Lobo Louie revived. I got a reprieve this afternoon from the task that kept me so late last night, only to deal with a bad video card and another failed HD for much of the afternoon. At least the drive was still under warranty — I sent it to the manufacturer for replacement.

 

 

After a 14 hour day I could use some of Stretch’s I.V. I’ve been working like a dog, and so much so that Lobo Louie finally got worn out watching me, and passed out.

 

 

Tristan got a Chilean rose haired tarantula for Valentine’s Day, but I hadn’t seen it in person until this evening. She’s a lovely tarantula.  The fish were silly tonight.

 

 

I’m still dinking around with extreme close-ups of frost. I’m getting pretty good detail, but I need to pull out the remote shutter release, because I’m getting a little movement when I press the shutter release on the camera.

Today was hardware hell with a drive going out in one of the servers, kernel panics in another computer, and a freaked out monitor that turned out to be the video card going bad.

 

We had way too many things to get done today. I’m still working on finishing the carne adovada stew I started around noon. About halfway through preparing the potatoes, I realized I had forgotten to get red chile. So once the potatoes were done and the frijoles were simmering, I ran out to the store and picked up some red chile. I snapped the photos of the mountains on my way home from my chile run.

I didn’t have time to get back to the French Lab today, but I did get the sentences about Lincoln written. Each sentence was painful to write, and they probably aren’t even grammatically correct. Oh well, that’s how you learn.

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.