this page intentionally left blank

some flowers...

This hopper was so damn small... the thread looking thing in the foreground is a piece of abandon anchor section of a spider web. The hopper was on a leaf in the yard... the first one I've seen in these parts.

Bianca

Bianca smiles

Happy Memorial Day. I hope everyone is enjoying a day off work. My muscles are sore and I'm in the midst of a meat hangover. We played 18 holes at High Meadow Ranch yesterday morning and went for Fogo de Chao last night. It's still odd to me actually hearing the words, "no, please no... no more filet mignon". It happens. I planned on heading out to the woods for some snippety this morning, but it is so humid you could cut the air with a knife. Miserable and sticky. I found this fella in the back yard when I was playing with Henry. Any ideas what it is? Perhaps a variety of fruit fly or something? Anyhoo, back to holiday.

This guy was about 6mm long. I have no idea what species, but that is a cool arrow on his back, no?

The Rat Pack pimpin' in da hood... beeyotches.

Everyone say "oooooh ahhhhhh"... Marketechture.

Sleepy. Last night was all thumbs up. After work, Sam and I picked Urs up at the medical center and headed over to McGonigel's Mucky Duck for some Guinness and Murphy's. We gave Urs a celebratory bottle of single barrel rum for his mini-bachelor-party-ish night out that we'd aquired at the "new" downtown super-Spec's. Awesome store... really. Next was one of my serious favs... Downing Street Pub. Single malt scotch and imported cigars (the same one's from my wedding) were the flavor of the moment. That place brings back memories. Back in the Benz, we scooted to Scott Gertner's Skybar. Overpriced glam and plastic people ala Sex in the City meets Hollywood after taking that wrong turn in Albuquerque... despite all the Houstonian wanna-be's, it is a very nice place to take in a 360 degree few of the city skyline. Drinks down and time to eat. Dinner was at the Black Labrador Pub (apparently with no web site to link). English food is a nice switch up. Shepherd's pie, fish and chips, beef wellington... it was all there next to the Guinness on our table. Next stop, The Big Easy Social and Pleasure Club "House of Mixology". Another one of my all time favorite places to find myself in Houston, The Big Easy hosts the Houston Blues Society's monthly open jam on the last Thursay of every month. Asshole John was there... as well as the usual regulars. The was a Jimi Hendrix look-alike wailing through some solo when we arrived, but the highlight of the night was some little kid named Dalton... couldn't have been more than 15 or so... amazing. He play guitar like it developed as a limb in the womb. He covered Stevie Ray Vaughan and Hendrix... he played some Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry... he sang while he played and was clearly the most technical guitar player in the house. Absolutely amazing. Anyhoo, I didn't get in until late and that makes working this morning all suck and no fun. I'm really looking forward to this 3-day weekend... hoping the weather holds out. Yeah. Good times!

Look inside...

I'm a little tired this morning. I had planned on going to Vance's impromptu birthday party at Blanco's Bar and Grill after work with "da guys", but EL received a call with an attached dinner invitation from another couple, so we did that instead. It was great. We grilled fresh vegetable skewers, shucked corn, baked potatoes, and pork tenderloin and enjoyed various libations over cards and conversation. EL and I love playing cards. I suppose it was close to midnight when I finally went to bed. Long past are the days when I can stay up until two or three most weeknights and still get up and function the next day. I am still very much a night person, but not one that also can be happy-go-lucky at 7:00 the next morning. I have some martini-cigar-single-malt-live-blues plans this evening, so I took the bus as to be on foot when quittin' time came this afternoon. Big mistake. EL rang my cell just after the METRO left the station to tell me there was an accident being reported in the HOV. Now we wait. I think I could hop out and jog faster than traffic at this point. Welcome to everyday Houston, TX. The installation of Mandrake 10.0 over the Fedora partition I was testing out went like buttah. So far I really like it... just as nice as I remembered 9.2 being with some improvements like a 2.6 kernel (supports USB2.0) and more refined packages. It's even built with free86 4.3 with 3D hardware support. Linux has come a long way in a short period of time. I'm astounded at how dusty my relatively new laptop is as I watch the particles dance around in the light streaming from the window of the bus. Where are the handy little compressed air blowers when you need 'em? So I have some general landscape portfolio plans for this year based on the sequence of events laying out my vacation time. Between now and year end, if all goes well, I'll have had a week and a half in northern Minnesota to capture imagery of the north shore of Lake Superior and the boundary waters. I'll have had a few days of opportunity in Colorado to photograph some of the rugged landscape in the central region. I'll have had a full week in Switzerland, nestled in the Alps, with nothing to do but photograph the area outside of my one day assignment. Weather providing, I hope to have some splendid photos of poster quality for Christmas presents this year. Speaking of posters, I put up a few 16"x24" black and whites printed on Endura metallic in my office this week. I love the look of that paper... especially with black and whites. Well... I'm approaching my stop. I can almost smell the coffee from here.

Ok, here is the new one (Albatross Overload). Let's have some scores! and the previous are here (Seal Bounce), here (Orca Slap), and here (Pingu Throw).

You ever get that feeling in traffic like you're a lemming headed for the cliff? I left for work a little later this morning... took my time... stopped for coffee. Not counting travel time or the time getting dressed, I worked over twelve hours yesterday... stepped into the office at 5:30 aye emm and rolled out just after 6:00. I remember being a kid and working during the summer at a metalworking shop for a general contractor. We were commissioned to demolition a piping structure on the outskirts of Sonora, TX (basically, the desert) and worked seven twelves for the weeks we were there (ie. 7 days a week, 12 hours a day)... manual labor from dark to dark. Granted, working as a respected IT professional in an air conditioned office with a view is not the same 12 hours, but it's still entirely to long to be at work when you are working for someone else. I downloaded the official Mandrake 10.0 i586 ISO's last night. I plan on replacing my test partition of Fedora with the new Mandrake. I really liked the Mandrake 9 series and if this is just an improvement on that, it should be great. Fedora was pretty cool, but the interoperability just wasn't there yet. In Mandrake, I can easily access my NTFS partitions formatted with XP Pro and manipulate files. Red Hat tends to stay way back from touching NTFS. It is strictly "use at your own risk" kernel mods with those guys. I'm looking for a new way to display photos in an online gallery. The Movable Type based content engine that runs behindthelens.org is ok, but I don't know enough about scripting the templates to make it do what I want... further, I don't have the time to learn. I could use something prepackaged like Gallery, Exhibit Engine, Coppermine, or the likes, but I want it to be really simple and easy to navigate by queriable criteria. I really don't have a lot of time these days to fiddle with customization. There should be more hours in the day. Who is going to start that petition? Where do I sign? T-Minus one hour until the meeting-fest of the day starts. What would corporate America be without meetings? Would people just wander aimlessly in the halls? Could the rest of us just leave after our work was done? Today, it's one of those meetings-all-morning-through-lunch days... you know, where you eat lunch and talk about work ala working through lunch because there apparently isn't enough time to get it all out outside of lunch hours. Ugg. Calgon take me away. At least this weekend is a three day. I'm diggin' it. Perhaps I can get something productive done with that extra day. I don't want to get my hopes up. Heh. Cheers.

He throws himself to the wolves again.

Urs called me last evening and asked me to be his and Sandra's official wedding photographer. I guess they liked their engagement photos enough to stick with the same guy. Heh. Anyhoo, they are going to fly me to the wedding and arrange lodging while I'm there... pretty cool of them if you ask me. It's really an honor for them to like my work enough to want to pay my airfare. The wedding is in Switzerland this fall. I hope the weather is nice. I've been so busy today that I lost track of time. It's almost beer:thirty.