Loxosceles

Another race, this one a 5K. My time was a little better - 31:29.

I don't plan on running any more races for a few months. Hopefully then I'll be a little faster.

If you go ice skating at Cass Park (or, now that it's spring, if you come to roller derby practices) you will see this mural:





Yes, that's right. One side has an angry evil octopus, the other has angry evil snowmen, aliens, and killer bees.

I don't know who painted this. It's as beautiful as it is nightmare-inducing.

Here are some more views of pain, suffering, and a small amount of fun-in-the-sun (the park also has a swimming pool):



Here, a girl is being chased by a snowman, right into the path of the red-toothed evil snowman you can see in the photo above. In the background, a UFO is abducting most of the landscape's remaining objects.



And here, some people swim (enjoying themselves or eating fish, according to their preference) while a girl who was flying finds herself stung. Maybe that's in the pool rules: no running, no horseplay, no flying?

When the Finger Lakes Running Company moved into this building, they started painting the side of it. This is one of my favorite murals in town.


Here is some more art. This one is in front of a gift/art/craft shop called Spirit and Kitsch that is located in what they call an "art vacuum" in Ithaca. It's on a street where every building is either a garage or looks like it wants to be one.

Chris and I are still alive. This is what we look like.

If it snows, they'll write the sky a nasty ticket.

To help encourage myself in my newfound love of running (I had a few good runs without my feet hurting, but I'm not signing myself up for a marathon just yet) I got a little music player. It's matchbox sized (does anybody remember when matches came in boxes?) and it does FM radio as well as mp3s.

(Yes, it's linux compatible - it's just USB mass storage.)

Apologies for the boring picture. I didn't go anywhere interesting today.

People rarely take photos of subway stations, but for me that's a big part of your trip. Some dumb statue? You passed it once. But the T stop is one of the first things you see, one of the first systems you have to navigate, and the infrastructure to get you around town.

OK, so I'm a rube who never sees subways at home. Is that so wrong?

(By the way, that song gets stuck in my head every time. Argh.)

Lots more Boston photos here.

A mural in one of MIT's engineering buildings. Surely you know the story.

I forgot to include a quarter for scale. The XO makes my laptop (right) look big.

The mcdonald's employee sweeping up told me that MY laptop was really small and cute.

I'll be traveling over the weekend, so in case I forget tomorrow's photo, here are some extras. They're from tonight's roller derby practice.

We're doing a great job recruiting new girls, and the new girls are doing a great job too! They're dedicated - for some, this is their 3rd practice in a week - and they are definitely up for a challenge. We did practice bouts (in our tiny gym space) and some of the fresh meat jammed! How awesome is that.

In the photo above, the girl in the white shirt and red helmet is jamming. And it's her second practice EVER.


This is a bonus on the bonus photo - in case the motion blur hurts your eyes, this is one of the few shots I got of derby girls sitting still.

Taken with the new cheapie camera, the one that actually fits in my pocket. I'm loving it.

I never knew it was there! This 0.89-mile asphalt trail, connecting Maple Ave to Honness Lane, is part of the Belle Sherman 5K route.

Seeing a colorful car like this always makes my day. Somebody loves their car very much and wants to use it to make people happy (or some other emotion, I guess, depending on what the paintings are of.)

For Christmas, I got a flash for my camera. It's the first time I've owned one - the kind that mounts on the hot shoe, can bounce off the ceiling, all that good stuff. I used to hate flash pictures. I have been won over. Just look at what it can do:


Flash pointed directly at the reindeer


Flash bounced off the ceiling.

Note brighter background, soft non-glarey light on the plush. No catchlights in eyes because the light wasn't pointing at the eyes. (This is my favorite of the three)


Flash pointed at the ceiling, with a doohickey that scatters the light so it comes from different directions.

This gadget scatters the light, so some of it reflects off the fur and the eyes, and less of it gets to the background.

Yarr! I be usin me new camARRa! It be a Pentax K100D. Look what it be doin!

A weed in me garden

Scurvy dogs dancin

Me own scurvy self

The cap'n's quarters

Each o' these be a photo I couldn'ta taken with me old camARRa. Avast, me hearties!

We went to the state fair.



There were chickens ...



... and even multicolored chickens ...



... but my favorite hairdos were on the ducks.



When chickens have ridiculous multi-colored hairdos, they really look the part. Like, "I'm a rock star!" or "I'm a clown!" But the ducks don't really get into the character. They're like "I'm a duck." A duck with a great hairdo, that is.

I caught a sheep mid-baa:



and some pigs during their nap:



These guys were really rocking their harmonicas



and these seals were trained to plop their heads on anybody who posed for a picture.



I can't forget the butter sculpture



but most amazing of all is the tiny state fair inside the state fair.



I looked, but I couldn't find a tinier state fair inside of it.

More photos are here. The state fair website is here, but you can't see it for yourself until next year.

This was my February.


Like February itself, this photoset is mostly boring, with a few fun days here and there.

My favorite is the chili pepper photo. That was all Marty's doing - he bought a bag of dried organic cayenne peppers, deposited them on my desk one day at work, and repeatedly told me to photograph them. (I think he was getting sick of all the dog and lunchbox pictures.) So we wandered around the hallways at work looking for a suitable backdrop. Somebody left an art book near a sunny window, and the rest is history.

These are the photos I took for each day in January. Sometimes I was out of ideas and I had to just take a picture of a dog. (Hey, at least they're cute.) My favorite photo this month is the running deer, in focus.

Here are the daily photos from December 2006:


I recently read a bunch of articles on night photography - a lot of interesting stuff. Some of the authors note that when you're in a strange place in the middle of the night, especially if you're trespassing or if someone might think you are, to carry prints of your night photography - so you can convince the cops that you really are there to take pictures. (I guess this is a tough sell when you're out "taking pictures" in the dark.)

(I had an encounter with a cop once when I was out with my camera in some roadside cornfield. He was very friendly, and recommended some other nearby photo spots.)

Anyhow. Here's a night photography blog and flickr's neon clusters.