We went to the zoo over the holidays to see the baby elephant, Lilly.
She was about 3 weeks old.
The morning was foggy and cold, I was glad I had gloves and a wool cloak. Luckily, it wasn't raining. As long as I kept moving, my feet didn't get too cold.
We got to the zoo relatively early and joined the throng winding its way down the paths curving around the Pacific Northwest exhibit, past the spuming coastal exhibit, and the investigated by the health department restaurant, to the elephant house.
There was a queue to go into the sturdy, blocky building, which usually isn't the case. Inside was slightly dark and dank; the building must be about fifty years old, so it looks like a giant cage -- I'm guessing the plexiglas between the zoo-goers and the gigantic bars holding back the elephants is only slightly younger than the rest of the building.
Behind the bars, eating a breakfast of hay, were Lilly and her mother. I took a few photos of the elephant when we got closer. People were mostly polite and aware of the folks behind them. The most surprizing thing to watch was how much of an infant Lilly still is, even though she is the size of a small pony. We always equate large animals with grown ones, but the way she moved her trunk and leaned against her mother was very infant like.
After the elephants, we went to the Safari Section of the Zoo to see the Lions, Tigers, Cheetahs, and Leopards. The Lions and the Tigers were distant. The Cheetahs and Leopards, however, where hunkered down against the inclement weather in window bays (conveniently lined with straw). I'm not sure that I'd want a large window in my bedroom for people to peer at me through, but the cats seemed pretty adept at ignoring us. I got some nice close-up pictures of them.
The sea lions -- large and graceful within the blue water, like shadows of dark clouds meeting. -- reminded me that sometimes it's better to enjoy what you're looking at directly, rather than constraining it to a finder frame.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Friday, December 28, 2012
Design Made Real
This year's holiday gift craft was a luminary.
I started out wanting to make a lamp casing out of plastic from a 3-D printer. I made a model using Blender, which looked cool when I rendered it. But what I enedeed up with was something that was A) too big to fit in the 3D printer available to me and B) probably not printable at the level of detail I wanted on a PrintRBot printer.
For my next attempt, I tried to make a lamp casing out of a flour and salt mix, with crushed life savers in the middle. That didn't work so well as the dough had a pretty rough resolution and the crushed life savers didn't melt the way I wanted them too (they were too lumpy and the end product was too sticky).
My third attempt, I thought I'd try to make a design and then have it printed out on plastic... but the plastic shop I connected with was a supplier to signs and windows... their web page is nice, but in some ways you have to know what they're working with ahead of the fact. And order 1000 for it to be cost effective.
The last attempt came from a local paper craft shop. They had a exacto-knife plotter. After some minor tweaking of a design made with InkSkape. I was able to get a design to them for plotting. I was able to modify a decagon zillij design to the plotter and get it cut out of some 60 pound paper. Then I glued the ends of the resulting cylinder together into the luminary.
"Wow," someone said, "It's like those designs you've been posting made real." That's right up there with seeing a story I wrote published.
I started out wanting to make a lamp casing out of plastic from a 3-D printer. I made a model using Blender, which looked cool when I rendered it. But what I enedeed up with was something that was A) too big to fit in the 3D printer available to me and B) probably not printable at the level of detail I wanted on a PrintRBot printer.
For my next attempt, I tried to make a lamp casing out of a flour and salt mix, with crushed life savers in the middle. That didn't work so well as the dough had a pretty rough resolution and the crushed life savers didn't melt the way I wanted them too (they were too lumpy and the end product was too sticky).
My third attempt, I thought I'd try to make a design and then have it printed out on plastic... but the plastic shop I connected with was a supplier to signs and windows... their web page is nice, but in some ways you have to know what they're working with ahead of the fact. And order 1000 for it to be cost effective.
The last attempt came from a local paper craft shop. They had a exacto-knife plotter. After some minor tweaking of a design made with InkSkape. I was able to get a design to them for plotting. I was able to modify a decagon zillij design to the plotter and get it cut out of some 60 pound paper. Then I glued the ends of the resulting cylinder together into the luminary.
"Wow," someone said, "It's like those designs you've been posting made real." That's right up there with seeing a story I wrote published.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Birthday 2012
My birthday and Christmas have come and gone. We're still in the holiday mode. I love visiting with my family, and I'll be glad to get back to my regular routine.
My birthday went very well. Mark pulled together a simple and elegant birthday tea party with Ceylon tea, petitefoirs, and simple savories. We had a small gathering of family and friends whom I (mostly) see on a regular basis. One of my cousins sent a Christmas present, which I guessed correctly was a dish caddy--we opened it early--and which came in very handy for the party. While we didn't have a Symposium, we did have a brief book review of ancient archeology as it impacts theories of NeoPaganism and modern constructs of shamanism (and Mark got to poke a little fun at my bibliophile tendencies).
Mark got me a present with a LED bow complete with fiber optic strands. I was like a child with a cardboard box a present comes in.
My birthday went very well. Mark pulled together a simple and elegant birthday tea party with Ceylon tea, petitefoirs, and simple savories. We had a small gathering of family and friends whom I (mostly) see on a regular basis. One of my cousins sent a Christmas present, which I guessed correctly was a dish caddy--we opened it early--and which came in very handy for the party. While we didn't have a Symposium, we did have a brief book review of ancient archeology as it impacts theories of NeoPaganism and modern constructs of shamanism (and Mark got to poke a little fun at my bibliophile tendencies).
Mark got me a present with a LED bow complete with fiber optic strands. I was like a child with a cardboard box a present comes in.
Friday, December 21, 2012
New Blogger App...
Well, on the plus side, the new Blogger App is easy to use and links up well with other social media.
On the down side, I just now checked and the app doesn't format pictures very well. I'm willing to live with it because, hey, you get what you pay for (free). But it would be nice if the uploaded pictures stayed within the columns instead of bleeding over--which make for some arty effects that are, alas, making some text links difficult to read.
Looks like I've got some picture reformatting to do.
On the down side, I just now checked and the app doesn't format pictures very well. I'm willing to live with it because, hey, you get what you pay for (free). But it would be nice if the uploaded pictures stayed within the columns instead of bleeding over--which make for some arty effects that are, alas, making some text links difficult to read.
Looks like I've got some picture reformatting to do.
Winter Solstice 2012
(singing) "Have yourself a merry little solstice (is it light, yet?) make the Yuletide gay / from now on our troubles will be far away (I can't see anything)..."
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Working With Paper
My latest craft, which I'm trying to use as a reward for writing, is designing paper objects. It's an outgrowth of designing virtual 3D objects.
It turns out that designs made in Inkscape can be exported to dfx files, which in turn can be "printed" out on a Silhouette printer. The printer uses a rotating blade to incise the paper, and can make intricate cuts.
One thought is to try to make some variations on the icosahedrons made out of paper squares -- I want to see what circles look like, and there are some dodecahedron designs I've seen on the web. I've read a book about paper clock escapements, and I think it could be interesting to design paper geared machines. Probably I'll have to cut out four or so copies of the gear to make them strong and thick enough to use.
Then I'll have to learn how to construct gear and pinion ratios.
In the Winter, arranging geometric shapes into patterns brings me a steadying sense of solace. Part of the comfort of design is creating order, if only on a computer screen or piece of paper. The other part is the wonder underlying how six circles are connected to a cube.
It turns out that designs made in Inkscape can be exported to dfx files, which in turn can be "printed" out on a Silhouette printer. The printer uses a rotating blade to incise the paper, and can make intricate cuts.
One thought is to try to make some variations on the icosahedrons made out of paper squares -- I want to see what circles look like, and there are some dodecahedron designs I've seen on the web. I've read a book about paper clock escapements, and I think it could be interesting to design paper geared machines. Probably I'll have to cut out four or so copies of the gear to make them strong and thick enough to use.
Then I'll have to learn how to construct gear and pinion ratios.
In the Winter, arranging geometric shapes into patterns brings me a steadying sense of solace. Part of the comfort of design is creating order, if only on a computer screen or piece of paper. The other part is the wonder underlying how six circles are connected to a cube.
Is It Solstice Yet?
This morning it is very dark, with much rain. I'm listening to the rain falling on the roof and it sounds like the rapid tick-tock of the world's clock. I am ambigious about all the rain and the storms; on one hand I like the rain and the clouds and (when it happens) the mysterious fog. But this morning just seems grey.
Outside the window, I'm watching a cascade of water from a rooftop fall on somebody's truck's trunk. I suppose that can't be good. Time to stop writing, I think, and go tell them about it.
Outside the window, I'm watching a cascade of water from a rooftop fall on somebody's truck's trunk. I suppose that can't be good. Time to stop writing, I think, and go tell them about it.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Pre Birthday Musings
In a few days I'll be 48.
When I turned 40, it wasn't such a big deal. We had fun party--with a Birthday Throne--which I enjoyed very much. Turning 30 was much more traumatic for me. I think turning 50 is going to be like turning 30. I have a vague sense of ... dread? Sort of like I'm like Tolkien's painter, Mr. Niggle, and I've forgotten to pack something.
On those days when the glass feels half-empty, I remind myself that I plan to live to 100 (Mark will chime in here and say something about exercise and eating right), and that the years so far have been mostly fun.
When I turned 40, it wasn't such a big deal. We had fun party--with a Birthday Throne--which I enjoyed very much. Turning 30 was much more traumatic for me. I think turning 50 is going to be like turning 30. I have a vague sense of ... dread? Sort of like I'm like Tolkien's painter, Mr. Niggle, and I've forgotten to pack something.
On those days when the glass feels half-empty, I remind myself that I plan to live to 100 (Mark will chime in here and say something about exercise and eating right), and that the years so far have been mostly fun.
Friday, November 09, 2012
Dreams of Horses and Native Americans
Long, complicated series of dreams last night....
The dream was in progress, something about a make-over team remodling our house. Then there was a transition...
I was going to a school of some sort. I wasn't a student, and now that I think about it, I don't recall why I was going there. The school was a giant black cube (which didn't remind me of The Borg in the dream) which rotated. (In waking life I'm more reminded of a rotating castle in the Arthurian romance cycle).
The interior of the Rotating Black Cube School wasn't always consistant. The first floor seemed more like an outside courtyard than the interior of a building. There was a red stone fountain with carved horses. The water was pretty still, so calling it a fountain is a stretch, maybe well would be more accurate. A freize of running horses sprang up over the still water. The water was brackish because a cupful of ocean water needed to be added to the basin or the horses would fade from red horses to pale white ones. It was not desirable to have the horses turn pale white for some reason.
I walked along a hallway, which was decorated at the corners with stone-carved art-deco snakes framing the hallway. They were very angular, with 90-degree angle turns and a straight run of snake body ending with the open-mouthed heads on the floor.
I went up a floor to where a teacher was reading from a book to a bunch of second or third graders. I have a sense of wooden chairs with some textured carving on the seat backs. Suddenly, the building began to rotate--this manifested as a sense of dizziness and the scenery outside the window moving.
Throughout the dream, the building would turn suddenly. The teacher said something about not liking how the building spun.
I went up another floor. I was in a large, dark room. I have a sense the walls were made of stone. The only light coming from the room was from a doorway cut into the wall and a square window cut next to the door. The doorway opened onto the air, and I had a slight sense that this was like an elevator anxiety dream, only without the elevator. Some women were with me in the room, and we were all a little worried that the building would spin so quickly that we would be thrown out the doorway and fall onto the ?sharp rocky cliffs? below.
There was a transition, or else I'm missing a piece here. I think the same people (mostly women) in the dark room from the scene before were now either on a rock in the middle of a river, or on a narrow beach between a dark, rocky cliff and a river.
A white horse appeared. It might have been swimming in the river. Or it might have been on the shore below us some how. It was very thin and thirsty, and we had to give it water. The gaunt horse opened its toothy mouth very wide, and we sprayed water into its narrow mouth. I'm not sure how we did this, but the image that sticks with me is looking down on a narrow, bone-white horse's head pointing up to the sky, mouth open with its tongue stuck out, while five or six different streams--as if from garden hoses turned on full blast--from above converged on its mouth.
Then there was another transition. The building (or cliff) started to rotate and we were all in the river. I got stung by jellyfish in the river; it didn't hurt that much, and I was more surprized that jellyfish were in a freshwater river than anything else.
I woke up enough here to remember that I wanted to remember the rotating school with the horse fountain and snake halls. Then I went back to sleep.
Somehow I ended up at some place like Arcosanti or Reed College. I think the buildings were like a college campus, but the location was in the Arizona area (or something). There was a Native American there in a stereotypical headdress with long feathers. We were friends.
"[A mutual woman friend] says you're leaving for good," he said to me as we walked hand in hand in front of a brick building. (I remember that his hand was big, warm, strong, and not boney as we held hands.)
I told him that I was leaving.
"I thought so," he said. "Listen, there's something important that I need to tell you..." -- and then I woke up.
I remember thinking it was a strange dream, because I usually dream about "Magic thespians", not "Magic Indians" and I am slightly embarrassed to be dreaming a cultural cliche.
The spooky coincidence was that when I got home and looked at the mail, the US Treasury had sent Mark a coin catalog. On the outside of the envelope was a stereotypical Native American in a headdress, a freize of horses, and a larger horse looking at the Native American.
Mark joked later this evening that the treasury was using psychics to sell their collectors' coints.
The dream was in progress, something about a make-over team remodling our house. Then there was a transition...
I was going to a school of some sort. I wasn't a student, and now that I think about it, I don't recall why I was going there. The school was a giant black cube (which didn't remind me of The Borg in the dream) which rotated. (In waking life I'm more reminded of a rotating castle in the Arthurian romance cycle).
The interior of the Rotating Black Cube School wasn't always consistant. The first floor seemed more like an outside courtyard than the interior of a building. There was a red stone fountain with carved horses. The water was pretty still, so calling it a fountain is a stretch, maybe well would be more accurate. A freize of running horses sprang up over the still water. The water was brackish because a cupful of ocean water needed to be added to the basin or the horses would fade from red horses to pale white ones. It was not desirable to have the horses turn pale white for some reason.
I walked along a hallway, which was decorated at the corners with stone-carved art-deco snakes framing the hallway. They were very angular, with 90-degree angle turns and a straight run of snake body ending with the open-mouthed heads on the floor.
I went up a floor to where a teacher was reading from a book to a bunch of second or third graders. I have a sense of wooden chairs with some textured carving on the seat backs. Suddenly, the building began to rotate--this manifested as a sense of dizziness and the scenery outside the window moving.
Throughout the dream, the building would turn suddenly. The teacher said something about not liking how the building spun.
I went up another floor. I was in a large, dark room. I have a sense the walls were made of stone. The only light coming from the room was from a doorway cut into the wall and a square window cut next to the door. The doorway opened onto the air, and I had a slight sense that this was like an elevator anxiety dream, only without the elevator. Some women were with me in the room, and we were all a little worried that the building would spin so quickly that we would be thrown out the doorway and fall onto the ?sharp rocky cliffs? below.
There was a transition, or else I'm missing a piece here. I think the same people (mostly women) in the dark room from the scene before were now either on a rock in the middle of a river, or on a narrow beach between a dark, rocky cliff and a river.
A white horse appeared. It might have been swimming in the river. Or it might have been on the shore below us some how. It was very thin and thirsty, and we had to give it water. The gaunt horse opened its toothy mouth very wide, and we sprayed water into its narrow mouth. I'm not sure how we did this, but the image that sticks with me is looking down on a narrow, bone-white horse's head pointing up to the sky, mouth open with its tongue stuck out, while five or six different streams--as if from garden hoses turned on full blast--from above converged on its mouth.
Then there was another transition. The building (or cliff) started to rotate and we were all in the river. I got stung by jellyfish in the river; it didn't hurt that much, and I was more surprized that jellyfish were in a freshwater river than anything else.
I woke up enough here to remember that I wanted to remember the rotating school with the horse fountain and snake halls. Then I went back to sleep.
Somehow I ended up at some place like Arcosanti or Reed College. I think the buildings were like a college campus, but the location was in the Arizona area (or something). There was a Native American there in a stereotypical headdress with long feathers. We were friends.
"[A mutual woman friend] says you're leaving for good," he said to me as we walked hand in hand in front of a brick building. (I remember that his hand was big, warm, strong, and not boney as we held hands.)
I told him that I was leaving.
"I thought so," he said. "Listen, there's something important that I need to tell you..." -- and then I woke up.
I remember thinking it was a strange dream, because I usually dream about "Magic thespians", not "Magic Indians" and I am slightly embarrassed to be dreaming a cultural cliche.
The spooky coincidence was that when I got home and looked at the mail, the US Treasury had sent Mark a coin catalog. On the outside of the envelope was a stereotypical Native American in a headdress, a freize of horses, and a larger horse looking at the Native American.
Mark joked later this evening that the treasury was using psychics to sell their collectors' coints.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
More Renderings
I haven't been writing much in this blog, mostly because I've been really busy.
Here's a cylinder of interlocked circles I created in Blender. I had a sudden insight about how to do it this. I'd been thinking about carving pumpkins. Jenn Wild had forwarded me a photo of an insanely carved pumpkin that was a carousel with horses. I'd been thinking about zillij and how I might use a star-shaped cookie cutter to make a vague kind of Moroccan lamp. The images must have been bumping around in my head because I figured out that I could use a Boolean intersection to make the individual rings, then use Blender's spin function to make a ring of interlocked circles, then use the array function to stack them.
The whole operation took about 45 minutes. If I'd tried this a year ago, the rings would have been flat, and I would have spent several days trying to stack everything just so.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
But Is It Art?
Over the weekend, Mark and I went to the Portland Art Museum. I love going to the Museum with Mark because he always opens me up to portrait and landscape pictures; I'm missing the gene for picture appreciation and I'm more likely to go to a show with Mark. It's true that I often have a "why am I looking at this again" reaction, but at least now with Mark around, I have a better understanding for, um, craft.
The other reason I love going to museums with Mark is that we usually think the same installations are hilarious. This visit's hilarious installation involved fake animals stacked into a pyramid and a mobile made out of wax heads. The other installation, which Mark called a visual pallet cleanser, was a collection of prints by Ellsworth Kelly.
I have to confess, that seeing Kelly's work makes me want to give an improv art talk using words like "explore," "juxtaposition," "dissonance," and "vis-a-vis." Cue DeForest Kelly as Dr. McCoy saying, "It's worse than that; it's _art_ Jim." But then I started thinking about a little more and asked the question, "What's the difference between Kelly's art and, say, these pieces here":
This was the piece I did that initially came to mind on the way back home from the Museum.
This was something that I designed on the trip back, too. These two, especially ask, is a geometric grid automatically art?
Maybe it's not so much about art as it is about design. "Here the artist is exploring the relationship between the moon, opacity, and masks." 
This snowflake was created using a random number generator, which calls into question my role as artist. More likely I'm a curator--possibly at best a co-creator.
OK; I just like this one--to me it's about connectivity and motion (and stars!). Mark and I had an interesting discussion about it a few weeks ago. Mark think's it's geeky (and cold). So maybe Kelly's art speaks to Art Geeks?
I was going for a Mucha vibe with this one, which Mark says I've missed completely.
I'm not saying that the pictures I've created with Blender are Fine Art worthy of being hung up in a gallery. Or... are they? Seriously, though, what makes a lithograph of a blue square "art."
The other reason I love going to museums with Mark is that we usually think the same installations are hilarious. This visit's hilarious installation involved fake animals stacked into a pyramid and a mobile made out of wax heads. The other installation, which Mark called a visual pallet cleanser, was a collection of prints by Ellsworth Kelly.
I have to confess, that seeing Kelly's work makes me want to give an improv art talk using words like "explore," "juxtaposition," "dissonance," and "vis-a-vis." Cue DeForest Kelly as Dr. McCoy saying, "It's worse than that; it's _art_ Jim." But then I started thinking about a little more and asked the question, "What's the difference between Kelly's art and, say, these pieces here":
This was the piece I did that initially came to mind on the way back home from the Museum.
This was something that I designed on the trip back, too. These two, especially ask, is a geometric grid automatically art?
Maybe it's not so much about art as it is about design. "Here the artist is exploring the relationship between the moon, opacity, and masks." This snowflake was created using a random number generator, which calls into question my role as artist. More likely I'm a curator--possibly at best a co-creator.
OK; I just like this one--to me it's about connectivity and motion (and stars!). Mark and I had an interesting discussion about it a few weeks ago. Mark think's it's geeky (and cold). So maybe Kelly's art speaks to Art Geeks?I was going for a Mucha vibe with this one, which Mark says I've missed completely.
I'm not saying that the pictures I've created with Blender are Fine Art worthy of being hung up in a gallery. Or... are they? Seriously, though, what makes a lithograph of a blue square "art."
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Colors at Yellowstone
Wednesday, Aug 15 2012
I got up to pee and had just gotten back into bed when the neighbor's alarm clock went off.
"What time is it?" asked a female voice.
"5:15" said a male voice. Then what followed sounded like one elderly deaf person asking another elderly deaf person how to work the shower
After listening to them while I dozed, I finally decided I wasn't going to get any rest and that I might as well get up a look at the geysers along the Fire River.
I dressed, collected various photography tools, and wandered off to Old Faithful. The lobby of the Inn had one or two people in it. When red double doors were closed, and went I went through them, the cold air wrapped around me. The sky was turning lighter shades of pearl. A sliver of a crescent moon hung below a bright planet which I thought was Mars the other morning, but turned out to be Venus--I want to blame the haze for making Venus look redder the other day.
There were a few other early-bird geyser gazers at the bleachers around Old Faithful. I wanted to get a photograph of the moon in the geyser's plume to complement the one I had taken of the sun the other day. Something about the geyser made me think an eruption wasn't too far off, so I waited.
Video of the geysers seems to come out better than the stills I take, so I pulled out my iPad and managed a few shorts of Old Faithful before and during the eruption. In some ways recording events this way works better because I can watch both the equipment and what I'm videoing without feeling like a Borg or a technophile two times removed from the event that is happening. On the other hand, I aways think about how Mark says to experience the moment and not live it through the filter of devices.
After Old Faithful was finished, I went out into the geyser area on the other side of the river to pretend to be David Attenbourough. There were a couple of times when I was facing away from geysers and watching me talk in front of them that struck me as kind of odd--but I was having fun, and I'd appreciated the geysers directly earlier in the week.
At 7:30 we all met for breakfast. I was starving and had a big one.
---
We went to thermal features near the lodge, working our way to the Artists Paint Pots and then back toward Old Faithful. The most interesting thing about the paint pots are the way that mud piled up around the mud-hole, and the cracked mounds surrounding the gurgling mud. I expected more colors in the mud, but it was mostly cream and sepia. Some times a dried out hole might have a dusting of mustard yellow, presumably from sulphur, which we smelled. Drier holes made a hushing and whistling noise as steam rose over crazed mud tiles; wetter holes sputtered like oatmeal.
The Firehole area had more color. Steam rose from broad pools of deep turquoise rimmed with greens and browns, and made a rainbow in the early morning sun. Actually, our sunglasses contributed greatly to the rainbow effect.
Mark got into timing Jewel Geyser. While we were there, it had a period of about six minutes. The most fun we had was with a visiting family--they sounded British--waiting for the next eruption. They were suitibly impressed, and told Mark that he should sell tickets predicting the geyser; Mark said something about visiting Stonehenge and our woo-woo tour guide; Larry said that Mark should make up something like, "Oh! I can hear the crickets! Can you hear them? They're telling me the geyser is about to go off." Hearing the crickets then became the joke of the hour.
We crossed the highway and took a short hike to [sage brush] geyser. We were hoping that it would go off, because the blue waters in it appeared to be rising and bubbling. But a local geyser gazer stopped by and told us it would be several hours at least before it went off.
----
Mark and Larry went off for another Birthday Hike. The farther they got into the back country, the fewer other hikers they saw. They did not see any bears.
----
As I drifted off to sleep, I heard the old man next door ask, "Did I take my pills?"
The old woman asked, "Which pills are you supposed to take?"
"Well.. I think I'm supposed to take a either an aspirin or a pain pill..."
I got up to pee and had just gotten back into bed when the neighbor's alarm clock went off.
"What time is it?" asked a female voice.
"5:15" said a male voice. Then what followed sounded like one elderly deaf person asking another elderly deaf person how to work the shower
After listening to them while I dozed, I finally decided I wasn't going to get any rest and that I might as well get up a look at the geysers along the Fire River.
I dressed, collected various photography tools, and wandered off to Old Faithful. The lobby of the Inn had one or two people in it. When red double doors were closed, and went I went through them, the cold air wrapped around me. The sky was turning lighter shades of pearl. A sliver of a crescent moon hung below a bright planet which I thought was Mars the other morning, but turned out to be Venus--I want to blame the haze for making Venus look redder the other day.
There were a few other early-bird geyser gazers at the bleachers around Old Faithful. I wanted to get a photograph of the moon in the geyser's plume to complement the one I had taken of the sun the other day. Something about the geyser made me think an eruption wasn't too far off, so I waited.
Video of the geysers seems to come out better than the stills I take, so I pulled out my iPad and managed a few shorts of Old Faithful before and during the eruption. In some ways recording events this way works better because I can watch both the equipment and what I'm videoing without feeling like a Borg or a technophile two times removed from the event that is happening. On the other hand, I aways think about how Mark says to experience the moment and not live it through the filter of devices.
After Old Faithful was finished, I went out into the geyser area on the other side of the river to pretend to be David Attenbourough. There were a couple of times when I was facing away from geysers and watching me talk in front of them that struck me as kind of odd--but I was having fun, and I'd appreciated the geysers directly earlier in the week.
At 7:30 we all met for breakfast. I was starving and had a big one.
---
We went to thermal features near the lodge, working our way to the Artists Paint Pots and then back toward Old Faithful. The most interesting thing about the paint pots are the way that mud piled up around the mud-hole, and the cracked mounds surrounding the gurgling mud. I expected more colors in the mud, but it was mostly cream and sepia. Some times a dried out hole might have a dusting of mustard yellow, presumably from sulphur, which we smelled. Drier holes made a hushing and whistling noise as steam rose over crazed mud tiles; wetter holes sputtered like oatmeal.
The Firehole area had more color. Steam rose from broad pools of deep turquoise rimmed with greens and browns, and made a rainbow in the early morning sun. Actually, our sunglasses contributed greatly to the rainbow effect.
Mark got into timing Jewel Geyser. While we were there, it had a period of about six minutes. The most fun we had was with a visiting family--they sounded British--waiting for the next eruption. They were suitibly impressed, and told Mark that he should sell tickets predicting the geyser; Mark said something about visiting Stonehenge and our woo-woo tour guide; Larry said that Mark should make up something like, "Oh! I can hear the crickets! Can you hear them? They're telling me the geyser is about to go off." Hearing the crickets then became the joke of the hour.
We crossed the highway and took a short hike to [sage brush] geyser. We were hoping that it would go off, because the blue waters in it appeared to be rising and bubbling. But a local geyser gazer stopped by and told us it would be several hours at least before it went off.
----
Mark and Larry went off for another Birthday Hike. The farther they got into the back country, the fewer other hikers they saw. They did not see any bears.
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As I drifted off to sleep, I heard the old man next door ask, "Did I take my pills?"
The old woman asked, "Which pills are you supposed to take?"
"Well.. I think I'm supposed to take a either an aspirin or a pain pill..."
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Stupid Tourist Tricks
As we were driving along the roads at Yellowstone, we happened upon a bison crossing the road. This one was a smaller bison, but still, it probably had as much mass as our car.
The SUV folks in the opposite lane thought it would be ever so delightful to parallel the bison so that they could take video and still pictures out of their car's nearest open orifices. In other words, they were A) driving with their cameras, B) harassing the wildlife, and C) herding the bison into our car.
We encouraged them to move along. I'm still trying to decide if the "thanks" from the red SUV meant, "Thanks for getting that silver SUV to move along," "Thanks for getting that silver SUV to move so we could have our turn harassing the bison," or "Thanks for letting us be selfish jerks."
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