Danielle Blog

Summer! Update #1

Hello!

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.

A visit to the historic/tourist town down the street from where I live

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.

Winning photo

I know I haven’t blogged in forever, and the dearth of information is going to continue a bit longer.
But this one only needs a couple of sentences, so I thought I’d post it.

I entered this photo in a Biology Photo contest at school in the “plants/fungi” category. The photo had to have been taken this semester, which meant that I pretty much had to intentionally look for something to photograph. I happened upon this vase by pure accident.

I was at Mom and Dad’s new house, and after coming back from attempting to take a photo of the deer in the neighborhood (which didn’t really work), I spotted the vase as I was walking up the driveway! I ended up spending a while taking photos of it, and they looked better than anything else I’d taken, so I entered it, and I won the category! I was particularly excited, because while I didn’t get to see the other faculty entries, I know that one of the other profs takes beautiful flower photos.

They are getting matted and hung in one of our buildings, which is rather cool.

BTW: here is the only deer photo I got.

Obviously, not one that would work for a contest. But rather funny all the same.

fun outings with Mom and Dad – part 1

I mentioned previously that I had some fun things going on last week that I would share with you, and here they are.

Last week, Mom and Dad were here in TX. They drove some things down (and across) from IN on Saturday that can’t be moved by the movers. They also wanted to use the week to make a decision about tile and carpet for a large percentage of their new house here in TX. And to top it off, there was the possibility that some of it could actually be installed that very same week!

On Monday, they chose tile and carpet, and I worked on a manuscript for some of my research. oodles of fun, that.

On Tuesday, they came down to my apartment so that Dad could see it for the first time in person and so that Mom could see the latest stage. I had hoped to get the last two boxes of decorative things unpacked before they arrived, because I had visions of them helping me hang framed art that day. However, it just took me too long to do the manuscript on Monday and other unpacking/cleaning on Tuesday morning.

Consequently, we used our Tuesday to go out to a fabulous, fabulous German lunch and go site-seeing. Lunch was just amazing. I had three kinds of sausages, sauerkraut, red cabbage, and what they called “German potatoes.” Turns out German potatoes are fried/sauteed potatoes cooked with baaaaaaaaaaaaaacon that have baaaaaaaaaaaaaaacon bits on them. OMG were they ever good. The sausages were fabulous.

Did I say the food was amazing?

Anyway, on the way to shopping in the historic part of town, I drove them past a couple of things that my town is known for. And we happened to go past the library.

Note that these were taken on one of my prior visits to the library; we did not go inside on this trip.

I love the high ceiling, natural light, and light fixtures inside.

And this library is the one that has the Starbucks machine inside; that is very funny to me, since I didn’t even know they existed.

Here is one of the landscaping features you see as you walk to the front door of the library.

And on my way to the parking lot, I spotted this sign.

That sign for the reading garden intrigued me, so I decided to venture to the back of the library

Turns out, it was just a very open space with benches and minimal landscaping. But I did see a lovely crepe myrtle that was in bloom.

And then we headed to the historic and tourist-y shopping district in town.

I hadn’t taken my camera with me, which was a shame, because there were some lovely places that were really photo-worthy, but that just means that I’ll have to go back!

We had a really fun time there. We were mostly just browsing, but we did keep an eye out for a breezy gardening hat for Mom. We saw a LOT of various decorative things for inside and outside. In fact, Mom found a great wrought iron, glass, bead and bell hanging piece; I guess it could be considered a windchime. She was hesitant to buy it, but the price was so low, that Dad and I went back to buy it for her.

I found this really interesting stone that is in the shape of a smooth egg that changes color inside (very subtly) depending on the angle from which you view it. And I scoped out clogs. I have been debating with myself about buying a pair of clogs for school. Not being able to wear open-toed shoes in labs means that I have to think a bit differently about what kinds of shoes are wearable for work.

And then, pretty soon it was time for us to end our day of site-seeing. But we made plans for another outing for Wednesday.

- to be continued in part 2 -

Sunrise at Port Aransas, TX

Last week, I was at Port Aransas, TX, near Corpus Christi on the eastern coast of TX, for vacation. I was with Texas Seestor (TS), Trainwreck (Tr), older niece (M) and younger niece (YN).

I had an exceptionally great time. Floating around, swimming, bouncing around, and playing in the pool for pretty much all day from 8:00am to 4 pm was just fantastic.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I am definitely a “water” when it comes to the whole water, air, earth, fire personality types. My dreams are usually water dreams, and I just love the feel of being in the water. I never dream about earth. If fire or air is in my dreams, it is usually a nightmare of some sort.

Anyway, mornings were usually a time when I sort of took care of M, because she and I both wake up early (6:00ish). Most mornings, I was only able to occupy here and allow TS and Tr to “sleep in” until 6:30, maybe closer to 7:00 if we were all lucky.
One morning after she woke me up at 5:00am, I really wanted to go out to the water and take photos of the sunrise. You might recall that last year, I was able to take sunrise photos every morning from our condo’s patio and I wrote a blog post this spring with a few of my best shots.

This year, due to the location of our room, I actually had to take more time to do it, because I had to take the boardwalk out to the beach to get shots.

But I love the boardwalk, because it allowed me to experience this interesting transition from condo and building to ocean. And on the way, I was walking past the dunes which were actually still green this year and not all dried out; I guess all of the rain they got a couple of weeks ago due to hurricane Andrew was actually helpful.

Here is the end of the boardwalk before I got onto the sand.

And then just as I was setting up my tripod at the bottom of the steps, this group of about 8 (or so) teenage girls dressed in white gauzy dresses start walking past me onto the beach. Right into the sunrise area.
ugh.
But the adult who was with them, with the big fancy camera, stopped and talked to me about how it was their last morning here and how the sunset the previous night didn’t work out. How she had to get them all up and ready by 6:00 am, blah, blah, blah. I was sort of sympathetic, but I also knew this might be my only morning to get out and take photos. She ended up saying that she’d try to keep them down the beach and out of my line of images. They were only partly successful. Thus, some of my photos do not have the sun actually centered. *sigh*

But, I caught the first glimmer of the sun over the clouds.

And one of my favorite parts is the sound of the seagulls calling out to each other over the background sound of the ocean waves.

Once the sun rose a little more, I decided to try to capture my joy in being out there. This required me to use the self-timer on my camera and to sort of guess where I needed to be in the photo.

For the first one, I only had the timer set at 10 seconds, because I didn’t check it ahead of time, and when I got out there, I realized that I’d left my shoes on. As I was trying to pull off my shoes, the camera snapped the shot.

oops.

setting it for 20 seconds worked out a bit better.

of course, when I ran back to the camera, there was that girl in the photo again.

it isn’t perfect, but it is all that I had energy for.

I realized it is quite difficult holding ones balance with ones arms raised in joy while not knowing when the waves were going to come in. Once a wave comes in and the water sucks back out, it is rather hard to keep ones balance.

Then attempts with the sun shining on me.

oops.

try again.

then back to the ocean and the birds and some close ups.

After some photos of the seaweed, I headed back.

It was a beautiful way to start the day. It made up for waking up at 5:00 am.

And then, after breakfast, it was back to the pool with M. We had it all to ourselves for about an hour.

It was really wonderful.

Fall leaf – part 5

This is the last one in this particular fall leaf series. I think you can all see why this leaf jumped out at me when I saw it on the sidewalk.

Here is what I like about each image, that I think all of you have noticed too.

In the first one, you can see the yellow cells outlined by the green borders. They are so close to the green vein and reddish-orange region that provide nice contrast (but in retrospect, might be a hint more distracting than I’d planned on). If I were to re-post that one, I think I’d crop out the green vein.

In the second one, the veins are the star of the show. I’d intended for the color variation to be the focus, but the crevases of the veins and the patterns really draw your eye.

In the third one, the symmetry, and the tye-dye appearance really appeal to me. I also really like how the green reminds me of rays of sun coming up over the horizon or some sort of star burst.

In the fourth one, the green horns are just unbelievable. It also reminds me of a Rorschach blot in the way the patterns on each side are similar but not perfectly symmetrical. My eye is always drawn to the center vein and the red outline of cells around it. I just can’t quit tracing it with my eyes.

It reminds me of these art things my sister and I used to make. We’d start with our name or letters in black, and then would carefuly outline around it with one color of marker, and then another color. We’d keep tracing until an entire 8 1/2 x 11 paper was filled with lines of tracing. It might take all day to carefully trace with markers and not bleed into the nearby color…. but the end result was just beautiful. I wonder if we have any of those stored away at my parent’s home? I know Mom saved most of our artwork from school. If I ever get a chance to find it, I’ll show you what I mean.

This last one, isn’t quite like seeing the leaf on the sidewalk… but well, you can get a sense of what it looked like from farther away and what caught my eye.

Fall leaf – part 4

Fall leaf – part 3

Fall leaf – part 2

Fall leaf – part 1

I found a beautiful fall leaf on the sidewalk on my way into school the other morning. I think it was Wednesday. I’m not sure what type of leaf, someone who saw it said Maple. Perhaps. I don’t really know. All I know, is that this type of tree is my favorite.

Every fall, I see these trees that are part green, part orange and part red, with hints of yellow and colors in between, and I am awe struck by them.

For this particular leaf, I admired it for the remainder of my walk to the train station, tucked it away safely in my bag, and scanned it when I got into school.

I thought about putting it under a dissecting microscope and taking a digital image of it that way. But well, it takes a while to get the scope and lighting set up for materials that need to be lit from above, and I simply didn’t have the time.

I scanned it at 800 dpi and I am going to post pics of it each day from the closest view to the one that is zoomed out.

This first one is full resolution, just one small portion of it.

I like how you can see the colors changing from region to region. And you can see the veins and the cells. Especially at the bottom of this image where the green and yellow ones are located.

Biology is so beautiful.