Month: January 2009

Snowy Quincy (and Boston) from the big conference room at work.

OK, so I missed the opportunity to take the same picture as seemingly everybody else who’s doing Project 365, namely the conference room full of coworkers watching the streaming video of President Obama’s inauguration.  I simply forgot to bring my camera with me.  Instead I took a shot of him from CNN’s web page when I got back to my desk:

OK.  This is getting ridiculous.  I fear for our ability to get into the house if we get another storm like this one.

Perhaps honoring our friend Jason’s visit from North Carolina this weekend, this morning a Carolina wren visited our suet feeder, then took shelter in this hollow of snow before departing.

This tiny bird lives somewhere near our house, scolding us or our cats through the window on a semi-regular basis.

The thing about a lava lamp is, it’s not really intended to be run continuously for 6 months.  This one’s wax (the colored part) is developing kind of a film on it, and last week its bulb burned out.  But we want to keep it on to lend atmosphere to our “game room” for house showings.  I replaced the bulb today, and I think it’s running a little bit better than it had been.

This is not the coldest temperature I’ve ever seen on this gauge… that record still stands in the negative teens Fahrenheit seen in Stowe, VT on a ski trip a couple years back.

We’ve recently switched to new bug tracking software at work.  It’s evidently got some psychoanalysis features built in as well.

Between Lis being on Weight Watchers, and me working in an office without a cafeteria for the first time in my career, we are doing a lot more cooking for the freezer.  Tonight’s meal (delicious, if I do say so myself) is beef stew with potatoes, carrots, turnip, kidney beans, and kale, served over pasta; very satisfying for a day where (as Pete from Channel 7 says): “arctic air payed us a visit today: pure, numbing, dense, and ubiquitous.”  And the best part: we get to enjoy it for 6 more servings.

Who can resist…

… a Parker in a box?

The moon is a harsh mistress.  It’s also famously difficult to photograph.  It’s so much smaller in the frame than you expect, and despite the fact that it’s dark out, the moon is in direct sunlight, so it’s quite easy to overexpose.  It’s also moving fairly fast, so tends to drift out of your carefully-composed frame.

Tonight’s moon is supposedly larger than usual due to being close to perigee, and so I figured it was a good candidate for today’s photo.

I have an old manual-focus 500mm reflex lens for my camera.  I attempted this shot a couple years ago with my old camera, but the new one has a few technical advances that make this lens easier to use.  Even with this extreme focal length (equivalent to 15x binoculars), today’s photo is cropped.