Pictures
drorzel | October 30, 2017It's been a couple of years since we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, and we've held off getting a dog until now because we were planning a big home renovation-- adding on to the mud room, creating a new bedroom on the second floor, and gutting and replacing the kitchen. This was quite the undertaking, and we would not have wanted to put a dog through that. It was bad enough putting us through that...
Withe the renovation complete, we started looking for a dog a month or so back, and eventually ended up working with a local rescue group with the brilliantly unsubtle name Help Orphan Puppies. This…
drorzel | May 21, 2017The big development of this week is that construction started on the Great Chateau Steelypips Renovation of 2017. We're extending one part of the back of the house about ten feet to gain a bedroom on the second floor, and gut-renovating the kitchen, dining room, and mud room. This is a massive undertaking, with a massive price tag (more than we paid for the house in 2002), and is going to be massively disruptive later this summer. Right now, it's very exciting, because we have an excavator and giant piles of dirt in our back yard:
The Pip looking at the excavator used to dig the foundation…
gregladen | October 7, 2016A collection of tweets showing things #Matthew related
Las inundaciones a causa de #Matthew...Video of flooding from 11th Ave S, Jacksonville Beach. Vía: @wjxt4 pic.twitter.com/J5AAzMPXiM
— Webcams de México (@webcamsdemexico) October 7, 2016
Video of huge tree getting ripped out of the ground from #HurricaneMatthew in #Jacksonville FL.#Matthew #Hurricane pic.twitter.com/r6Wwd2aRS9
— DeeconX (@DeeconX) October 7, 2016
#Hurricane #Matthew death toll passes 800 in #Haiti, cholera takes lives https://t.co/QRx8HRPyx4
— Skep tickle (@Ellesun) October 8, 2016
Current look along A1A in St.…
drorzel | September 12, 2016And now, the photo-a-day project straggles in to the finish line, with a final five photos dominated by the kids:
362/366: Kid Art I
A set of figures drawn by The Pip at day care over the summer.
363/366: Kid Art II
Awesome owl drawing by SteelyKid.
One of the official end of summer activities is cleaning off the "art shelf" in the bookcase in the dining room, where we pile the various projects the kids bring home from school and day care. I sort these, and take photos of the best, for historical documentation purposes, and these are two of my favorites from the lot. The four round-…
drorzel | September 11, 2016Another day, another batch of photos from August.
353/366: Trail Blaze
One lost sock next to the hiking path in the Reist bird sanctuary.
This is actually a slight reversal of chronology, as the hike through Vischer's Ferry was the day after I went for a hike in the H. G. Reist Wildlife Sanctuary. The pictures from Vischer's Ferry were better though, as despite the name I didn't see much wildlife in the Reist Sanctuary. I did, however, find this bright pink child-size sock sitting next to the trail right after a fork. Presumably a way for some wandering toddler to find their way home...…
drorzel | September 10, 2016Another in the sadly delayed wrapping-up of my photo-a-day project. These are all pictures from a hike in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve over in Clifton Park. We took the kids over there one time, but a thunderstorm started coming in before we got very far. While the kids were at my parents', I decided to go over one afternoon and take a more thorough walk around the place. This ended up going quite a bit longer than I had expected, as I misremembered part of the trail map, but I got some good photos out of it.
344/366: Fake Jungle
Part of the old Lock 19 from the Erie Canal, cosplaying…
drorzel | September 8, 2016I've got a big backlog of photo-a-day pictures, but finding time to edit and post them is a major challenge. I've got nearly all the editing done, now, so I'll start putting blocks of stuff up when I have time (generally very early in the morning, as I'm awake before everyone else in Chateau Steelypips). Since we've long since stopped even pretending that these are date-specific, I'll just collect together groups by vague themes:
Panorama-rama
At some point this summer I started playing around with stitching together bunches of shots to make panoramic photos. Some of this involves playing…
drorzel | August 21, 2016It's been over a month since I did a photo-a-day post, largely because I haven't been taking many pictures for a variety of reasons. I do still mean to get a year's worth of good photos done, but the "daily" part has completely disintegrated at this point.
As a way of getting somewhat back on track, I've edited up the best of the shots I took in the loooong break since the last batch I posted. This spans all the way up to the present, and a few are just cell-phone snaps, but it's better than nothing. since these aren't really associated with particular days, I'll group them thematically…
drorzel | July 15, 2016A delayed photo dump this week, because I was solo-parenting last week while Kate was traveling for work, and then I took the sillyheads down to Long Island to visit my grandmother while Kate was at Readercon. Recovering from all that took a lot of time, plus there was a bunch of computer wrangling in there. But, on the bright side, you get several cute-kid photos in this set...
And here's a bonus image, which captures something of the flavor of travel with the sillyheads:
Selfie in the car with the kids engrossed in their tablets.
(That was stopped at a light, not actively driving, so don…
drorzel | July 3, 2016A while back, I went down to Vroman's Nose in Middleburgh to go for a hike, and found a sign saying that peregrine falcons are known to nest on the cliffs. Since the peregrine falcon is SteelyKid's absolute favorite bird, and the subject of her school research project, this seemed like a good location for a family hike, so I took the kids down there yesterday. And even though that was really only one day out of a whole week, I got a bunch of really good photos from it, so it will supply all the material for this week's photo dump.
300/366: Panorama
Panorama of farmland from the top of Vroman…
drorzel | June 29, 2016When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.
Tourists taking photos of each other in…
drorzel | June 27, 2016Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I've always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures-- over 1,600 all told.
This happens in part because when I'm visiting a major tourist site with a camera, I'm trying to do two things at the same time. One, of course, is to get good photos of the big attractions, to supplement my memories of the actual sites. But this is always constrained a bit by the knowledge that, you know, major tourist destinations have plenty of…
drorzel | June 17, 2016Another week, another batch of photos. This is coming on Friday rather than the weekend because I'm going to be incommunicado for most of the next week, and have some free time now.
284/366: LIGO, Eat Your Heart Out
Gravity wave clouds above our house.
Sure, LIGO detected gravitational waves from a second pair of merging black holes, but I found me some gravity waves.
(The pattern was much more pronounced 5-10 minutes before this was taken, but I was in the car driving when SteelyKid pointed it out.)
285/366:
SteelyKid with her hand-written report on the peregrine falcon.
SteelyKid's…
drorzel | June 12, 2016Shortened "week" this week, because I did the last photo dump on Tuesday. 80% of these are also from a single day, this Friday, when I decided to call a Mental Health Day and get away from stuff that was annoying me by driving down to Scoharie County to hike up Vroman's Nose.
279/366: Road
Rt. 30 from the top of Vroman's Nose.
Vroman's Nose is a huge rock outcrop in the middle of a valley, with a moderately steep trail going up through woods to a dramatic cliff with views over the valley. These are very cool when you're there, but the camera really dilutes the impact of those kind of…
drorzel | June 6, 2016Last in a series of themed collections of pictures. These ones are showcasing my rudimentary GIMP skills, pasting together multiple pictures into composites.
276/366: Sky-Bison for Scale
One of the earliest happenings in the three-week period I'm dumping photos from was SteelyKid getting strep throat again. She spent a Friday at home, and I took the opportunity to introduce her to Avatar: The Last Airbender on DVD. They're now a few episodes into the third season, so that was a big hit.
This reignited an interest in our stuffed Appa toy, which I used to use for scale in baby-blogging photos,…
drorzel | June 6, 2016This one, we'll do sorta-kinda chronologically:
268/366: Niska-Parade
Why is it always bagpipes?
One of the big temporal landmarks of the recent stretch without photo-blogging posts was "Niska-Day," the annual community festival here. This kicks off with a parade, the route for which comes right to the end of our street. Here's one of the first marching elements, the local bagpipe group.
269/366: Niska-Ride
SteelyKid is on this somewhere.
Of course, if you're a kid, the real highlight of Niska-Day is the bit with the carnival rides. SteelyKid is on this, having dragged one of her more…
drorzel | June 6, 2016Once again, I've let a very long time pass without posting photos. It's been a crazy stretch for us, starting with SteelyKid getting yet another case of strep throat, then DAMOP, then a trip to my parents' for Memorial Day weekend, then trying to recover from the previous. As with the last few, I'l group these into themed collections, this one devoted to the kids and my parents' dog. We'll do this in order from oldest to youngest, so:
Bodie
257/366: Two Sticks
Bodie is a good dog. He has TWO sticks.
Fun fact: my parents' yellow lab, Bodie, was born within a day of SteelyKid. I think he's…
drorzel | May 15, 2016Getting caught up to today, a bunch of pictures from the past week (250/366 was the photo of Emmy's memorial shrub):
251/366: Wagons Ho!
SteelyKid and The Pip taking turns pulling each other in their wagon.
Last weekend we had gorgeous spring weather, so the kids were playing outside a bunch. They ended up getting out the wooden wagon SteelyKid got for her birthday some years back, and giving each other rides. This inevitably resulted in me being asked to tow them around the neighborhood, but they did return the favor...
SteelyKid and The Pip pulling me on a wagon.
(Photo by Kate.) They…
drorzel | May 13, 2016As promised/threatened in the previous post, here's a big collection of shots from our cruise vacation featuring the sillyheads.
243/366: Bunk Beds:
SteelyKid and The Pip like the bunk beds in the stateroom.
The sleeping arrangements in the stateroom were pretty slick. We had a double bed that was there all the time, and during the day a sitting area with a couch. While we were at dinner, the housekeeping staff came in and flipped the couch over to become a bed, then lowered a top bunk from a hatch in the ceiling. The kids have never slept in bunk beds before, so this was considered highly…
drorzel | May 11, 2016Since I've given up on the strict daily arrangement, I'm going to somewhat arbitrarily assign photos from the cruise numbers corresponding to the days of the last two weeks. I'll do this in two big photo dump posts, grouped by whether or not SteelyKid and The Pip are in the shots. And since this is a little cheesy, I'll throw in some extra bonus photos as well...
236/366: Ships
The Disney Magic, from the dock at Castaway Cay.
It seems appropriate to start with a picture of our ship, the Disney Magic. This is out of chronological order, as it was taken the last day of the trip, but this was…