Moon phase: First quarter
Weather: Cool & breezy
Phenology: Hydrangeas are blooming
Another snap from the car, this time accidentally catching a hawk sitting on a branch. Of course since it's in silhouette I can't tell what kind it is, but from the size and the short tail I'd guess it's one of the buteos.
Moon phase: Waxing crescent
Weather: Warm, cloudy
Somewhere in Jersey, blurry pictures taken from a car.
New layout. I like it better because it's less Bloggerish and more photoblogish. I'm really getting fucking sick of the standard Blogger layout, especially since it doesn't work very well for photoblogging. I had a hell of a time getting the code right, since everything is complicated by my previous/next links (another feature that Blogger really needs to add, for christ's sake). The code requires archives to be listed on each page, but since I hate Blogger's archives format, I made them invisible--but they still take up (blank) space, which was fine when I had a sidebar, but became impossible when I got rid of it. Finally I discovered that I could just make the archive size 0 pixels. So simple, and yet so complicated. Why does Blogger suck so much? Oh yeah, cuz it's free. I'll stop complaining now.
Moon phase: Waxing crescent
Weather: Hot and humid, with impending thunderstorm
Phenology: Mayapple is fruiting
When I was a sophomore in high school, my Humanities Through the Arts class was studying the architecture of the Guggenheim, and we convinced our teacher that we needed to go to New York and actually see it. So we went up there for a couple days and visited several art museums and also had a blast hanging out in Manhattan and Brooklyn. But when we went to the Guggenheim, it was closed. Oh the irony! The side galleries were open, actually, and I enjoyed seeing some Picassos and Van Goghs, but the entire point of the trip had been to see the spiral of the main gallery, and it was fucking closed. So anyway, in my recent trip I actually got to see it finally. I couldn't take pictures from the upper levels, unfortunately, but these from the first floor turned out well.
Moon phase: Waning crescent
Weather: Warm
Some photos from Central Park. I know, I'm behind again — it's been more than a month since my trip to New York. I'm trying to catch up.
This lake had some very cute turtles.
Cleopatra's Needle, reminding me of home since we have the most famous obelisk in the world. But this one is actually much cooler looking, with hieroglyphics all over it. And apparently it's an original, erected by Tuthmosis III more than 3,000 years ago. Who knew?
Moon phase: Waxing crescent
Weather: warm
Some photos from my recent trip to New York. This was the view from the hotel room, looking out over Riverside Park and the Hudson River.
A display of various hominid skulls in the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. The one in the upper left is Homo floresiensis, a recent find estimated to have lived until about 18,000 years ago, or possibly more recently. I wrote a letter to the Washington Post after their article on H. floresiensis mistakenly called it an ancestor of modern humans (repeatedly). They didn't publish my letter, of course, and I don't think they issued a correction. But this issue makes me so mad: just because something is an extinct hominid doesn't mean it's an ancestor of ours. (And in this case it's historically impossible, since our subspecies, H. sapiens sapiens, is at least 150,000 years old.) There were at one time many branches on the hominid tree, and we just happen to be the only ones still around.
Okay, I'm done ranting.
The wolves in the North American Mammals exhibit. I wanted to take a photo of them the first time I went to this museum, back in 2000 at a time when I was completely obsessed with wolves. Of course back then I only had my film camera, and it just couldn't take low-light photos. So of course I had to take the picture now that I have my digital camera, which is excellent for low light. I love the northern lights in the background. I saw the northern lights a few times when I was up in Wisconsin and once in Canada last summer, though none of those times was it as amazing as the photos you see in magazines. You really have to go way up north to see that.
The skyline with a gibbous moon. Next time, I'll post photos from Central Park.
