how now brownpau
This has been a nice week for being outside, what with Fall approaching, temperatures dropping a bit, and the sun being out. Here are two nice photos of cirrocumulus clouds over DC landmarks which I snapped with my phone while walking home on Monday afternoon:
Due to lots of work and a bit of travel, I have posted only infrequently as of late, and there have been two weeks of no cat photos, so I hope this entry makes up for it, with a picture of Pandora in a blurry mid-meow. I will be bringing her to the vet soon for a checkup and claw trimming (I tried trimming her claws myself and was unsuccessful) but due to shoulder pain I will be unable to use her carrier, so I got a Kittywalk stroller. We’ll see how she likes it next week.
Seen at the “Soviet Safeway” on 17th St NW. There’s at least two things wrong with this photo:
All through Saturday I had a script fetch an image from the WJLA sky cam every 30 seconds to catch Tropical Storm Hanna’s progress as it passed over DC, then combined the image sequence into a movie with some loops for background music. Kennedy Center is at lower middle right. I do wish the office staff would turn that webcam back towards the National Mall, though; it’s not quite as recognizable as DC otherwise.
I snapped this panorama from the Harbour yesterday as Tropical Storm Hanna approached; that’s the last bit of sun we see till Sunday. Being an obsessive weather geek, I am of course following the storm closely on We Love DC, and have multiple tabs open for radar, NOAA reports, local news, webcams, weblogs, and Twitter. So for today, I’ll be at Hanna Watch.
After some soul searching, I have come to the conclusion that I will never engage in the following activities on Twitter, and repent of all times in the past that I may have purposefully or inadvertently done any of them:
I might occasionally post a Twitter link to something particularly notable on my site, but I feel shouldn’t cross-pollinate my content or hammer the stream with multiple automated posts from third-party services. Those of you who do engage in some of these practices on Twitter in moderation, please do not regard this as a negative judgment on your activity. This is just an informal code of Twitter conduct to which I will hold myself in order to better serve the ends of my online presence.
And now, just a few more photos from our Labor Day weekend:
At top, Amy found King Friday in a closet. So this is where he went after Mr. Rogers’ sad passing and the subsequent fiery destruction of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe: the harsh, real world of the suburban sprawl. At lower left, Amy explains how Four Squares works on the playground of her childhood school. And at lower right, I could not leave New Jersey without a picture of The World’s Tallest Water Sphere, shot from the parking lot of a Union County strip mall, one of many which give the state its distinctive local flavor.
We were riding a bus back into New Jersey Saturday evening when we saw the sunset. I took out my camera, but the sun and moon are always a lot smaller than your average point-and-shoot can resolve decently, plus the ride was too bumpy and the light too dim to get a good photo or standard video at full zoom. Instead I decided to go into Continuous shooting mode, hold down the shutter button, and got a series which I could later put together into this video, cropping each frame so the sun was as close to center as possible. I repeated the video four times to make up for the series not being long enough, added some mixed loops from Garageband, and voila, artsy sunset timelapse video.
We went up to New York City Saturday afternoon, lunching at Soba Nippon and checking out the art at NY MoMA. This was my first time visiting MoMA, and oy, what a crowd. But the mess of people (a more yuppie-ish art-viewing audience than one would see at the Metropolitan Museum or National Gallery, by the way) made photos of them viewing art as much fun as the art itself.
Note to self: next time start on the top floor and work way down. The paintings are mostly on the fourth and fifth floor, and we were primarily there for those. Full photoset here.
Here’s a quick nighttime video of the Lower Trenton Bridge taken from the Amtrak Regional while crossing the Delaware River. The bridge is most famous for the slogan affixed to its side in bright red neon letters:
A brief history of the sign, which was Trenton’s slogan back in the early 20th Century, when the city was a booming industrial town.