Sunday bird blogging

Keeping with the theme of summer blues, here's a bluejay, regarding me suspiciously over what would be his shoulder, if bluejays had shoulders that is.

Never have I asked an August sky, Where has last July gone?

Never have I wandered through the rye, wondering where has some guy gone

I had to throw in the next line just because I love the rhyme of “guy gone" with “July gone," though it has absolutely no relevance to the photo at hand.

Which depicts some fun futuristic porthole windows on Ninth Avenue, against the brilliant backdrop of one of those aforementioned August skies.

Astronomy Tuesday, on Wednesday

I honestly forgot all about Tuesday this week -- work has been busy, and we've been having the most August-like of Augusts, with baking hot wet days, and by the time I trudge home and dry off all I want to do is lie down in a cool room.

It's great incentive to cast the mind elsewhere, and here's a lovely elsewhere for the occasion -- clouds of gas in the constellation Cygnus.

Image Credit and Copyright: Paul C. Swift

Saturday reflections

An abstract of red, white-ish, and the deep blue of an August sky, in Midtown.

Urban poetry

Pipes at a construction site. Who knew they came in so many flavors of red?

Astronomy Tuesday

Gob. Smacked.

This looks like an amateurish animation in a bad sci-fi movie, but it is actually a series of photographs taken by NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory last month showing our moon passing in front of the Earth.  (That's mostly the Pacific Ocean you're seeing on Earth -- you can see the west coast of North America moving away to the right, and Australia coming into view in the bottom left.)

This is also a good look at the dark side of the moon -- the side that is always turned away from us. It's comparatively featureless, lacking the dark seas and big craters of the near side, and looks thoroughly dowdy compared to the blue jewel behind it.

Saturday reflections

The blue skies and puffy clouds of summer in the city, as reflected on West 18th Street.

Urban poetry

An empty tour bus heading back to the garage.

I do think that Les Miserables may be an unfortunately appropriate label for any tourists riding on that top deck on one of our steamy summer days.

Wednesday reflections

We now resume our regularly scheduled blogging.

This is a slice of the cool glass spiral staircase at the Apple store on 14th Street, where I spent much of my weekend. This all began with one tiny, itty bitty, minuscule, barely perceptible drop of water, which got into the trackpad of my Macbook last week and brought all laptop operations to a halt.

I took the patient in for surgery on Saturday, and got a message that it was available for pickup Sunday morning. So I went downtown again, booted up in the store, found everything working correctly and all my data present and accounted for, and went home.

Where the laptop, which had been so deceptively well-behaved inside the Apple store, no longer booted up. After an hour or so of cursing, I cabbed it back downtown, where it was determined that the operating system was toast, the hard drive would no longer mount, and BTW, I did have everything backed up, right?

A few hours later, I had a new OS, but no data or programs. Though I had been thinking extremely uncharitable thoughts about Apple in general, this laptop in particular, and their fiendish decision to situate their store within easy walking distance of the Sarabeth's in Chelsea Market, where I had drowned my sorrows in baked goods multiple times over the course of the weekend, when Apple technology works, it is truly a thing of beauty. My Airport router backs up my laptop automatically without my having to think about it, and when I got home I just had to click on Restore, and....it restored. Everything -- all my documents, all my photos, all my software.

So Apple, I'm sorry for all the mean things I said. My laptop is not a finicky slab of over-engineered aluminum, and you are not a hipster Satan. Still, the next time I have a crisis I think I'll pick a store that's not anywhere near a bakery.

We are experiencing technical difficulties

My laptop is seriously indisposed, though I am hoping that the denizens of the Genius Bar will live up to their name and make it all better.

In the meantime, I have just discovered the wonderful Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which invents and immortalizes words that should actually exist already.

Like this one:

vemödalen

n. the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

Sunday bird blogging

Blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos, of course -- this may be the most unmistakable bird on the planet.

This isn't something I dug out of my own extensive collection of boobie-graphs, though -- this is actually a shot I took Friday of the postcard I left in Post Office Bay almost two years ago, which was finally delivered to my friend Jayne's apartment building last week.

It was somehow more exciting to see this old message finally arrive, transported entirely by the goodwill of strangers, than any snail mail I've received in -- well, maybe ever.

Saturday reflections

It's not immediately obvious just what is the reflection here, which is why I like these otherwise unremarkable buildings in downtown Portland.