A photo of the lake at George L. Smith II State Park near Twin City, Geor­gia taken Wednes­day the 22nd on our way south.

Aiken’s sec­ond snow of 2010, and hope­fully the last, turned out to be a major bust com­pared to the Feb­ru­ary snow­fall of almost a 1/2 foot. It snowed most of the morn­ing and on and off dur­ing the after­noon, but we ended up with near zero accu­mu­la­tion (not that I’m com­plain­ing mind you.)

Two more GA State Parks and nine more caches today. One of the caches was placed right near the Suwan­nee River and its water level is way down giv­ing the exposed roots of the trees a very oth­er­worldly look.

My Santa Claus, GA cache did get pub­lished and some­one has already found it. I won­der if some­one will log it on Christ­mas Day?

Lake Jocasse from Dev­ils Fork State Park

Didn’t have much to say last night, so I didn’t say it. Tonight? Pretty much the same.

The doc­tors have made their pleas to Big Insur­ance, we remain admit­ted and inside stay­ing warm while a freak (for Aiken) snow storm dumps the white stuff outside.

Back in the day we used to take pic­tures, get them devel­oped and place them in photo albums. When we first went dig­i­tal, a step was added to the process, upload them to an online ser­vice. Some­where along the line that extra step was elim­i­nated and the con­se­quence of that is now there are no phys­i­cal images to bore your friends and neigh­bors. All the pho­tos are mere ones and zeros on a hard drive.

A cou­ple years ago I found an online place that mashes up the photo devel­op­ment and photo album into a full color bound book and we have made sev­eral of them from our vacations.

We took a 2 week trip back in April and I just now got around to mak­ing a pho­to­book from the pic­tures. I made it for us to put with the rest of our vaca­tion mem­o­ries, but you too can own those mem­o­ries, buy one for your­self for Christ­mas. Or if you are cheap, just check out the gallery here on mr-miata.net.

Noth­ing to say.…

Sorry Mark.

More Fun Box Photo

Who Is The Iron Man?

 
Morn­ing Paper

 

When we wait­ing for our break­fast on Sat­ur­day I wan­dered the block look­ing for photo ops, pick­ings were slim. I parked my butt in the median to get a low angle shot of the line of Miatas. I was there a while try­ing out dif­fer­ing com­po­si­tions try­ing for the just the right shot. One of the mem­bers noticed my sit­ting there and broke out her cam­era to take a pic­ture of me tak­ing pic­tures (she thought it looked like I was sulk­ing.) Of course by the time she got out her cam­era I had stood up and was head­ing back. By now every­one else was in on the sce­nario and waved me back to the mid­dle of the road, so I sat down and smiled, thereby ruin­ing the moment. That smile reminds me of Jack Nicholson’s Joker look from the 1989 Bat­man movie.

I got her back by tak­ing her pic­ture as she took mine.…

The Pavil­ion Restau­rant Pier, Edisto Island, SC

So late, I’m well past being fash­ion­able. I’m pathet­i­cally late. I signed up for a Flickr account.

I’ve started by load­ing some of the Post Office pho­tos and I got a lit­tle less than half uploaded today.

I really like the map­ping fea­ture, but it is for all your pho­tos, so maybe I’ll just keep this account lim­ited to SC Post Offices… Explore Brian the Red’s geo­t­agged pho­tos on a Map

Turns out that this thing (Flickr!) is so pop­u­lar that there is a group set up for just about every type of pho­to­graph, includ­ing one for pic­tures of Post Offices. There are 135 mem­bers with 1304 pho­tos in the group.

I’ve even added a lit­tle Flickr! thing in the sidebar.

Taste of Amer­ica with Mark DeCarlo on the Travel Chan­nel in is my old home town, New Britain, CT talk­ing Kiel­basa. He said that the city is affec­tion­ately called Lit­tle Poland because of the large Pol­ish pop­u­la­tion, we just called it New Brit­ski when grow­ing up, but I guess that would have not been very polit­i­cally cor­rect for 2007 & TV. I like to refer to New Britain as the “Ex Hard­ware Cap­i­tal of the World.” What attracted all those Pol­ish folks to the town in the first place was the plethora of jobs at all the fac­to­ries that made locks, bear­ings, hinges, tools, etc. It is the “Ex” because all the fac­to­ries are closed down as the man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs moved south. The only com­pany that still has any pres­ence in town is Stan­ley Tools, but they only have white col­lar jobs left at their World HQ. You can get a brief glimpse of Broad St, NB, CT by watch­ing the repeat of this episode at 11:00PM tonight or at 2:00PM on Sat­ur­day afternoon.

The skies have been very inter­est­ing around here lately, which means spring can’t be too far away. Also for the first time in a cou­ple weeks we were near the aver­age (low six­ties) for us this time a year instead of 10 degrees below it. I’ve got my fin­gers crossed that this her­alds the end of win­ter for us. For the next 10 days we will be 5–10 degrees above nor­mal temps. Sun­day calls for rain, but Sat­ur­day looks very promis­ing for a Post Office photo expedition.

I meant to put this link in my post the other day about drafts­men: MUSEUM of OBSOLETE DRAFTING TECHNOLOGY.

Here is a photo from the trip that with a lit­tle help almost isn’t dreck. It was under­ex­posed and not very inter­est­ing, so I cranked up the con­trast which washed out the col­ors. I then ran it through a sepia tone fil­ter and viola, an old locomotive.

Most of the pho­tos from the rail­road round­house would look improved once run through a sepia fil­ter. You know, I think if I work at it I can get 20 decent pho­tos for an online vaca­tion gallery, just don’t hold your breath wait­ing for it, OK?

It took me a cou­ple hours of star­ring at the paper­work on my desk before I could deci­pher where I left off 10 days ago, but once I got my bear­ings it was off to the races and I had a fairly pro­duc­tive day. I hope the com­pany doesn’t expect that every­day now…

The pic­ture in last Wednesday’s post was on TV. After I showed the image to a cou­ple folks at work I was told I should sent it in to the local morn­ing weather guy because every morn­ing he shows a pic­ture that a viewer has sent in. I emailed it to him on Fri­day and he replied that it would get shown on Mon­day at 5:15 and 6:15AM. When Donna asked if I wanted to get up a lit­tle ear­lier so I could see the pic­ture, I told her no, I’d already seen it.

There are a lot of peo­ple at work who get up early and must get their weather in the morn­ing from Matt Mon­roe because I had a whole lot of peo­ple catch me Mon­day (and a few on Tues­day) and tell me they saw my pic­ture on Chan­nel 6. One per­son tells me I won a cof­fee cup with some ground cof­fee. Another tells me I will prob­a­bly get an umbrella. I think both of those are pro­mo­tions from other sta­tions or pre­vi­ous weather peo­ple, but never hav­ing watched the local morn­ing news, who knows. I vow to watch on Tues­day morn­ing to see what actu­ally hap­pens dur­ing the viewer photo segment.

I of course for­get all about it. Then last night a friend from the MMC emailed me to say she saw my photo on TV on Mon­day and I should watch this morn­ing to see one of hers, so I rolled out of bed about 10 min­utes ear­lier than nor­mal and watched the morn­ing weather. Matt did the weather and then went to a com­mer­cial. Huh? No pic­ture? When they came back from the break, there was Carol’s photo of some high moun­tains and blue sky. Oooh and aaah from Weather Guy, cheery com­ment from Anchor Woman and back to the news. No men­tion of a cof­fee mug. No umbrella. Noth­ing but using up about fif­teen sec­onds of our 15 minutes.

Both with rain­drops and Min­nesota Twin’s hits. It was sup­posed to rain all day here in Aiken, but as you can see by this pic­ture it wasn’t at 1:45 this after­noon. And it still hasn’t.

My pic­ture tak­ing had really slacked off recently, but now that I have a new toy the “magic” is back. We were at the local Honda dealer this after­noon and inside their show­room they a metic­u­lously restored 1973 600 Coupe. I used the 23mm wide angle lens to take the pic­ture and then added a Kodak EasyShare fun fil­ter called appro­pri­ately, car­toon, to get the fin­ished product.

This car is famous in my mem­ory because while sta­tioned on Guam, one of my VQ-1 squadron mates owned one. When Super Typhoon Pamela made a bee­line for our tiny lit­tle island in July of 1976, he had to be on one of the squadron’s planes that flew off to safe har­bor in Japan. He left his car parked with those of the rest of the air­crew near the hanger, which was in plain sight from the back of our bar­racks about 200–300 yards away. On the typhoon’s way onto the island, it was best to be holed up in your bar­racks room, but after the eye passed the wind shifted so that the back stairs were in rel­a­tively quiet air and we could stand on the land­ings and watch the winds wreak havoc on the air­field build­ings and hangers.

As some of us watched 4 x 8 sheets of cor­ru­gated tin roof­ing get peeled off an older hanger, my room­mate pointed back towards our hanger. There rolling down the tar­mac was that poor lit­tle Honda 600. It got rolled onto one side, then onto the roof and then over on the other side before com­ing to a stop pressed up against the squadron’s duty pickup. To add insult to injury, the wind then pushed a nearby dump­ster slid­ing along the pave­ment until it mushed into the roof of the tiny 1200 lb car. Need­less to say the car was a total loss.

We stopped by the Aiken County Museum this after­noon to check out the entries in the 2nd Annual Sculp­ture Com­pe­ti­tion. Last year there were about 20 dis­played out­side with the rest indoors. This year there were only about 5 out­doors with the major­ity inside. This pic­ture is of the 1st place sculp­ture, Gretchen Lothrop’s “A Sub­tle Miracle.”

I didn’t bring a tri­pod, so shoot­ing indoors was really out of the ques­tion, but I saw one that was inter­est­ing and seemed to have enough light. But when I snapped the pic­ture, the flash went off, caus­ing one of the elderly vol­un­teer ladies to come over and chas­tise me. I apol­o­gized and made sure it wouldn’t hap­pen again. As it was it didn’t mat­ter as there was noth­ing else I found pho­to­genic anyway.

Back over Thanks­giv­ing week when Donna and her sis­ter were going through pic­tures to take to the funeral home for them to use in pro­duc­ing a trib­ute video of their mom, Sandy kept look­ing for a pic­ture she had seen before and wanted it included, but look­ing high and low it couldn’t be found. Donna and I hadn’t ever seen it before and we were begin­ning to believe that it didn’t exist, that Sandy had a false mem­ory implanted some­how or was confusing/combining two sep­a­rate images in her head.

This week­end Donna has been in the back bed­room con­tin­u­ing her daunt­ing task of sort­ing through thou­sands of fam­ily pic­tures. So guess what she hap­pened to find today? That’s right, Mom and Dad on a boat. Sorry we doubted you Sandy…

In lieu of actual con­tent tonight, I present a pic­ture snapped out­side a church in Rome, GA last week. The park­ing lot was across the street from the church and they had evi­den­tially spent some church funds to do some land­scap­ing and wanted to keep it nice.

Con­tinue read­ing Ninety-Eight Dol­lar Shoes

Con­tinue read­ing Giant Hydrant

Con­tinue read­ing Lick Fork Lake