Things are against us, and the perfect ending to a rather annoying day came when I got to the Walmart pharmacy a few minutes before closing to pick up a prescription for Laurie and they didn’t have it. The dentist had called in the prescription and left a message, then called a few minutes later, got a person, and asked how long it would take for the prescription to be filled — “an hour and a half” was the reply — so Laurie called me at the office  and asked me to pick it up on the way home.  For whatever reason, the message didn’t get through and there was no prescription.  I picked up two bottles of cream and a half gallon of milk, and got in the “10 items or less” line. Walmart was a zoo with people of every “challenge” imaginable swarming the Valentine’s isles.  When the woman in front of me got to the checker and stood beside her cart to unload it, I noticed she had well over 10 items, mostly multiple fruit she hadn’t bagged. I suppose if she had bagged the fruit like a normal shopper, she would have had ten items, but loose she had more than twenty. Even worse, the checker weighed and entered the code for each individual piece of fruit, even though there were only 4 different varieties of fruit.  If there is a hell I can imagine it would be an eternity of standing in line behind people who don’t bag their fruit and checkers who can’t assemble and weigh like items.

 

Snow was falling under a uniform gray sky, laying down a thin white blanket in the subfreezing temperatures, when I got up this morning. The geese and cranes flew to and fro as dry flakes gathered loosely on the plants, falling off with the slightest movement caused by wind, bird or beast.  The temperature slowly made its way above freezing, so by 10:00 am no snow remained.  Puck played with a wood chip after rolling in the dirt where the mulch had washed away, while sparrows and finches scratched in the driveway taking refuge on a far post and thick branches when I approached them.

 

 

 

 

 

I got a couple new bouquets of flowers when I was at Costco today.  They had a fresh shipment for Valentine’s Day, and I couldn’t resist the combination of daisies, roses and carnations in these bouquets.  BTW. A flash ring is a flash that fits on the end or the lens for doing flash with macro (close-up) photography.

 

 

 

I got a ring flash for my macro lens. These are my first photos with it. I still need to do a lot of experimenting with exposure, but I’m happy with the results so far.

 

 

 

This installation is in a yard at the top of our road. When it was installed around Christmas, I thought it was decoration for the holiday, but tonight I gave it a closer look and realized it is an installation of night art.

Among the memorabilia at Cecilia’s Restaurant on 6th and Silver is a rusty New Mexico license plate from 1957.  Apparently the plates in those days had green numbers against a white field, and since the year is embossed in the plate, the DMV must have issued new plates every year in the 50’s.

If you are downtown looking for good New Mexican food, I recommend Cecilia’s. The food is spicy and as close to homemade as you will get in a restaurant. Cecilia’s was even featured on a Food Channel show that was called something like “Dives and Diners on Route 66” a couple of years ago.

 

I had one of those days with no real breaks. But as I was leaving the office this evening, the full moon, under a veil of thin clouds that obscured its detail, looked like a big city light hovering in the sky.

I generally don’t find doves to be particularly interesting birds. Perhaps it’s because there are so many of them, and the doves that hang out around here are so gray; however, today I got close enough to a dole of doves to notice they have subtle purple in the gray and blue around their eyes.  They also have nice contrasting stripes of white on their tail feathers and in their wings that are visible when they fly, but I only managed to get a blurry tail of a dove as it flew out of my viewfinder. The dole flew all at once, making my autofocus go crazy trying to decide which one to focus on — by the time the focusing system decided to allow the shutter to release, only a dove’s tail remained in the frame.

I replaced the hard drive in my Macbook Pro last night, and restored everything from a backup while we watched a French movie.  My computer had been acting flaky, with lots of pauses and programs not responding. A couple of weeks ago I tried restarting the computer and it wouldn’t come back up, so I booted from the install DVD, fixed disk permissions, then repaired the hard drive. While lots of permissions had gotten out of whack, the disk utility reported nothing wrong with the hard drive. The computer rebooted, but continued to act up, so I replaced the 250 GB drive with a 500 GB drive and everything has been working really well all day.

Laurie’s taking French this semester, so we are watching French movies to improve listening and comprehension. I like French movies because they are made for adults in that they assume the viewer has intelligence and they generally have complex plots, good dialog and excellent cinematography. The silly comedies we’ve seen are funny bet not plain stupid, and the action films are still fairly sophisticated.  We watched D13-U last night, the sequel to Luc Besson’s District 13. It didn’t have as much of the parkour type stunts as the first movie, but it still had a lot of action and it was exciting and suspenseful.  If you are into French films I highly recommend the following: OSS 117: Lost in Rio, Tell No One, Mesrine: Part 1 & 2, Potiche and Priceless.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio is a comedy set in the 70’s,  it is very funny and really has the look and feel of the 70’s. Tell No One is fascinating and has a super complex plot. Mesrine: Part 1 & 2 is about the life of Mesrine, who was France’s public enemy #1 in the 70’s and early 80’s. Potiche, another one set in the late 70’s, is about a trophy wife who ends up running the family’s umbrella factory. Priceless is a modern, French version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I think Rosencrantz was trying to warm his back when I photographed him with the sun starting to rise over his head through the glass this morning. A roadrunner was foraging in a vineyard when I went out to the post office at noon, and I got the sparrow hanging out in a fruit tree when I took out the trash this afternoon.

We woke up to snow and wintery skies. I figured the schools would be delayed and the roads a mess, but once outside of Corrales there was no snow, and it was hardly even wet.  The kitties had to go out first thing and leave paw prints in the snow.