Gallery on Alkahest

Yellowstone calendar pictures

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:27:15 +0000

Time to assemble the annual Yellowstone calendar. This year I had a bit of a deadline (and not the shipping deadline this year!). The company I ordered from (Zazzle) was having a 44% off deal, which expires around 3am. Unfortunately, because of my grandfather’s death, I never did get around to processing the pictures from this year’s trip, so I didn’t have anything ready to go. Fortunately, it didn’t take that long to find 10… 18… 26… 28… 29 pictures. It took a bit longer to color correct and prune them back down to the 13 below:

cec's day off

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:02:02 +0000

I thought about titling this “VD Day” for reasons explained below, but as K pointed out, my mom reads this blog. More to the point, as I noted, my mom has a dirty mind - which is where most of her children got our sense of humor, so she would absolutely get it. Anyway, I took today off work, because a) I recently had a birthday and wanted a three day weekend, and b) there were a number of little things around the house that needed doing. In rough chronological order, I

Ph34r t3h cut3 0n3s

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:27:27 +0000

Last night, I realized that K had quite a few baby animals around the house and that I hadn’t posted any pictures. So, without further ado, may I present the cute ones:

The first picture is of a young opossum. He and his siblings were in one of our outdoor enclosures, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well, so he’s back inside for a bit.

The next set is a group of baby (week old) snapping turtles - note the remnants of the yolk sack. This is sort of an interesting story. The old non-profit had a snapper that died. However, we knew that the turtle had eggs. So we sent the body over to the vet school’s turtle team where they extracted and incubated her eggs until they hatched in August. These are the her babies.

Vacation notes (3 of N)

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:58:22 +0000

May 24: Memorial day weekend is in full swing and there are idiots everywhere. I swear that the older I get, the more I sympathize with my father’s dislike of crowds. We braved a bit of the crowd (keeping in mind that we’re already in the least crowded part of the park) and went up to Floating Island Lake to see if the sandhill cranes were nesting. When we got there, a coyote was crossing behind the lake and the cranes, who were on the shore at the time, were putting on quite a display: loud squawks (or whatever noise cranes make), spread wings, raised heads, etc. Basically, everything a crane can do to tell a coyote to go away… which he did. There weren’t any eggs in the nest yet, so we left and decided to get away from everybody by hiking the Lamar Trail. That was a very nice hike, we only saw one other group of people, but we did see many hawks and bluebirds. We got down to Cache Creek and stayed for a while. The rain didn’t start until we were a mile and a half down the trail home. That would be great, except that it left us another 2 miles back. We did have rain gear, but it isn’t very good and doesn’t breathe well, so we didn’t put it on. Between the lack of rain gear and my putting my hat on the camera, we arrived back to the car tired and soaked, but happy. A wet day of hiking is still better than crowds.

Vacation notes (2 of N)

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:54:57 +0000

May 20: In the morning, we saw a small herd of bighorn sheep near the Yellowstone Picnic Area. Later on, we saw a grizzly bear hanging out in the Lamar Valley: sleeping, grazing and hanging out. Heading back into the cabin for dinner, we talk to our host. He’s going through a nasty divorce which may wind up causing them to lose their business (for reasons I shouldn’t get into). Helpful hint: if you’re going into business with someone, even a spouse, set up an LLC. You don’t want everything to be owned jointly. In the evening we see still more grizzly. It’s apparently a grizzly year - it looks like we’re going to have to cruise the Tower Junction area if we want to see any black bears. On the way home that evening, we saw three moose by the side of the road. I got out and took a few pictures which were (at best) okay given the lack of light. Neater than the pictures though, was hearing them tear off the plants and chewing them. That was very cool.

Vacation notes (1 of N)

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:33:37 +0000

As mentioned previously, K and I have been out on vacation for the past two weeks - no phone (okay, there was voicemail), no email, and really very little in the way of computers. I did take some notes, because, unfortunately, my memory is exactly what it used to be: bad.

May 16: An inauspicious start to a vacation. Neither K nor I were particularly in the mood for heading out of town. We were seriously contemplating not going next year and possibly even forgoing the plane fare this year and bailing. I had been putting in too many hours working on a project for work, and K was have some difficult times with her rehab. That said, we dropped of the dogs and headed out to RDU. Unfortunately, the Delta/Northwest merger meant that instead of taking RDU->MSP->BZN flights, we were taking RDU->ATL->MSP->BZN (yes, 3 flights) and upon checking in, it seemed that we were going to be delayed in getting to Atlanta :-( Well, that worked out okay. We got into ATL at 5:30 and our MSP flight left at 6:35. Oh wait, no - it, too, was late and left at 8:00pm. That meant that in spite of the assurances of several Delta and Northwest agents, we landed at MSP at 9:30 - the same time the BZN flight left. Well, it turns out that we weren’t the only ones in that situation (‘and if you ever find yourself in that situation, there’s only one thing you can do: sing a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant”’). Delta left 17 of us stranded in MSP, while their computers showed that they were only stranding 3. Delta proposed routing many of us to Salt Lake City (SLC?) where we could catch a flight to BZN in the morning. Of course, unless we were flying first class, we would have to eat the costs of staying in SLC. One woman vociferously complained (though it later turned out that she had already been booked for a morning flight to SLC). When we arrived at SLC, they had hotel and meal vouchers waiting for us (score!). So a night at a very gracious Comfort Suites capped the day. FWIW, on the IT front, the Delta/NW merger has been pathetic - at every point where a user interacts with their computers, they have a front-end which redirects you to the appropriate computer system: Delta or Northwest. It’s no wonder they can’t figure out that they stranded 17 people, they can’t even make good sense of their different flight numbers!
May 17: Relatively uneventful. We grabbed the shuttle to the airport. SLC is apparently one of the few airports now invading your privacy by looking at your privates through millimeter radar. They redirected our line through the system where they had you enter the scanner. They proceeded to use the Twister spinners to dictate how you place your hands above your head while performing a pelvic thrust for the sensors, then getting annoyed when you didn’t understand the first time that you should pretend to be flashing teenage school girls in order to get the posture correct. Once it was done, they had to fondle your pocket regions. No, that’s not a euphemism. The wavelength of the radar is apparently too short to penetrate the pockets on (men’s?) pants and they then have a pissy highschool educated TSA weenie with delusions of grandeur frisk your pockets. FWIW, I’m equally pissed at myself that I went through the damn thing. I should have insisted on a pat-down. If someone is going to violate my person, I want to get a good look at ’em while they are doing it. Having the person sit in an anonymous room getting their jollies just isn’t cool. So, once we got through the faux-security checkpoint, we ran into the woman who complained in MSP (and got us free lodging)! We made it to BZN - though our luggage didn’t, rented a RAV4 and went to our hotel. The luggage showed up around 5pm. Lucky for Delta, otherwise, they could have had it delivered to our final destination, Cooke City - 3 hours away.
May 18: bought supplies and headed into Yellowstone. We didn’t see much on the drive in and we didn’t go out to the park in the evening: too tired. The beds were great (pillowtop mattresses) and the kitchen was very nice. I wasn’t too sure about having a TV in the room, but having a phone that we could use after hours was nice.
May 19: First real day in the Park. We did get a late start in the morning, but the viewing was great. We saw a wolf on the northern ridge above the Lamar valley. People were saying that he was a part of the same group that killed several coyote pups in the valley the night before. We saw a grizzly bear, a coyote, a bald eagle and a golden eagle (on a old kill). That evening we went out again, we saw two grizzly and lots of bison with their young calves, also a very nice scenic view, complete with DRAMATIC LIGHTING. (* all of the images in this series are original jpegs without the color correction, etc. that will be applied later)

William Wallace on wildlife releases

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:30:53 +0000

They may take our rehabilitation bins, but they’ll never take… our FREEDOM!

On Sunday, K release some baby water turtles that she had been over-wintering. Fortunately, we’re all of a mile from a good place at which to release turtles, Jordan Lake, so we didn’t have to drive too far.

The big one in the image set is a male (note the long nails for better, um, gripping) slider and the other three are painted turtles (you can see the orange on the underside of the shells in the images in the gallery).

Eeek!

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:06:54 +0000

Some of the more social people from my high school class in Louisiana are apparently putting together a reunion. They’ve managed to track down maybe 90+% of the class and have just sent out a (scanned?) copy of the senior class photo. I defy you to find more 80’s hair in a picture. The sad thing is that I can’t put names to the majority of people here. Maybe 10 at most. I guess that either means there’s no point in going to the reunion or that I really, really need to go.

Snow pictures

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:39:51 +0000

Last week (on Inauguration Day no less), we got about 7" of snow out at the house. I just uploaded the pictures this morning. Some of my favorites are below, the rest are in the gallery.

If nothing else, the dogs sure did seem to enjoy the snow. :-)

front yard birding

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:06:32 +0000

Using a bit of leftover birthday money, I bought some new camera equipment. Nothing particularly sexy like a big long lens (what do you mean by homoerotic?). I bought a set of carbon fiber tripod legs that weigh about 3 pounds instead of the 6 pounds of my old tripod legs - that should make hiking easier. They can also hold more weight which is good since my biggest lens tops out what you should put on the old legs. I also bought a new tripod head. Instead of a ball head (ahem), I got a gimbal head that balances the weight of the camera so that you can easily point it anywhere and it stays put. Moreover, the new head is far more stable than the old one when using long lenses.

Pictures from Geek Beer

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:20:17 +0000

So Hunter is planning on being at GB tonight too. But as of last week, we thought this was his last GB and so of course, everyone brought cameras.

Sample pictures:

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Yellowstone pictures - part 2 of 2 (updated)

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:38:45 +0000

update: and for those that prefer a better interface, all of the pictures in gallery

Yellowstone pictures - part 1 of 2

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:19:44 +0000

I haven’t finished processing all of the Yellowstone pictures – it takes a bit of work to get the color balance set right. (THM – that’s why I always shoot raw on the D80. It gives me more freedom to get the image “right later.) But at least the first half is done. I’ll post the second half this weekend sometime.

If you love something, set it free . . .

Tue, 06 May 2008 02:58:16 +0000

About a year and a half ago (November 2006), the wildlife clinic K volunteers with transfered a water turtle (yellow bellied slider) to her. A cute little guy, just over 7 grams and about the size of a quarter. Yesterday, weighing in at 125 g and with a shell about 4 inches long, we released her into the nearby lake. It’s easy to fall for a lot of the animals K rehabs. Their cute and tiny or just plain helpless and on the mend, but the turtles are particularly hard because K keeps them for so long. The following are a handful of the pictures we’ve taken of the turtle:

Baby opossum pictures

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:10:33 +0000

When it rains it pours. A month into spring and K hadn’t received any calls about rehabilitating animals until today when she got two. The first was about baby bunnies. K doesn’t take baby rabbits because too many of the stories end with “and then they died. For example, “I was rehabbing some bunnies in the spare room, the dogs barked, the rabbits got scared and then they died; or “I successfully rehabbed the bunnies, but they got stressed out while I was releasing them, they stroked out and then they died. You get the idea. The other call was for a litter of opossums whose mother had died. She took those.