Brian and Natasha

My friends Brian and Natasha on their wedding day, which was, coincidentally, today.

Sunday, September 16, 2007 

Brian and Natasha
Category: Life

10:47 PM 

Poolesville Day 2007

I was recently at the home of my good friends Jeff and Zoë Welsh in Poolesville for Poolesville Day 2007. They are not on MySpace, but they really do exist.


This is the street they shut down for it. For some reason, it looks less crowded in this picture than it seemed at the time.


I didn't take many pictures. This is the sign that announced Poolesville Day. The smudge is back. Maybe I fried my camera somehow. I had the same problem taking pictures of the birds with the same blue sky in the background.


I decided to alter the picture as best I could using Photo Editor to get rid of the smudge. Here's the result of that effort.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 

Poolesville Day 2007
Category: Life

10:51 PM 

Go See Shoot 'Em Up

This movie was great. I liked it so much I created this graphic (from two pieces on the official movie web site) to put on my blog.

Go see this movie.

Go See Shoot 'Em Up
Category: Life

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 

10:44 PM 

Black Rock

So I think I've taken this picture before. This is where I start my walks up to the Appalachian Trail. I decided to walk up to the view at Black Rock on my birthday.


It's only been a year, so I hate to think I'm running out of material here. This picture seems vaguely familiar, too. I guess it's hard to see in this picture, but the trail winds up and to the left. It's kind of steep in places. For a trail, anyway.


This is the first in an inordinate number of pictures devoted to a toad I met on the trip up. This game is called spot the toad. Do you see him? I had a hard time finding him looking at the display on my camera. In the end I just pointed it where I thought he was. And, well, he was there, and is in this picture.


This is a closer look at the toad in the first picture.


Different picture. Same toad. Different location.


Once again, a closer look.


This time I think I was the one who moved.


And here is the toad, close-up.


OK, if you haven't been having much luck with spot the toad in the previous pictures, here is your chance.


Closer still.


And still closer. I thought the shadow to the left looked like the profile of a kids head in shadow. If you stare at it long enough, I think you'll see what I mean.


Wildlife abounds on my trip. I saw a good many of these caterpillars, but they were all dead. Except for this one. And it wasn't moving too fast. Now, it could be they weren't dead, they just looked that way. I think the normal life cycle of this bug has it dropping to the forest floor right about now. So the ones I saw may not have been dead, but they certainly were unlucky, then, because they were very exposed.


I believe this caterpillar is an orange-striped oakworm. Its diet consists mainly of--you guessed it--oak leaves. One article I read on the World Wide Web said that these things eat constantly. I might have to adopt it as a mascot.


This is the Pogo Campsite. Or more accurately, a sign declaring that the place I was standing was the Pogo Campsite. It is about half way on my trip to the Black Rock view. This camp site is on the Appalachian trail.


The aforementioned Black Rock view. A sign pointing out which way it is, that is.


This is a campfire at the view. It looks like a well constructed fire. The only problem being that people are not supposed to build fires here.


This is the view from Black Rock, starting at the extreme right.


A little to the left.


A little more.


More to the left.


Almost done going to the left.


OK. That's it. We're all the way to the left now. You can just make out the edge of the lake at Greenbrier.


I tried to take a better picture of the lake.


Looking (way) down, you can see rocks.


Lots of rocks.


Here is another rock. This one has my backpack on it. You may recognize my backpack from such earlier blog entries as: "Tubing on the Shenandoah."


The only cloud in the sky was a man-made contrail. The smudge was not present in real life.


I decided to lay down on one of the rocks to rest. That's when buzzards started to circle me. They are turkey buzzards. This is one flying with its wings in a characteristic V shape.


The wingspan on these birds is just about the same as I am tall, around six feet.


I managed to get a couple pictures that actually looked like the birds were flying. This is one of them.


A view of that bird in more detail.


Here's one sizing me up. I know what he was thinking. He was thinking "Man, I could eat for a week on that thing."


Now, I know these things only eat dead stuff, and I wasn't dead. But I wasn't sure they knew those two things. They can swoop down pretty fast and sometimes they were only 10 or 15 feet above my head, which is close enough, thanks. I think these things might get a little ahead of the game if I were close to expiring. At one point, I know I counted at least 8 of them, all waiting on me to die on the rocks (or get close enough). I made eye contact with a couple of them.


Sometimes scale is hard to judge in pictures. I took this picture from Black Rock. Near the center of this picture is a church.


A picture of the church using the zoom feature on my camera.


A picture of the tower of the church from the ground next to it.


And here is a picture of Black Rock from the ground next to the church. The rocks I was standing on are more or less straight up from the third fence post on the right.


Back up on the mountain, on my way down, I spotted this critter, a millipede.


I also saw this mushroom, which I thought looked like the star of life, so I took a picture of it. I wonder how it wound up this way, and if it is genetic. Somebody probably knows. I don't though.


That's it for my walk up to Black Rock. After a year of blogging away without putting myself in any entries, here's a picture of me. Sort of.

Thursday, September 06, 2007 

Black Rock
Category: Life

9:44 PM 

Happy Birthday To Me

Happy Birthday to me! I took some other pictures today, but I spent too much time editing some of them and uploading them, so they're going to have to wait.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 

Happy Birthday To Me
Category: Life

12:23 AM 

Blog over 1000 views now

I was waiting for my blog to go over 1,000 views, which it has now, sometime over the weekend. Somebody is reading it. I think my trying to make sure the entries are formatted correctly can only account for about half of the views.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007 

Blog over 1000 views now
Category: Blogging

9:02 PM 

Tubing on the Shenandoah River

Today I went tubing on the Shenandoah River as part of a bachelor party for my friend Brian. This is the company that rented us the tubes, dropped us off, and picked us up.


There is lots of stuff going on in this picture. In the background you can see one of the buses on its way to drop off some people with a bunch of tubes in tow. In the foreground is the tent where we dropped off our liability forms. Also in the foreground are more portable toilets. Portable toilets are becoming an all-too-common theme in my blog. This also counts as an action shot since that random guy is running and my camera snapped him in mid-stride.


It was a bus like this that took us to the drop-off point.


The sign for the Harpers Ferry Flea Market. It seemed busy.


This is Wilt's Fruit Stand. Wilt is an interesting name for somebody in the produce business, which apparently Wilt has been for nearly 50 years, according to the sign which is hard to make out in this picture.


Here is the tube. We got the deluxe model. Also featured is my backpack. It is dry in this picture. It stayed dry for all of about 30 seconds as I slipped and fell trying to get on the tube while keeping it dry.


This is a picture of the Shenandoah River from the first set of rocks I stopped on.


There are lots of rocks on the Shenandoah.


For fun I altered that last picture using the crude tools available to me in MS Photo Editor. I got rid of three sets of people (one group and two individuals). They're barely recognizable in the reduced format PhotoBucket stores, anyway.


Lots and lots of rocks. There are people in this picture, too, but I just left them there.


Another view of the river, from pit-stop number 2.


There are rocks above the river, too.


Playing with the zoom feature again.


I think this is Harpers Ferry. I'm not sure though.


So this was supposed to be whitewater tubing. Here is some whitewater. Nothing too vigorous. I went down the left side on this picture. This was the only picture I took while I was on the water. I am semi-waterproof, but my camera is not in any way waterproof at all.


This is a bridge over the river.


I spotted a tube without a rider making its way down the river, so I thought I would take a picture of it. I got a picture without a tube. So this is just another picture of a rock in the water.


A picture of the river from the bridge, looking upstream.


A picture of the rocks, vegetation, and whatnot.


The Virginia welcome sign and the end of the ride for the whitewater tubing.


These are some bonus pictures of a stretch Ford Excursion limousine.


Inside . . .


. . . and out.


And back inside. This is the back seat.


One last look at a bunch of glasses and the bar inside. I left the party when it transferred to the limo, so that's it for the pictures. MySpace probably wouldn't let me publish pictures of what went on past this point, anyway.

Sunday, September 02, 2007 

Tubing on the Shenandoah River
Category: Friends

12:24 AM