CK (lead singer in my (secular) band) has a dog who gave birth to a litter of puppies.
I took photos of them on Saturday in order to show my family the adorable puppies who want to have a home with us. “Us” is sort of like the royal “we,” in this case, my parents will be the ones who are most likely to get (a) dog(s).
Anyway, I noticed that my photostream and photos, especially the one of Missy up there at the top, had gotten a lot of hits yesterday and that my stats showed a lot of it was coming from tumblr. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m sort of in the “WTF is tumblr?” boat.
I am still not entirely sure, but the photo of Missy was posted on Brandon’s site and as of this morning about 1600 people had “reblogged” it onto theirs. Hence the “she’s famous” title of this post.
Update: As of Tuesday at noon, the photo of Missy on Brandon’s Tumblr site has 4,394 notes!
That’s a lot of people looking at her photo.
I guess everyone loves puppies.
Another update: As of Saturday morning, the photo of Missy on Brandon’s Tumblr site has 10,094 notes! I haven’t even looked at any other Tumblr sites to see how many notes it has on any others.
Again, I think this just shows how a love of puppies is universal.
There have been 349 views of that photo (or of the adjusted version) on my Flickr site!
She IS adorable, isn’t she???
This one is my personal favorite:
If you want to oooo and awww over the cuteness, feel free to check out the set.
On Thanksgiving morning, I was making dill pickle doobers when the sun was coming up. My hibiscus on my patio had about 4 or 5 flowers that morning, and I could see it through the window. I grabbed my camera and did a quick photoshoot while the light was spectacular.
After leaving the azalea gardens (described previously), SeaQueen and I ventured to the birthplace of Gilbert Stuart – portrait artist (painter). This is a place that SeaQueen had not heard of, but when we were worried of being rained out at the beach (and I went searching online for tourism), I spotted the entry in the “museums” section. I had no idea who Gilbert Stuart was, but I saw that it had a gristmill and snuff mill with functional waterwheels, which was enough for me to want to go see it.
(snuff mill on left, gristmill on right)
I’ve always been fascinating by mills and the workings of mills.
The tour guide was fabulous! Here he is describing how millstones have grooves in them.
The bottom stone stays in one place, and the top one is the one that spins and grinds (powered by the flow of water across the wheel, of course). They are both grooved. Millstones can have different groove patterns, as was evidenced by the different millstones that SeaQueen and I saw in a different park/gardens in Massachusetts. At that park, the millstones were part of the landscaping which was really unique and creative (shown below).
The story of Gilbert Stuart is rather interesting. He is the artist who painted the (unfinished) image of George Washington that is used on the dollar bill.
This is a sheet of one dollar bills from the mint that have not been cut.
Gilbert Stuart also painted images of many of the early U.S. presidents. I like the one he did of Dolley Madison (below).
All of the paintings are reproductions, because his art is too valuable to be housed at the birthplace where there is poor temperature and humidity control and inadequate security. I guess someone on the trustees committee for the birthplace once had the bright idea of housing an original on the grounds; they advertised it, and it got stolen!
Anyway, the story of Gilbert Stuart is also linked to the snuff mill, which made it very interesting to me. Snuff is the powdered tobacco that men and women used to stuff up their noses to get a buzz (before smoking tobacco became more common). This will be no surprise to my fellow lovers of historical fiction who are familiar with characters who kept their snuffboxes handy and who always kept a handkerchief handy for their brown dribbling noses (rather disgusting sounding – but isn’t smoking just as disgusting? – I digress).
Anyway, prior to this time period (mid 1750s), there were zero snuff mills in the U.S. So, any tobacco that was grown here in the states had to be shipped to Europe to be ground into snuff and then shipped BACK to the states for sale. Well, a rich person in Rhode Island (RI) decided that he was going to make a bunch of money by bypassing the shipments to and from Scotland by building the first colonial snuff mill in the states that could mill the locally-grown tobacco. He needed someone experienced to run the mill. So he recruited Gilbert Stuart’s dad and family to move from Scotland to RI to run the mill!
Gilbert was born at the snuff mill in RI and grew up in this relatively wealthy family. He showed a tendency to draw and color. A visitor from Scotland who was an artist, recognized Gilbert’s talent and convinced Gilbert and his family to allow Gilbert to study with him in Europe when Gilbert was in his teens. On the voyage to Scotland, Gilbert was tutored and mentored by this artist. However, the person either died on the voyage or died shortly after their arrival in Scotland! I don’t recall when the tutor died. What I distinctly remember our tour guide telling us was that Gilbert was all alone in Scotland with no money, no credit, and he knew no one! Also that he “must have” been getting some training on the long voyage from the states to Scotland, because his painting improved in just that short period of time. Gilbert ended up getting various odd jobs and (literally) working his way back to the U.S. again; I think he may have worked on the ship in order to have passage. When Gilbert was 20, he moved to England to study with Benjamin West, a famous painter.
His early work was not very good, compared to what he would be capable of later in life.
And then with time he was capable of this kind of work:
That one is my favorite. It is called “The Skater” and won him acclaim in 1782; he was 27 years old! The original is actually really large; our tour guide showed us a photo of him (I think) standing next to it in the gallery where it hangs.
The Wikipedia entry for Gilbert Stuart says that over the course of his life, Gilbert painted over 1,000 portraits. You should check out that entry if you want to see a list of the names of people whose portraits he painted and images of his paintings.
The other thing that was really neat about the birthplace was all of the aspects of colonial living that were on display. There are too many photos for me to post here but they are in a set here.
Herbs were dried behind the fireplace in the fancy, upstairs, rarely-used, living room.
A bench with a nanny board (like a short fence) allowed a woman to sit on the bench and have a small child next to her; the nanny board would keep the child from rolling off of the bench. The board could be removed so that a couple of adults/older children could sit on it.
This next photo is fuzzy, because I took it really fast. But the idea is that a well-made bed was so expensive, and fire was so common, that people kept the tools for dismantling the bed hanging on the bed post. If a fire would break out, they grabbed the tool and dismantled the bed quickly!
Can you imagine living in an age where fire is so common that you have to be able to quickly dismantle your bed for safe-keeping?
I liked the bedside table, because it had eyeglasses, old books, and a neat candle stand on it.
The spinning wheel was very large
as was the loom (sitting next to the grinding mechanism of the snuff mill).
My absolute favorite part of the whole tour was seeing the snuff mill actually be put into gear so that the pestle grinds the mortar (probably not the correct terminology). There is a video in the set on Flickr that shows it in action. Here is the video embedded in this post (hopefully one of those will work for you!):
Here is a photo too.
All in all, it was a really wonderful day! I learned many new things about colonial living and mills, I learned about a famous american artist, and SeaQueen and I had a lovely picnic on the grounds. It was quite a nice way to spend our Memorial Day in lieu of going to the beach!
I FINALLY posted all of my photos on Flickr of my trip out east to Rhode Island and Massachusetts to see SeaQueen and go to my science conference!
Jenski was in Rhode Island at the time too, so she met SeaQueen and I for supper at a great Indian restaurant. We had a lot of fun catching up in person and talking about all the stuff that we don’t talk about on our blogs. We had all worked together (in separate labs) in MA back when I was getting my Ph.D. They both went on to get their PhDs at different schools and are now post-docs. I’m glad we got together.
SeaQueen and I had all kinds of plans to meet up with her lab-mates and go to the beach on Memorial Day after breakfast. Well, on our drive home from breakfast, we saw a parade gathering. I got online to see where the parade was going to be (in case there was time to see a bit of it, OR if we needed to adjust our route accordingly), and the website said that the parade was canceled for severe weather!? severe weather? weren’t we going to go to the beach? Well, it turns out that everyone had assumed that someone else had looked at the weather to see if it was a good beach-going day. We started trying to come up with things to do that would be inside (like a museum) or located close by and cheap so that if we got rained out we could just bail on it really fast.
We ended up having more fun, we both think, than if we’d gone to the beach. We went to an azalea garden and spent a couple of hours taking photos!
It was one of the best times I’ve had going somewhere and taking photos. Usually, I’m with people who are NOT taking photos and thus don’t want to move at my snail’s pace. But SeaQueen had recently got a DSLR body from a friend who upgraded her camera; SeaQueen bought a lens and was ready to go super slow at the gardens too.
I have many, many photos of the gardens on Flickr. Here are a few of my favorites.
No, those are not azaleas. They are irises. But they were so gorgeous, they are my favorite photos of the day.
THOSE are azaleas.
And these next ones are rhododendrons (same family, different structure in how the blossoms cluster). They were in bloom too and were just gorgeous!
And then riiiiiiiiiight as we were taking these photos of the fencing made of vines, the rain started! We were at the end of the tour of the gardens, fortunately.
Sunday
Look to the right! I have a Flickr badge now! Thanks go out to my blog admin (Ex-HB) for setting it up for me.
(FYI: It uses Flash, so if you don’t see it changing photos, then it is possible that the speed of your internet connection and/or the version of Flash you have on your computer is a limiting factor.)
I hadn’t realized until I went searching in the Flickr FAQs that you can make a Flickr badge be made from photos in a particular set or with particular tags. I had always thought that it pulled photos from your entire photostream. But that is not the case. You can select the set or the tag. I’ve got mine set to pull photos from my set called “some of my best shots.”
Anyway, I’ll post more real news later. For now, I’m excited about the Flickr badge and wanted to blog about it.
As the title says, I was inspired to update my “some of my best shots” set on Flickr yesterday and today.
I hadn’t really updated it much for the last 3 years. It was interesting for me to look at my older flower photos and compare them with my more recent photos. My photography skillz have been slowly getting better with time, I think.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Dad gave me a lens and tripod to do really close-up photography, and I’m slowly but surely getting better at using it too. I still love my Kenko extension tubes that allow me to do the closest of the close photos.
Spring break is a week away and I’m hoping to do some more intentional photography of flowers, animals, and maybe even landscapes. Looking at my photos made me realize that I haven’t done much close-up work lately, and I’ve missed it.
Anyway, take a look at the set in slideshow form when you have a few minutes.
There is just enough snow accumulation here in my part of Texas for the roads to become potentially treacherous (if they are not treacherous already) and for schools to shut down for a snow day! In parts of the country where salt/sand/cinder trucks are available, this amount of snow would be nothing, because the trucks would have laid down enough salt/sand/cinders ahead of time to make the roads negotiable. But since small amounts of snow can easily turn to ice without those preparations, I think that the administrators are doing the right thing today by keeping buses and cars off of the roads.
Happily, I don’t really care at this point if I lose a day of lecture. We are on a schedule, but there is only one other prof with whom I need to coordinate the timing of our lectures which is waaaaaaaaaaay easier than the situation I had in MN. Also, in MN we were on a super strict schedule to get through certain chapters. Here, it is much more relaxed.
Thus, I will spend the day prepping my lecture for Monday and writing up a lab that needs to be ready to hand out on Monday too.
Part of me wants to just curl up with a book and read all day; but that is a luxury that I can’t really afford right now if I want to still take tomorrow off. I have been trying to be better about having one whole day off each week. It is better for me, and better for my students. My lectures are more creative and energy-filled if I’m not burnt out. Did I mention that on my evaluations last semester, my highest marks from the students were in the enthusiasm category?
Some of that is because now that I’ve been teaching the material for the 3rd (or 2nd time, depending on the class) it is easier to spend the time finding the “interesting examples” that make the material interesting at this basic level. It is tricky, because in biology, a lot of the things that I find inherently interesting require an understanding of concepts which they simply have not learned yet. However, one of the things I REALLY like about the genetics textbook that I’m using is that each chapter starts with an interesting situation that IS understandable to students with their level of knowledge.
Anyway, back to the snow day. I’m excited to have this change in scenery. The first snow of the year, even in MN or IN or MA, was always something that I found some joy in – as long as it didn’t make my commute bad that day. However, when that first snow occurred, part of me knew it to be the indicator of a long, drawn out winter that was just around the corner.
In contrast, THIS snow is simply joyous, because there is nothing of that impending sense of disruption and doom. I also have no need to go out and drive in it. At the most, I will walk around my apartment complex and look for things to photograph before it all melts away.
During the days leading up to Christmas, Texas Seestor and my two nieces and I converged on Mom and Dad’s house. We spent a day making various types of cookies including: Swedish Spritz, sugar cookie cutouts, gingerbread, and snickerdoodle. We also took breaks to run and play with the girls outside, watch and wave at the golfers, and take the girls on a wagon ride around the neighborhood.
After the everyone else went home, Mom, Dad and I went into town to see the Christmas lights that were put up at the park.
I thought that green tree was an interesting way to do something useful with all of those clear plastic water bottles that are accumulating in our world.
Did you write your letter to Santa this year? Perhaps it ended up in this mailbox…
On Tuesday, Mom and Dad came over to my apartment, and we built the shelves for my garage. They also helped me figure out how to fit everything inside.
Once we got that finished, we headed to the historic/tourist town down the street from where I live. We had a fabulous lunch there and then played tourist for a while. THIS time (as opposed to a trip during the summer), I brought my camera!
Those were Christmas windows in an antique store.
I had to laugh that these are now considered antiques.
This building looks like a lovely place to sit on the front porch, and rock with a glass of iced tea in my hand.
I had to laugh at the barrels that were used to prop up the branches of this tree.
I’ve always loved how some places use these beautiful cabbages (?) (maybe lettuce?) as a way to have something pretty in the wintertime.
