Beowabbit

Today when I got home from work, I was too tired and low-brain-function to do anything actually useful. But repetitive stuff involving pictures was not beyond me, so I uploaded some of the photos I took when plumtreeblossom and I went to see the Big Apple Circus in April to Flickr. You can see them here.

On Friday I met plumtreeblossom after work (see her weekend write-up here) and we took the train to Quincy Center together. We had dinner at Outback Steakhouse. I don’t like their corporate politics, but I love their food and sometimes I just need a hunk of cow. As it turned out, I’m very glad we did, because I ordered an Australian beer I wasn’t familiar with — Cooper’s Brewery Sparkling Ale — and it was so good I ordered a second, and then went looking for it at the liquor store later in the week. (If you are wise enough to follow my example, be cautioned that it’s fermented in the bottle, so there’s some sediment in the bottom; you want to pour it into a glass.)

After a yummy dinner, we went to my house and watched Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, which was very funny, and a little bit of the original 1930s exploitation/propaganda movie, which was a bonus on the DVD.

( Another few meals, another movie, some geekery, and some games with darxus and cathijosephine. )

At some point in the weekend, plumtreeblossom took a whole bunch of pictures of grim warrior beowabbit, including the one that I eventually munged into my new userpic, and I also took some pictures of her cats, who were sleeping together on her bed looking especially cute.

The one bad thing about the weekend is that towards the end of the workweek I’d been having little twinges in my hip, and they got considerably worse over the weekend. I’m going to need to drive to the T tomorrow (where parking is $7); there’s no way I can do the normally 15-minutes walk to the T station with the ice that’s on the sidewalks. I’m not sure if this is a return of my sciatica or if I did something to my hip slipping on the ice. But if a hurt hip is the price for all the joy and fun I had this weekend, it was worth it.

Hi! I had a fabulous weekend, involving dinner, good conversation, and Reefer Madness: The Musical with eisa on Saturday, and then a date with plumtreeblossom that started with a three-course dinner on Sunday, and continued with a trip to the Topsfield Fair on the holiday Monday. We had a fabulous time eating fair food, riding the Ferris wheel, eating fair food, petting the bunnies, eating fair food, browsing the fair museum, eating fair food, checking out the cattle and newborn baby piglets and raptors, eating fair food, seeing the giant pumpkin (1400 pounds!), eating fair food, petting and feeding critters at the petting zoo, and eating fair food. And plumtreeblossom rode an elephant and I got pictures of her on it! And I got pictures of a kangaroo and a camel and the raptors and piglets and lots of other nifty things. And the food was good. I had a wonderful weekend. I love my darling and love doing simple outdoorsy stuff with her, and it was wonderful to see eisa and get caught up a bit, and I got some nice relaxing time with cathijosephine in there, too.

Oh, I also slept about twelve hours Saturday night! This means I did not get as much done on Sunday as I might have liked, but I seem to have needed the sleep; I felt great during that fraction of Sunday that I was awake for.

Also, I've gotten through selecting and commenting the first (and largest and best) batch of my Montréal photos: the animal photos I took at the Biodôme de Montréal. Some of them are pretty nifty, and this is the sort of thing my new camera is wonderful for (and why I wanted it). You can see them in this Flickr photoset. I will be posting a few more Montréal photos at some point, but I really went overboard in the Biodôme.

Of course, I also hope to post my Topsfield photos soon. Amusingly, both the Biodôme and the fair had ring-tailed lemurs, so I got two opportunities to photograph ring-tailed lemurs in one month. The ones at the Biodôme had been pretty sedentary, but at the fair I saw a pretty impressive behaviour. They would be on the side of the cage and jump backwards to land onto a perch in the middle of the cage. It was nifty to watch, and I wish I had been able to get some video of it. They did a lot of jumping, but the backwards jumps were especially delightful.

PS — My weekend was so fabulous that I haven’t come close to catching up with LiveJournal, and probably won’t. If you posted something I should see, feel free to point me at it.

I haven’t done one of these in a long time, but coraline encouraged people on her F’list to, so I decided I would. I had been planning on taking a new picture with the wonderful new camera plumtreeblossom, eisa, beetiger, docorion, mrpet, nex0s, and angeltigriss got me for my birthday (THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! IT ROCKS!), but it’s late and I have a very big day ahead of me tomorrow, so I’m just going to reuse an old picture from the mid ’90s or so of me swimming at the Ledges in Vermont. It shows off my best assets: my smile, and my joy in being among people I love. (sionnagh, zzbottom, and his then-wife whose LJ name I’ve spaced on were there with me.)

Me at the Ledges Me in the water at the Ledges (Harriman Reservoir, Vermont), probably mid-’90s.

Hmmmm. I look a lot different now, but I think I’m still that happy pretty often.

So I took a bunch of photos of Festival@First last week (opening night) and posted them to Flickr, and then realized that they were spoilers and I shouldn’t make them public until the show was over.

The fabulous show is now over, and the photos are up here! Unfortunately, (1) my camera isn’t great in low-light conditions, (2) I didn’t have a tripod, and (3) I didn’t (and still don’t, given my parents’ visit) have time to adjust them for optimal viewing. But I figured they were worth posting anyway. The ones that aren’t too fuzzy do get better with tweaking, so if there’s one that you’d love if it were brighter or had better contrast or weren’t quite so green, let me know.

These are all from the first act, since that day plumtreeblossom’s back was in terrible pain, and we needed to leave at intermission. But on closing night I got shots of the shows I hadn’t gotten on opening night (as well as some more of “Last Minute Adjustments” and “Playwriting 101”), and I’ll post those when I get a chance (probably after my parents’ visit).

By request. Let me know if you want this lj-cut; I figured it was small enough that wasn’t necessary.

plumtreeblossom with wildflowers, from September. Two beauties of nature captured in one shot! More flower pics (and one more plumtreeblossom pic are here.

It’s now the beginning of November in Massachusetts, and the flowers show no signs of slowing down. They’re still covered with new blossoms and lots and lots of buds. And they’re a lot taller than they were when this picture were taken; a few plants are taller than I am, standing. (Unfortunately a few of the taller ones were knocked over wind storms last month, or there would be a lot taller than me.)

I also need to organize and post pictures from our DC trip last month.

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately; I’ve been too busy living life to write about it. I will mention last Thursday, though — darxus and cathijosephine and devoken came over to watch Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart is Crazy, I think), which is pretty much the quintessential Bollywood movie and was (as my delightful plumtreeblossom, who sadly couldn’t make it, would say) made of awesome. The costumes and dance numbers were particularly impressive even for Bollywood. And today plumtreeblossom and I are driving out to Western Mass to go to the housewarming of a couple friends and former housemates of mine. And basically life is going well, except I need to get more sleep and not decide two hours after I should have been in bed that it’s really time to organize some pictures. :-)

My delightful friend golux_org, among his other excellent qualities, is an astronomy buff and a photographer. He posts a daily photo at http://photo.bluebrook.com/potd.html, which I read through its LJ feed, bluebrook_potd. Usually he posts (gorgeous) nature scenes, but today’s photo is of the ISS, with the shuttle docked, passing overhead on Saturday. As it happens, I was there when he took that photo, and it was pretty impressive. To my eyes, it looked about as bright as Venus, and it crossed about three quarters of the sky before rapidly dimming and disappearing as it entered Earth’s shadow. It was visible to us (given that trees and buildings blocked our view as it rose) for a minute or so.

On a related subject golux_org reminded me that our mutual friend dalek (a/k/a Marek), who works with the Clay Center Observatory, was one of the people who took this impressively detailed ground-based photo of the ISS and Atlantis during the previous shuttle mission to the ISS. Atlantis is docked to the bottom-left of the main space station body, between the two large groups of solar panels, mostly in shadow and pointed away (with the main engines pointed towards earth), so we’re looking at the rear of the shuttle. The ISS is well-lit. It’s worth clicking through the picture on that page to the higher-resolution version; you can see considerably more detail.

(BTW, my userpic for this post is the Hubble Space Telescope; nothing to do with the ISS.)

Had a fabulous, fabulous time last night at sunspiral and roozle’s amazing party.

darxus was there with cathijosephine’s DSLR camera (and cathijosephine), and he got some great pictures. They start here, and the first bunch are of firespinning (and firejuggling). He camera-geeks about how he took them in this entry. After the firespinning, there are some great indoor pictures (after plumtreeblossom and I had left), including a few lovely pictures of cathijosephine. And fans of cathijosephine, of buxom_bey, of gorgeous women kissing in general, or of fire will be interested in this shot.

[EDIT: Oops; I had linked to somebody else’s pictures too, but they’re in a locked post. Sorry!]

(I took some video of the firespinning; my little digicam does better at that than at still shots in low-light conditions for some reason. I haven’t looked to see whether any of it turned out yet.)

I also call your attention to this gorgeous sunset picture.

In other photo-related news, I got plumtreeblossom a camera yesterday, and from a purely selfish perspective it was a really wise investment on my part. This post of hers made me extremely happy. Awwww...

I’ve added pictures from my recent trip with plumtreeblossom to meet sionnagh in Las Vegas to my photo gallery:

• My photo gallery (recent photos at the top)
• Direct link to Vegas pictures

Unfortunately, I seem not to have taken any of sionnagh, but there are some nice ones of plumtreeblossom.