Zoom, Zoom!!!
A few weeks ago, Dave bought me a new camera as an early birthday present (yes, he really is that wonderful). After visiting the Penn Camera store where my friend Melanie works, I settled on a Nikon P90. I wanted a reasonably light camera with a minimum 5X zoom, and I didn’t want to think too hard about lighting. The Nikon P90 has a 24X zoom, though the last 6X is digital, which can be a bit blurry even with all the stabilization settings. Still, 18X is amazing! This camera has so many settings that I felt I had to dedicate an entire day to it. One day wasn’t enough — there will be more “camera days” in the next few weeks. However, I am awed by what this thing can do.
While I could still take the camera back to Penn Camera, I did some test shots to make sure it wasn’t defective. Here, then, is the obligatory “cat on the sofa” test picture:
I then stepped onto the back porch, zoomed to the full 24X, aimed the thing at a neighbor’s back patio, and got an artistically blurry mess because even though I have an extremely steady hand, 24X is hard to pull off without help. A few minutes later, with 1 of the 2 stabilization features in place, I took the same shot as a much less blurry mess. Side-by-side comparison below:
versus 
Here are some other close-ups of neighbors’ yards, all taken from my porch using the zoom feature:
On to Camera Day! There are about 40,000 different settings on this camera, or so it seems, and I could possibly care about half of them, which is a lot. There are “scene settings” for museums, fireworks, dusk, dawn, indoor parties, etc., etc., etc. Two settings that particularly captured my imagination were Copy and Food. Copy does just that — as you can see from this page in the manual:
Food is just amazing. It assumes a close-up and offers you five possible tints. Here is the bowl of pistachios that lives on my coffee table, shown in neutral, maximum blue, and maximum red:
There are various ways of doing close-ups, too, and here are some from my back porch and a park I visited:
Finally, the zoom feature on its own produces some pretty amazing shots, even without specific scene settings. Below, a caterpillar on a cattail, and a Canadian goose, both taken from a distance.
Thanks again to Dave — and there may be more posts like this one as I explore the camera further.
Random Thoughts for a Sunday
Dan Brown doesn’t care if I think he’s a lousy writer. And I do think he’s a lousy writer. I’m not alone. This article from the London Telegraph shows why, by dissecting 20 of Dan Brown’s worst sentences. And if anyone figures out what on earth Brown meant by “her precarious body,” please let me know! While you ponder that mystery, you can also play with Slate’s Dan Brown Sequel Generator. Plug in Major League Baseball for an especially good laugh.
If that depressed you, try visiting The Manolo’s Shoe Blog for something that will make you smile.
Finally, you can never have too many cats. Or too much bacon.
Goldilocks and the Three Cousins — Vacation Part Two: Utah and Idaho
Some family history for context: Mom’s younger brother, Ross, married his high school sweetheart, Joyce, when they were both 18. This was back in the 1950s, when such things were closer to the norm. After a few years, Ross and Joyce had a baby, then moved from their hometown in Illinois to Colorado, where they had two more babies. Then they moved to Idaho, the kids grew up, Ross tragically died of cancer in his late 40s, Joyce remarried a nice guy named Sam, the kids married, at least one of the kids divorced and remarried, they all converted from Catholicism to Mormonism, they all had a bunch of children, two now have grandchildren or step-grandchildren, and they all stayed in Idaho. The last I saw of them was in Colorado, when we were all children. Mom stayed in touch with Joyce, however, so when we began planning this trip, a visit to Joyce, Sam, and the Idaho cousins became part of the itinerary.
I wasn’t sure how this was going to go down. I even fretted about it, because I that’s one of the things I do best — fret. But realistically, I figured we’d end up somewhere between a disaster and a fairy tale. It was closer to a fairy tale: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, to be specific. Cousin #1 was too perfect, Cousin #2 was too … something, and Cousin #3 was just right! The cousins are aligned by the order in which we visited them, which is not birth order.
However, first we visited Joyce and Sam. As you may recall from the previous post, Dave and I arrived hellishly late and Joyce had to meet Mom at the airport. So they had a nice morning reconnecting and talking about my late Uncle Ross and bonding and all that, while Dave and I tried to recover from our travel ordeal. We then drove from Salt Lake City to Sam and Joyce’s home close to the Utah/Idaho border, and officially began the “visiting relatives” portion of the trip. I can’t say enough good things about Sam and Joyce as hosts. They were wonderfully generous and cordial. Sam is incredibly easy to get along with, and Joyce fell all over herself trying to make us feel at home.
Then it was off to visit Cousin #1 in Idaho Falls. I have pictures, but there were major camera issues during this trip and so I do not have access to those pictures yet. They’ll be posted eventually, although I don’t post pictures of minor children, so it will just be the adults. So why did I deem Cousin #1 “too perfect”? That’s said with quite a bit of admiration, but also a sense that he’s not someone I’d hang out with if we lived in the same city. Different styles, different values, different modes of being. He’s a good guy, I like his wife, I’m sure the 5 boys — 4 of whom are 8 or younger — will grow up to be delightful young men, etc., etc. But really, their house is astonishingly neat and clean with no household help and all those children. This is mind-boggling. There’s a lot of regimentation in their home, which I suppose is necessary with that many children. Also, Cousin #1 gets Masters degrees as a sort of hobby, and his wife takes Serious Classes. I admire this to no end. They are like Vulcans. And I am no Vulcan. We had a lovely visit, we ate pizza, and I left hoping that one of the other two cousins would be from my planet.
Cousin #2 is from my planet, but we don’t speak the same language. We visited her the next day. She lives in a modular home (used to be called trailers, but they really are modular homes) on a vast ranch with her husband and a few of their children. Two of her sons live in a house that the rest of the family abandoned due to sewer issues, but they come by each night for dinner. And a married daughter with children lives a short distance away. There are many dogs, some of which are “indoor” dogs and some of which are “outdoor” dogs. The younger daughter is 18 and in a 2-year program that will give her some kind of certificate deeming her beyond great with horses. She loves it, and hopes to work on a dude ranch some day handling the horses, possibly in Colorado. Dave and I liked her best, which seemed to throw her because she apparently gets lost in the shuffle and has been reportedly quite active doing the teenage-rebellion thing against her parents. Anyway, I asked her how many horses her immediate family owns, and it’s something like 20. But each horse is owned by an individual instead of there being “family horses.” So her mom has 3, she has 5, one brother has 2, another has 3, etc., up to about 20 total. Cousin #2’s son-in-law hand-builds awesome furniture out of rough-hewn cedar. There will be pictures, I promise.
Then it was off to visit Cousin #3, who was my favorite. He’s the one I’d like to get together with in the future, and he might be coming here in the fall, which would be great! His wife is funny and a bit sarcastic, so I could see bonding with her if I had the chance to get to know them better. He shares my love of cooking and made dinner using cast iron cookware, which is something I’ve gotten into lately. Their house was cozy (“just right”), the one son we met was independent without being annoyingly rebellious (“just right”), and we talked about our lives after dinner without it feeling like an interview with a stranger (“just right”). I wouldn’t exactly call this guy “Baby Bear,” but he matched my “Goldilocks” better than the other two.
Then it was off to Jackson, WY, and the Grand Tetons. That will be the next blog entry, some time early next week. I may even have recovered some of the pictures by then.
“Air Travel Is So Glamorous” — Vacation Prelude and Part One
Prelude
Some of you have heard my explanation about the genesis of this vacation, and you probably want to skip this paragraph because it’s the same thing I’ve always said. And that is: After my dad died last year, my mother — a burnt-out caretaker 13 years his junior — was talking to her priest, who said to ”Pat, I want you to travel.” She replied, “I’m going to.” He then asked “Where are you going?” And she said “Wyoming — Yellowstone!” This is that trip.
We could not have done this trip without Dave, and we were fortunate that he wanted to join us. After much consultation, we agreed on a 3-part trip: short visit with relatives in Utah/Idaho, 2 days in Jackson WY and Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park.
I carefully aligned our flights so that Dave and I were scheduled to arrive in Salt Lake City about 20 minutes before Mom, allowing us to meet her there. However, the morning we were to leave, as I was taking Eddie to the vet for boarding, I got an uneasy feeling that we had not made sufficient contingency plans. So I did something I rarely do — I called Mom while I was driving.
My car is manual transmission, aka stick shift. I need two hands to drive. There is no third hand available for the cell phone. So I called while sitting at what is normally a lengthy stop light.
“If something goes wrong, we’ll use Aunt Joyce as the switchboard,” I said.
“Why can’t I call you?” Mom asked.
“Because the voice mail on my cell phone doesn’t always work,” I said.
“Why?” Mom asked.
“Just trust me and don’t leave a message,” I said as the light turned and I had to make a left turn with a cellphone wedged between my ear and shoulder.
“But that’s not right,” Mom said.
HONK!!!! went the car behind me as I failed to put on my turn signal for the next sharp left I had to make.
“FUCK YOU!!” I yelled into the phone, meaning the driver, not Mom, which I had to explain once I was parked at the vet’s.
So we’re off to a good start already. I left my dubious Mom with instructions to call Aunt Joyce if there were a problem, and I said I would do the same.
Part One
Those carefully scheduled arrival times I mentioned above? They didn’t happen.
Dave and I were flying on Frontier, which is currently at the top of my list of Airlines I Don’t Hate Right Now. The day before, I did online check-in for the two of us because that’s the kind of thing I do.
Here is why online check-in is important: Say, hypothetically, you’ve booked a flight from Washington to Salt Lake City with a transfer to a connecting flight in Denver first. And say, hypothetically, that your flight to Denver is delayed 3 1/2 hours due to a mechanical problem. Under this hypothetical scenario, if you have checked in online, the airline may automatically rebook you on another connecting flight, maybe even on another airline, so that you do not have to stand in line with the teeming masses and figure this out at the airport. Which is what happened — we didn’t have to stand in line, because Frontier rebooked our second flight before we even arrived at the airport.
So thanks, Frontier Airlines and whoever came up with online check-in! Also, thanks for the two $50 vouchers, which are around here somewhere because I haven’t thrown out a single piece of paper since we left, although I will confess that I don’t actually know where the vouchers are. But I have them. Somewhere.
This begins a round of trying to contact Mom. As it will turn out, when we are on the ground, Mom will be in the air, and vice versa. All. Day. Long. So I call Aunt Joyce and tell her what’s happening. She wants to leave messages on my cell phone, however. I tell her no. Why is it that the 70-somethings don’t accept the notion of failed voice mail? Later that day, I spend the better part of an hour talking to my unhelpful carrier, and I still don’t have voice mail on my cell phone. This will be solved, but it wasn’t going to be solved while we were traveling.
Having nothing better to do, Dave and I go to the United counter, which is the airline that now has our second flight, from Denver to Salt Lake, and which is incredibly busy. The man who stands there directing people to his colleagues asks us what we want. Seat assignments, we tell him. He says his colleagues won’t be able to help. I look at them. They are under siege. But we decide to stick around and take our chances. Sure enough, when we do get to an agent, she gives us great seats in Economy Plus, for an extra charge. What do you get in Economy Plus? Nicer seats with extra leg room. I am 5′ 10″ and expecting to put in a 20+ hour day by time we land. Of course we’re going to pay the extra charge, which is only $39 each.
I then call Aunt Joyce, who volunteers to meet Mom at the airport since we won’t be there. It’s a 90-minute drive for her, but she and her husband will do that because otherwise my 76-year-old mother will be stranded.
Hours later, Mom calls my cell phone (and I have several voice messages from her and Joyce on my phone — too bad I can’t get at them) and actually reaches me.
“I’m in baggage claim, where are you?”
“Denver.”
“What?”
“Did you call Joyce?”
“No. Oh, wait, here she is.”
So that part works reasonably well. Dave and I then make reservations for a Hampton Inn near the Salt Lake City airport. Because our flight out of Denver is weathered in for a while, we arrive there just before 2 a.m. With the time change, this comes to a 22-hour day. We are not in the best shape at that point. The Hampton Inn is not all that easy to find, although the guy at the Hertz counter got us fairly close. But it is worth it. The clerk puts us in the quietest room he has open and, mercifully, we sleep. Sort of. If you don’t count Dave’s leg cramp in the middle of the night and my general inability to sleep from having been wired all day long. But eventually, we are something approximating rested, and get up in time for the free breakfast.
Hampton Inn gave us a great room, a better-than-decent free breakfast, and a few hours of sanity when we were desperate, all at a very reasonable price. Thanks, Hampton Inn!
Next up: Aunt Joyce, Sam, and the Idaho Cousins.
(Very) Odds and Ends
It’s another link day — cats, cooking, and common sense healthcare.
First, let’s look at the cats. Specifically, let’s look at 1,000 pictures of cats. Some of these animals are absolutely gorgeous.
As for cooking, a question that comes up now and then — and especially now, in the shaky economy– is whether certain items we consider panty staples are cheaper to make at home than to buy at the grocery store. An article on slate tells us one woman’s experience making bagels, cream cheese, yogurt, jam, crackers, and granola. She evaluates not just cost, but taste. The results might not be what you expect. I know I was surprised by one item in particular.
Finally, there’s common sense in health care, a hot topic these days with our devastatingly expensive “system” and the various thoughts on how to address it. This satire starring Fred Willard gets right to the point.
A Celebration of Weird Garbage Day 2009
Dave thinks I have a dangerous obsession with Weird Garbage Day, more formally known in my community as Spring Clean-up. This is the day on which we can put old furniture, brush, and other outsized items on the curb for pick-up by the city trash trucks. The night before, what we call “the scavengers” drive around in big trucks and pick up whatever they think can be rehabbed and reused. The city trucks then sort the reusable items from the true trash, and take it all away.
I like to see what people put out on the curb. This fascinates me, it’s like a small window into a side of their lives they’d normally not reveal. And I like to see what’s taken away. For example … if you enlarge this page to full screen, you will see a picture of Priscilla, my cat who died last year at the age of 19 1/2. Now, that is very, very old for a cat. And she spent her last year not using the litter box. She used a couple of spots in the basement, and one of those spots was the bottom of a two-tiered coffee table I planned to dump anyway. So on Thursday evening, Dave and I moved the cat-pee-soaked coffee table onto the curb. And yesterday evening, one of the scavengers loaded it into a truck and took it away! I am stunned that this cat-pee-encrusted piece of garbage was lifted onto a truck with the hope that it would prove to be of some use.
Aren’t people amazing? I love the ingenuity and optimism that represents.
Anyway, that’s the big recycling news in my life. Staying with the environmentalism theme, Slate magazine addressed the environmental aspects of microwave oven use. If all you’re doing is heating something, as opposed to really cooking, it’s the environmentally correct thing to do. Happy Belated Earth Day.
Finally, mother love can be recycled. Mother’s Day is coming up in a couple of weeks; I hope Jasmine has a good one.
Iceland, the Global Economy, and Culture
Like a lot of people, I’m doing my best to muddle through this economic crisis without having a personal crisis on top of it all. And, like a lot of people, I find myself following the various analysts and commentators as they address the situation. Most recently, I’ve been thinking about Iceland, the global economy, and culture. And the question that arises is, “How did this happen?”
In his Letter from Reykjavik, published in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker, Ian Parker discusses Iceland’s banking collapse primarily from an economic point of view. Parker’s answer to my question is that single-minded men — and they were mostly men, not women — paid no attention to warnings because the warnings didn’t match what these single-minded men wanted to believe. (How familiar is that?) These are people who would have continued to invest with Bernie Madoff after he was indicted. Parker reports the aftermath: the protests, the occupation of Iceland’s Central Bank, the election of a new prime minister. It’s an instructive article, although the link provides only an abstract for nonsubscribers.
More lively and enlightening is Wall Street on the Tundra, by Michael Lewis, in the April edition of Vanity Fair. Let’s start by copying the magazine’s own blurb on the piece:
Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.
Lewis covers a lot of territory in this article. From the brusk Icelander who bonks him in the head with a suitcase to the binge drinking to the widespread belief in elves to the fact that everyone there knows everyone else, including Bjork, Lewis provides a sense of who Icelanders really are. He explains how the country provides few jobs worthy of its highly educated population, and gives some examples of skilled fishermen becoming bankers with no training in the field. Why did they think they could pull this off? They think they’re superior to everyone else. Well, maybe they don’t think that anymore, but they thought it before their banks collapsed. Now, who knows? Many Icelanders have $35,000 Range Rovers with loans worth $100,000, vehicles that some of them simply blow up in explosions that rocked Lewis out of sleep his first night in the country. He also observed that Icelandic men and women have very little to do with each other except when sex is part of the equation. Yes, Icelandic women are well-educated, enjoy equal rights, and fully participate in the workforce. But they don’t seem to interact with men very much; the two sexes often treat each other with open disdain.
Lewis’s answer to my question about how the Icelandic banking crisis occurred would likely be “because of the country’s culture.”
And that leads to the third piece I’ve read about Iceland recently: the Iceland chapter in Eric Weiner’s book, The Geography of Bliss. I’ll be reviewing this book in its entirety on Wednesday, but I want to mention here the chapter on Iceland. Weiner visited Iceland and wrote his book before the economic collapse. His purpose was to visit the happiest and unhappiest places in the world. According to his research, Iceland often ranks as one of the happiest countries.
Why? Keep in mind, Icelanders were flush at that point, buying homes in London, hauling in Elton John to sing at birthday parties for $1 million, purchasing $35,000 Range Rovers that they would incinerate in 2008. But it wasn’t the money that made them happy. They’d been gauged as very happy before the money turned fishermen into international investors. What Weiner pointed out, with no idea of what was to come, was that Icelanders have little to no fear of failure. In fact, they embrace it. They accept it and see failure as a worthy outcome of engaging in a process they enjoy. As Weiner notes, there are a lot of terrible musicians in Iceland, and that’s not including Bjork. They are also career changers who accept that the change might not work. Are you a fisherman who wants to try banking? Even if you know nothing about finance? In Iceland, that’s not a problem, or at least it wasn’t. Weiner interviewed a music producer who had also been a professional chess player, journalist, theologian, and construction company executive. This man was 40. Weiner’s answer to my question about the Icelandic banking collapse might be “they tried out careers that didn’t work.”
Of course, all of this leads me to a new question: Are Icelanders still happy? I hope so, but I wonder if the incredible debts many of them have taken on might have dampened their enthusiasm for failure.
The Inauguration, Random Thoughts Part Two
The inauguration of Barack Obama humbled me almost to the point of having nothing to say. Almost.
I loved that he emphasized responsibility and mindfulness. I loved that he rephrased traditional arguments: we should not argue big government vs small government, but rather seek effective government, etc. I loved the crowds, I loved the peaceful transfer of power. I loved Aretha Franklin’s big hat, I loved Rev. Lowry’s sermon. I loved that when the Obamas passed the Canadian embassy, uniformed Mounties saluted him:
In front of the Canadian embassy
I do not do immense crowds, stand for hours, or subject myself to cold temperatures for prolonged periods of time. So Dave and I stayed home and watched on TV. On a mid-afternoon walk, we ventured into a middle school parking lot near the closest Metro station and found many cars with out-of-state license plates: Georgia, Michigan, Alabama, New York, Connecticut. Someone had to have directed them there, since the entrance isn’t obvious.
One of my online groups asked what two pieces of advice we’d give President Obama. I said:
1. Keep some parts of your pre-Presidential routine, like the 90 minutes of daily exercise, the weekly date nights with Michelle, and the time with your daughters. You’re a human being first, president second.
2. Your nominees for cabinet and your other advisors are mostly stellar, so please listen to their wise advice and delegate to them as much as you can, because you’ll have plenty to do regardless.
I think he’ll do fine without my advice, though. I think he is an extraordinary man who came along just when this country needed him most. If he does half of what he wants and a quarter of what we want him to, he’ll go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents.
Friday Fun
I will admit, I’m slightly blue today. The economy, the cold weather, etc., etc. So I’m going to skip the book review I’d planned for today and go for the kind of post that should cheer me up. Maybe something here will brighten your day as well.
Let’s start with something funny from YouTube. It makes me appreciate my cat, Eddie, that much more.
Next, I recently shared the URL for this blog with some writers on LinkedIn. This is for you, fellow writers, or for anyone who has to write for work or school. Because we all know, accurate citations are important.
And in case you, too, are bummed out by the economy and other things, here is an Armageddon Flow Chart .
Special pre-Inauguration bonus: Arlington County, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington DC, sent out an e-mail alert to residents yesterday. An excerpt:
To prepare for this event, pretend a hurricane is coming during that weekend and expect large crowds, congestion, traffic and many delays.
I thought the part I bolded was pretty funny. But maybe that’s just me
About
This is a picture of Priscilla, who lived to be an old lady cat of 19 1/2 and passed away on July 21, 2008. As Dave put it the next day, she was a great cat. I was privileged to adopt her in 1994, when her first family moved overseas and decided they couldn’t take her along. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife or a real “Rainbow Bridge” or any of that. But love lives on, and so I would like to dedicate this site to Priscilla and my first two cats, Hillary and Rabbit.
Like most blogs, this one includes random thoughts and observations, but its primary purpose is to provide book reviews for animal lovers. Please feel free to add comments or make suggestions of books that are animal-friendly.
