I don't really know anything about mushrooms or toadstools, but I do know they can be picturesque. It seems like the summer's moisture has reached the right stage so that we've had a bit of an explosion of fungus growths.
This is the view through the window of the Historic Colton House at Museum of Northern Arizona. The garden was carpeted with small examples.
A couple of years ago our neighbor's tree fell over and they removed it, but the stump was left behind. I trimmed around it yesterday with a "weed-eater" and there was nothing noteworthy about it. Today it looked like this.
Just last Saturday I checked our side yard for the presence of Stinkhorns and was relieved to find none. We've been fighting these things for several years. You have to dig them up and we watch for the "eggs" that produce them in hopes that we can dig them up before they erupt. Besides looking truly ugly, they do indeed stink. The aroma is so strong that a single growth, 30 feet away, can be smelled inside Linda's quilt studio when she has the window open - not good. I've never been able to come up with a reason why these things should exist.
Never fear - I'm no artist and I can barely do stick figures on my own, but SketchGuru does fun things that I could never do on my own. Gonna have to play with it some more - I can see using this thing for t-shirt graphics. Too bad it's just for mobile devices and not available for Windows or Linux, but it's still cool.
I think I like the first photo best. To my mind it captures the fun of a 914 - and yes, a 914 is one of the most fun rides ever.
Suddenly, the Black-eyed Susan's are in bloom. The field at my work is full of them. The prairie dogs seem to like them as they are quite active, running in and out. It's interesting that they seem to like being out in the open. I'd expect them to want to stay within the forest of wildflowers where the hawks would be unable to see them. Maybe they feel like they are close enough that they can scoot to safety as needed. They sure seemed to be busy getting ready for winter, and they weren't phased by my presence - only about 15 feet away.
We’re on our way to Priest Gulch, CO for a few days of relaxation. We timed the trip so that we could take in the Saturday Farmers Market and pick up a few fresh things to for the next few days. Of course, there’s more to Cortez than just the Farmers Market…
We found great coffee for breakfast, along with some fresh tomatoes and squash. The fudge sample was great, but the zucchini bread was something we had to have – they put streusel on top!
We met Laura, who was making a steady stream of very tasty crepes. There was a hint of Scottish in her voice, and it turns out that the University of Edinburgh Women’s Water Polo Team shirt is not just for show – she attended school there and played on the team for 3 years. We also learned that in addition to a full-time job, she makes crepes at the Farmers Market and has a small place called “The Black Goat” – all because she just loves to cook.
We found The Black Goat on our stroll around town and it looks like we’ll have to stop on our way back to Flagstaff for some brats and coffee.
All the vendors at the Farmers Market were sold out of eggs, but a lady with eggs for sale came into the local quilt store while we were there and was happy to sell us a half-dozen (just perfect for our needs). We also learned that there was a car show at the local park.
It doesn’t look like much, but Liquid Assets is always on our list of places to visit in Cortez. They have one of the most wonderful selections of French and German wines, plus local Colorado wines that we love.
When we came out of City Market, we discovered that the split-screen bus we had seen at the car show was parked right near us. Steve, the owner, let me drive it to put his “Love Bus” and our “Non-Hippie Bus” together so that we could get some photos of them together. It turns out that Steve is also the owner of a 1972 Porsche 914. He’d never heard of 914World.com or of our regular get-togethers, but now I won’t be surprised to see him in 3 weeks at the 9th annual Red Rocks Classic in Durango.
The last stop in town was at Wal-Mart, and we came out the wind was picking up and the skies looked like this. We were hoping that maybe we’d outrun it, but it turned out to be one of the worst storms we’ve driven through. As we went up the Dolores River canyon there was torrential rain, 1/4 inch hail, and tree branches being blown onto the road. The rain continued once we arrived at Priest Gulch, but was pretty light. We’re hoping that the monsoons have rained themselves out for now and we’ll have several days of sunny, but cool weather.
In my first job out of college I worked for a printing company that ran huge rolls of paper through the presses. When the presses were cleaned up we ended up with paper streaked with diluted ink that created wonderful abstract images. I've always been attracted to abstraction like this, or to the abstraction that comes from looking at just a small piece of a larger image.
We had a thunderstorm tonight around sunset that left behind some wonderful, billowing clouds in amazing shades from brilliant white to almost black. I found it interesting to look at just a piece of the larger scene.
I took a 3 image photo sequence and ran it through Photomatix Essentials, then did some post processing with GIMP. Here's how it came out.
This is the unmanipulated base photo. In person the scene looked much more dramatic than this.
My first outcome from Photomatix Essentials. It certainly makes it much more dramatic, but perhaps almost too dramatic.
This one was processed through Photomatix Essentials with the "Natural" preset, which brings in the shadows from one photo and the highlights from another photo to combine them with the base image of my first photo. After some adjustment of the levels with GIMP, this is the result. It's much more natural looking and in fact looks much more like the actual scene.
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