Bird, Bee, Flower and Clouds

July 22, 2013 Timothy Price7 Comments

We watched the final stage of the Tour de France, and the multi-media, light extravaganza they projected on the Arc de Triomphe was spectacular. If the church could could produce the same quality of multi-media production to illustrate the pastor’s points as the Tour de France’s light show did for the awards ceremony, I might buy into the multi-media projection during the service. Then again, if churches could give multi-media shows half as good as the clouds over the Sandias, they might be entertaining.

A hawk was blending with the insulators on the power pole — good hunting strategy. The bee/wasp in the second photo is as BIG as it looks. I’ve been trying to get a clear photo of this critter for a long time. It never lands for but a split second and zips around very quickly. I finally got it in flight. The Asian lily was backlit nicely just after sunrise, and the clouds were quite entertaining throughout the day.

Touch of Blue

July 20, 2013 Timothy Price3 Comments

I love the dramatic skies we get this time of year.

Anasazi Building

July 16, 2013 Timothy Price4 Comments

I dropped my car off the get the tires replaced at the Downtown Goodyear garage, and passed by the Anasazi Building on my walk back to the office. They are making progress on it as you can see from the first photo taken yesterday and the second photo taken in May of last year. The Sandias had waves of clouds crashing over them this morning. I took the panorama across from the Balloon Museum and Laurie took the last photo from our property about the same time.

Let Your Light Shine

July 9, 2013 Timothy Price4 Comments

I’m listening to a course on the history of Christian theology, and the last lecture I listened to was on how Christians came to the idea of the soul separating from the body and going to Heaven or Hell when they die. Believe it or not, the idea of the soul going to heaven when one dies is not in the least bit Christian in origin, or even Jewish for that matter, but purely from Plato. If you stick by the Christian tradition, Christ returns to establish God’s Kingdom on earth and resurrects those Christians who are saved to be part of the Kingdom of God on earth. So why is the idea that our souls go to Heaven or Hell when we die so prevalent in the Western Christian tradition? Mostly because Augustine was well versed in Plato and liked the idea of a separate body and soul, but he still believed there had to be the resurrection of the body before the soul could achieve complete happiness. One problem is that Paul and the other New Testament writers believed Jesus would return in their life-time, so there was no problem about what happened when a Christian died, but as time wore on, later Christians became anxious about what happens when they die. In a simplistic way of looking at a very complex and drawn out issue, Plato had the easy answer — good souls go to Heaven and bad souls go to Hell — but then there are the questionable souls, that, again because of Augustine, are believed to end up in purgatory, at least in the Catholic tradition!

Ducks in a Row

July 8, 2013 Timothy Price6 Comments

After I dropped Laurie off to sing in the choir at the early service, I went over to UNM and photographed the ducks and the architecture. The clouds were building up over the Sandias on my way home, so I stopped at the jetti sculpture on Coors and got the shots of the Sandias, clouds and sculpture.

Cumulus Construction

July 4, 2013 Timothy Price4 Comments

We are finally starting to get our afternoon rains.

Stormy Tuesday

July 3, 2013 Timothy Price3 Comments

While we didn’t get a lot of rain at our hose today, other areas north of us did.

Paws

June 30, 2013 Timothy Price10 Comments

Diné laid under the chaise lounge with her paws crossed, while beautiful thunderheads built up over the Sandias and floated by earlier in the afternoon. A vulture appeared to fly above the clouds as it circled over the river. The picturesque clouds turned into a dust storm in the late afternoon, but, alas, no rain.

Rain Smuggler

June 14, 2013 Timothy Price4 Comments

Don’t tell anyone, but I did sneak a little bit of rain past customs. It’s a piddling amount, just enough to turn the dust on the cars into muddy drops, but it’s rain all the same. When I went out to photograph the clouds, a hummingbird hovered at what it thought was a safe distance from my lens, but even in the low light of overcast skies at dusk, I got a clear shot of it hovering in front of clouds. A crow flew through my photo of the backlit clouds, and as it flew over me I could see it had something in its beak, but it was so strongly silhouetted against the clouds, I couldn’t see what it had.

France Day 18 A walk on Champs Élysées

May 30, 2013May 30, 2013 Timothy Price14 Comments

Laurie and I stood in line and got tickets for Handel’s opera Guilio Caesare, and then walked the Champs Élysées for our 31st wedding anniversary. Our walk was from the Opera down one side of Champs Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, a loop around the Arc, a shot of the CBD, the a walk up the other side of the Champs Élysées through the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre and back home. Along the way we saw the latest Renault Dezir on a showroom floor, and an old Citroën 2CV driving by. On the way to the Arc de Triomphe the sidewalk was covered with people as far was you could see, and the Champs Élysées had a constant flow of bumper to bumper traffic. The many cafes and restaurants lining the sidewalks were full of people and there was a mix of tourists gawking, street venders hawking, and well dressed business men and women making their way through the hustle and bustle.

Bathroom stops are quite interesting — you have to pay to pee in Paris, and you certainly can’t pee in peace, because there is always a woman in the men’s side cleaning. We stopped at the restroom at the entrance to the Jardin des Tuileries, and there was quite a line. There were several attendants keeping order on letting people in and out of the bathrooms. I got waved through, payed my 50 cents, and was standing at the urinal when I heard “Pardon!” in a female voice and felt a nudge against my shoulder. The cleaning woman was mopping making me and the guy next to me step over and around the mop while we were trying to pee. When there is a constant stream of people, she just cleans around them.

We got back to the apartment from our walk around 7:00 pm, then we went out to the Monoprix (a French Corte Inglés) and got food. Laurie made a pizza with bread, lardon (a cross between bacon, ham and salt pork), creme fraiche, eggplant and a medium aged Cantal cheese for dinner that was really good. You can see the outside of our apartment on the building in the last photo. The tiny window in the roof is the kitchen and the main room looks out the gabled windows on either side.