put in a moon shot tonight, but since the sky is overcast, I had to settle for another coon shot instead. The photos of freeze dried Mothers Rose and a remaining bud on Royal Wedding were done in the soft light of the overcast sky this afternoon.

Laurie successfully defended her thesis, “Closure Operations on the Submonoids of the Natural Numbers”, this afternoon. She practiced it for the cats last night, but Guildenstern got bored and walked around on her computer before walking off to find something more exciting like lying on the floor. Puck came in late and slept the the rest of the presentation. However, Rosencrantz stayed alert and payed close attention during the entire presentation. I think Stretch would have enjoyed Laurie’s talk, but he was too busy hiding in case I was going to waterboard him.

Laurie’s defense went very well today, so now she will have a Master of Science in Mathematics and will continue working toward a PhD in Pure Math.

A BNSF locomotive crossed my path at 6th St. on my way home tonight. I cross those tracks daily during the week, and that is the first train I’ve seen crossing there. I figured since the sawmill had all closed down in that area many years ago, the tracks weren’t used anymore, but obviously I was wrong.

Romeo, one of Laurie’s parents’ cats, was posing for me tonight, and not long after we got home, there were little knocks at the door to the sunroom, followed by little growls that sounded vaguely like trick or treat. I went to investigate and found the raccoons at the door looking for handouts. I told them Halloween was almost two weeks ago, but they argued that I was wrong because tonight is the full moon and that raccoon Halloween was on the penultimate full moon of the year. Right! Clever, but those masked bandits didn’t get any handouts from me.

The last photo is the view to the west from the third floor of the Science & Math Learning Center at UNM.

 

I got the moon rising over the light on Broadway just before the sunset on my way up to the university to pick up Laurie. Laurie snapped the moon rising over Albuquerque from the car when we were on Coors Road on our way home.

 

Movember progresses and so does my mustache. Here’s my progress after the first week. If you feel inspired to donate to help fight prostate cancer, you can go to http://mobro.co/Elcheo.

I got this sunrise last Friday morning, but with getting sick and all, I forgot about it until today.

 

Laurie left me stranded in the classroom where she will be defending her thesis later this week while we were testing the equipment. She was only going out for a minute, which turned into fifteen, because of some potential room scheduling conflicts. Nonetheless, leaving me stranded in a room with my camera in hand gave me the photos of the day.

I felt a lot better today, still not great, and as cranky as ever.  The kitties were in the mood to pose today. Guildenstern is trying to get on the cover of the Kitty Quarterly, Stretch was having a nice nap in the morning sun, and Puck was occupying a computer table in the study. He prefers to be on a computer to practice his cat-like typing, but finally settled for the computer table after Laurie successfully thwarted his many attempts to help on her paper.

I have a full blown cold. I haven’t felt this bad in a long time. With the smoke from the controlled burns in the Jemez and Santa Fe areas drifting into the valley over the past several weeks, I’ve been having a lot of sinus trouble. Now people are  burning their fire places — and as hard as I tried to keep the sniffles from turning into a cold — I have failed.

I didn’t get a whole lot done today other than make a big pot of chicken soup stock to put up in the freezer, work on photos and hang around on the Internet. I got bored after a while, and decided to try doing a “Test your photography IQ” exam. The results were a big fat FAIL on the “Define the following terms” section.  OK, whatever, but I beg to differ with their assessment — I think most of my definitions were perfectly reasonable:

1. F Stop: — The stop between E and G on the Red Line.

2. Depth of Field: — knee deep when it rains.

3. Matrix: — Green numbers that fall from the top of my computer screen.

4. Resolution: — A Beatles song.

5. Flash: — A partial wardrobe malfunction.

6. Exposure: — A complete wardrobe malfunction.

7. Exposure Compensation: — The settlement over a wardrobe malfunction.

8. Rule of Thirds: — 3.33333333333333333333333333.

9. Diaphragm: — A contraceptive device.

10. ISO: — The opposite of ISNOT.

11. Chromatic aberration: — A white guy.

12. APO: — A performance enhancing option.

13. Sunny-16 Rule: — Always check ID, she may only look 21.

14. SLR:  — Such a Lovely Rectangle.

15. Golden Rectangle: — An expensive SLR.

I might have to eat some of that chicken soup stock for dinner.