Now for the highlight of my Santa Fe trip: visiting with my step-brother, Jeff. The writer at work:
The cat:
The cat after he realized he was being photographed by a dog person:
The cat being emotionally needy:
The cat’s emotional needs being met:
Happy New Year!
As promised, the photos from the Santa Fe part of the road trip. Got up early Friday to try to catch good light in downtown Santa Fe . . . starting with the store next to my hotel:
Next to the gun shop and the hotel was a sculpture gallery. (Welcome to Santa Fe!) I liked this piece against the excruciatingly blue Santa Fe sky:
Then had some fun with it in Lightroom:
Then spent two hours walking around downtown Santa Fe, first with the 14-42mm:
Photoshopped an electrical wire out of this one! Progress!
I just loved this statue of St. Francis of Assisi dancing on water. He’s dancing so joyously his toes are curled!
Getting set up to sell jewelry to tourists:
Pause for hot coffee and cheese danish and a switch to the Nifty Fifty — at the Burro Alley Café.
The eye of the aforesaid burro:
The rare white buffalo:
Fun with HDR and Photomatix.
Loved these ladies – in a store window (also HDR):
More adobe and blue sky:
And my favorite, though I’m not even Christian:
To be continued… with photos of my step-brother, his gorgeous office, and his cat. Yes, this very very dog-oriented blog is about to host its first cat photo. Be sure to tune in!
Road trip to Cañon City, then on to Santa Fe. Here are some photos from the road. Santa Fe photos coming soon.
I’ve made the trip to Cañon City with co-counsel a number of times to visit clients at one of its correctional facilities. The cool thing about driving alone is that I finally got to stop and take a picture of this, Route 115 between Colorado Springs and Cañon City.
Did they find the giant insect while exploring space? Unfortunately, as you can see from the sign, the museum is currently closed, so that question will have to be answered some other day.
I spent much of the drive on back roads, which provided constant reminders why I love the West. This is from Route 50 heading out of Cañon City.
This from Route 522 in northern New Mexico.
This from I-25 north of Pueblo heading back to Denver.
From a grocery store in Fort Garland, CO
I loved the drive and the quality time with my brother in Santa Fe. Good to be back home in front of the Broncos game now.
Went to the The Snug to listen to some Irish music and watch the Broncos. (Tim might list the activities in a different order.) One of the musicians had asked if I could take pictures and, with a warning that it would likely take me a few sessions to figure out what I was doing, I gave it a try. Indeed, I have a lot to learn. I didn’t want to use a flash because I thought it would be disruptive, so I ended up shooting at 1600 ISO, resulting a lot of noise. But the combination of shooting indoors with the afternoon light coming through the windows made it hard for me to figure out a good exposure. I took over a hundred photos and these were the only ones within shouting distance of good.
Still and all, it was enormous fun. The music was awesome, and spontaneous Irish step dancing broke out. A really great afternoon with some great friends.
(Updated to add photo of Cara and replace Kevin’s photo with one less pink. I recalibrated the color temperature in Lightroom, though I did not attempt to calibrate it with the number of whiskeys consumed.)
Cara, woman of many talents: fiddlin (above) and signin (below):
Aaaaand, you’d never know this guy is a lawyer:
But my ability to use its software to save my soul currently has some bugs. This is the error message I get every time I try to open MS Outlook.
My Redemption Helper is on the fritz! I am unredeemed! Maybe I need a laying-on of IT hands! A binary prayer request! A baptism in bytes! A Microsoft mitzvah! (Trying to keep it ecumenical here.)
I think this is the scariest and most infuriating article I’ve read so far: In Town at Ease With Its Firearms, Tightening Gun Rules Was Resisted. It tells of the evolution of Newtown from a partially rural area in which some folks enjoyed owning and using guns for hunting or sport, to a place where a folks with assault weapons were are waking, disturbing, and terrifying their own neighbors with semiautomatic gunfire and exploding targets. That’s right – exploding targets.
Gun enthusiasts here, as elsewhere in the country, have taken to loading their targets with an explosive called Tannerite, which detonates when bullets strike it, sending shock waves afield.
Doesn’t improve your aim or better prepare you for the zombie apocalypse. It’s just fuckin cool.
[A] police commission member, who is a lawyer, said he wrote [a] new ordinance, which would have imposed additional constraints on shooting, including limited hours, and a requirement that any target shooting range, and the firearms that would be used there, be approved by the chief of police to make sure they were safe. This was no liberal putsch, [he] said; three of the five commission members are Republicans, and two members are police officers.
Of course, the new ordinance was voted down. This isn’t Second Amendment Rights vs. Creeping Socialism; it’s peace and quiet and neighborly consideration vs. unbridled selfishness. One shooting range owner explained,
The explosions [the] neighbors hear are targets that are legally available at hunting outlets. “If you’re good old boys like we are, they are exciting,” he said.
I’m guessing loud music and barking dogs are more closely regulated than exploding targets. Selfish, selfish bastards.
Every time another gun massacre happens, the commissars of weapon-correctness announce that we should not politicize the tragedy. They say this loud enough and often enough to shout us past the tragedy and into the next campaign where “taking away gun rights” equates to socialism, communism, and the coming of a one-world government that will force you to teach your disabled kids science,* and every politician of every party runs fast in the opposite direction.
Fuck that.
We need to politicize this most recent gun massacre because, in this country, “politicize” means “figure out wtf to do about.” The opposite of “politicize” is not “debate respectfully” or “decide unanimously.” It’s “sit around with our collective thumbs in our collective asses** and do nothing.” So let’s politicize. Let’s talk. Argue even – it’s how things get decided in a democracy.
And when we talk, let’s talk about the fact that – as a friend pointed out on Facebook – you have to provide more information to buy Sudafed than to buy a gun.
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* Or something like that. I get my right wing conspiracies confused sometimes. For example, do the same paranoid wingers who defeated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on the grounds that the one-world government would force them to kill their disabled kids oppose gun control on the theory that the future one-world government might prevent someone from killing their disabled kids? It’s so confusing!
** Not sure how this works in practice.
I’d like to take a break from the frivolity of blogging about abortion, constitutional theory, and peace in the middle east, to address a truly important topic: Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Guy Fieri (né Ferry it turns out) has come in for some recent and apparently not so recent crap for being an over-exposed douche with a couple of crappy restaurants. The Westword dis and the NYT wrecking ball are both worth reading, if for no other reason than to stock up on entertaining invective such as “hair like space-alien pornstar pubes” or “whirling hypno wheel … where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex.” Gotta remember that last one for my next opposition brief!
And it’s true that Fieri may be a bit overexposed, what with the TV show, the other TV show, the TV game show, the original restaurants, the new restaurant, the website, the books, the accessories, and the constant need to come up with new ways to say “off the hook!” “out of bounds!” and “on the _____ to flavortown!”*
But I’d like to stand up for Triple-D – Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.
In this show, Guy drives around in his signature red convertible (OK, probably flies to where some truck has recently delivered his signature red convertible – I get the kitsch but really don’t mind it!) to the sorts of restaurants that serve yummy food but may not make the Michelin Guide or even Zagat’s. I disagree with Westword that he sets himself up as
the proverbial white knight of normal, average, hard-working, unpretentious Midwestern diners who are oppressed and marginalized by hoity-toity East and West Coast chefs and their expensive, unapproachable, foreign-sounding dishes.
In fact what he does is celebrate a certain kind of non-chain, non-fancy restaurant with good food and – this is what I love the most – a good story. The restaurants are true celebrations of American creativity and entrepreneurialism. Some have been in a family for generations. Others were started by a couple with a small nest egg and a love for cooking, or by a classically-trained chef who wanted to call his own shots, or – my favorite, because these are the ones I am most likely to track down – by an immigrant family recalling and cooking their grandmother’s recipes, sometimes sending back to the old country for missing ingredients.
The shows always involve interviews with diners, who extoll the food and, often, the owners. Hell, some of the customers have been coming since they were kids, or their parents or grandparents ate at the same place.
It’s a celebration of good food and friendly restaurants as creators and sustainers of community.
So, yeah, Guy has a bit too much signature-this and –that (bleached tips, backward sunglasses, weird goatee, flip flops,** cargo shorts, red convertible, repetitious slang), but who on the telly doesn’t have a shtick? We tune in for the restaurants, the people, their stories, and the food. And have tracked down many a Triple-D joint on our travels, almost always to good result.
Extra bonus Conan O’Brien/Guy Fieri spoof: Brozen Brogurt: The Frozen Yogurt Just for Bros!
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* Tim and I always try to gauge Guy’s real view of the food he’s tasting on camera by the vehicle on which he is traveling to Flavortown. Someday some poor joint is going to whip up their specialty for Guy and hear that it’s “on the mo-ped to Flavortown!”
** I do wonder about the flip flops and the health code. Don’t want to get in the way of the signature, though!
Thought Snax 