Issac Preparation

26. August 2012 · Comments Off on Issac Preparation · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , ,

Come on! I know you aren’t the only one who thought this!

Yes, we are preparing for Issac.  We’ve been through this routine before — in 2004 with numerous storms, and we’ve already had a couple near misses here.

Dave, the kids and I took care of a lot of stuff last evening (after a wonderful afternoon boating with our friends the Scotts), to include burning the enormous pile of palm fronds and branches that had been sitting much of the summer in a corner of our backyard.

Today I will be attempting a trip to my local Walmart just for some groceries.  I’ll toss our 10 gallon gas can into the car just in case.  Although Facebook friends are saying that only premium gas is left in our community.

The kids don’t really know what to expect.  The 2004 storms impacted us right around Jacob’s 2nd birthday, and I was pregnant with Timmy at the time.  For Hurricane Jeanne, while I was evacuated with my Air Force unit, Dave stayed home with Jacob and Howie…and Jacob slept through the whole thing.  Dave says he doesn’t wish staying home in a Category 3 storm on anyone!

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A Fun Seashell Activity

22. August 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

Our family likes to go to the beach on weekends.  It’s Dave’s and my little indulgence on Sunday mornings these days: we head out around 10am and come home in time for a late lunch around 1pm.

You never know how the Gulf is going to behave on a given trip to the beach.  Sometimes there’s a ton of seaweed, sometimes there are jellyfish, sometimes the water is really deep at our favorite spot, sometimes it’s really shallow.

On our last trip, two weekends ago, the seashells were out in force and we enjoyed collecting several.

The kids have brought home buckets full of small seashells before, and they’ve mainly sat in our garage awaiting an idea.  This time the kids begged me to help them do something more fruitful than have them sit in the garage.

So I offered to buy the kids a vase and they could fill the vase with the shells.  I went to Walmart and took a look at the glass vases in the craft/candles section and thought to myself “That’s going to take forever”.

I found a hurricane glass and chose a sand-colored candle to add to the glass.  The kids filled the hurricane glass with the shells and it now sits in the bathroom to match their surf-shop bathroom look.

First we washed the shells and sat them out in the sun to dry.

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First Day of School 2012

21. August 2012 · Comments Off on First Day of School 2012 · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Enjoy a nice picture of the boys just before they headed out for the school bus yesterday.  The boys both have great teachers this year and both have been reporting good days so far.

Jacob’s happy to have many of his friends from last year’s class in his 4th grade class again this year.

Timmy reports that his favorite thing about 2nd grade is being allowed to sit at the back of the bus.

The best I could do in 21 takes....

The best I could do in 21 takes….

I used to have a nifty collage capability in iPhoto, but with an upgrade earlier this year I can’t do the nice gridded pictures the way it used to be. But here’s an alternative showing some of our takes, ha ha!

More Camera Fun…in Humid Florida

15. August 2012 · Comments Off on More Camera Fun…in Humid Florida · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

This is my favorite of the batch, really capturing the rainbow colors as the sunlight refracted through the ice clouds. The blueness of the sky really comes through also.

On Tuesday morning at about 8:30am when I let the dog out in the backyard, I saw a thunderstorm building towards the east near Hurlburt Field and Fort Walton Beach.  The rising sun was behind the storm clouds and shining through some ice clouds, causing some pretty diffractions.  This gave me some good opportunity to play with our new camera.

I ran inside, grabbed the camera, ran back outside, uncapped the lens…and everything fogged up.

Argh!

This is an issue here.  Bring a 75F camera outside into warmer 100% humidity and you will get condensation on the lenses.  After last week’s adventures at the butterfly house with the fogging lenses, I had ordered some anti-fog lens cloths from Amazon (along with a spare battery and some other maintenance supplies).  I hadn’t received that order by Tuesday morning (it arrived 6 hours later), so all I could do was stand outside and wait for the lens to clear up.

I was getting impatient, hoping the clouds would continue to cooperate for me…it took about 3-4 minutes before I could get clear pictures.

What I was attempting to photograph were “iridescent clouds“, which occur when ice crystal clouds are between your eyes and the sun.  Learn more about atmospheric optic phenomena here.  There’s all kinds of great stuff to see!

This storm moved east of us, but later that morning we had our own thunderstorm come in from the Pensacola area.  Right after I took these pictures I had gone out for a run (with the kids on their bikes) and we had come home right when it started raining.

Enjoy some of the color variations I could get from my viewing spot in my backyard.  No post-processing was done with these pictures, they’re coming to you straight off the SD card.  The first picture is my favorite of the batch, zoomed in…

The full storm, this is facing east in my backyard. You can see the ice clouds on the right.

Playing with the settings some. I think this was the silhouette setting.

Hi-saturation.

Low saturation.

The refractive effects have nearly dissipated…as the thicker clouds began to dominate.

Lacewing and Slime Mold

13. August 2012 · Comments Off on Lacewing and Slime Mold · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , ,

What???

Yeah…um…I had a good old time today photographing assorted stuff with the new camera while I was doing lawn work.  First of all, this lacewing has been sitting all day on our door from the garage into the house.

I’m starting to dabble a little with the post-processing that iPhoto offers.  Dave has numerous other options in his Paintshop Elements but I haven’t used that at all.  The lacewing pictured here is simply my hitting the “Enhance” button.

The next picture is of some “slime mold” that’s been in spots all over my front lawn, due to the volumes of rain we’ve been getting.  Sunday was a really nice day, the family got to visit the beach.  It was the first day in over a week that thunderstorms didn’t chase us indoors.  As a consequence, though, my lawn is covered in mushrooms, dead spots due to grass root rot and this spotted moldiness.  Click in the link in the caption below to learn more about this stuff.  There’s nothing I can do about it but let it run its course.

I fiddled with the more fine tuning features in iPhoto to make this picture greener than the original picture.

Learn more about grass slime mold through this Ohio State Extension service flyer.

Florida Discoveries 33: A Visit to Tallahassee

12. August 2012 · Comments Off on Florida Discoveries 33: A Visit to Tallahassee · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , ,

After a 3 hour car ride, the kids were ready to do some running around!

It had been on my to-do list all summer: to take the boys to Tallahassee to visit the Museum of Florida History and see the Capitol Complex.  It’d also be a chance to try out my new camera in some new settings.  We had put it off numerous times, and last Friday — our last Friday before school orientation — we made it out the door nice and early for the three-hour drive.

Except I forgot a critical planning factor: the one-hour time change.  So we were out the door at 8am and I was thinking we’d get there in time to enjoy lunch somewhere and then get in 4-5 hours worth of sightseeing.  We were on the outskirts of Tallahassee when I noticed that the clock on our truck was reading about 11:55am instead of 10:55am and I thought to myself, “Oh crap…”

So we blasted through a Taco Bell drive-through just off of Florida State’s campus and then as the kids ate I negotiated my way downtown and parked in a garage next door to the Museum.

This is a nice overhead shot of the Gray Building from the 22nd floor of the New Capitol building…the museum is only on the ground floor of this building.

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Our New Toy…

12. August 2012 · Comments Off on Our New Toy… · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , ,

This was with the 200mm telephoto lens from about 15′ away. Love it!

This past week was Dave’s and my 17th anniversary. Because Dave’s birthday is the same week as our anniversary, he took the day off between the two special events and we had a nice day together. We took the kids on one more trip to the Pensacola MESS Hall, and then after lunch at Cajun Specialty Meats, we visited the NAS Pensacola Naval Exchange (NEX) to browse the DSLR cameras.

We had been wanting a new camera for a very long time. We’d been accustomed to much-smaller point-and-shoot cameras, such as the Canon SD1200 Digital ELPH and the Nikon Coolpix S210. Between the higher-quality photography I require for my GeekMom blog posts, and Dave’s invitation to be part of Kalmbach Publishing’s Great Model Railroads special issue of Model Railroader magazine, we need something better.

We did our research — Dave asked advice of his fellow model railroad hobby friends, I asked my fellow GeekMom writers and consulted with my favorite photographer hobbyist: Maryann of the FotoMom blog. We weighed cost, weight, warranty, and capabilities for super-up-close photography and sports/action photography in our decision. We reviewed well-regarded DSLR review columns such as at Digital Photography Review.

We played for over an hour with two cameras at the NAS Pensacola NEX: the Canon EOS Rebel T3i and the Nikon D5100.  Kissing cousins in capability, we decided on the Nikon in part due to a discounted extra lens promotion they were having.  We got the camera body with the “kit” lens – 18-55mm – as well as an additional 55-200mm telephoto lens.  We also bought a nice carrying bag that came with a free DSLR photography DVD.  Dave and I would need it!

The following day I took the kids to the splash park at Navarre Park to play, and I had a chance to take some great photos.  Enjoy!

I love photographing water features. And kids playing in the water.

This is a single color selection feature. You use an eyedropper type of thing to pick up a single color to turn on…and all other colors on the palette are turned into greytones.

This is with only the green turned on.

The rest of the photos are of the same thing, but with the assorted settings on the camera. It was fun playing with the settings.

This is “Landscape” setting. Not noticeably different.

Black and White.

Silhouette, pulling out the colors in the background more.

Hi-saturation.

Low-saturation.

Color sketch. So it looks like a drawing, I guess.

I don’t remember the settings of these last two…I *think* this is the “Miniature” setting, but I do notice the blurriness on the edges…sharpness in the center.

Definitely don’t remember this setting…

 

Florida Discoveries 32: Cajun Specialty Meats, Pensacola

11. August 2012 · Comments Off on Florida Discoveries 32: Cajun Specialty Meats, Pensacola · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

A “turducken”, which is a chicken in a duck in a turkey. Cajun Specialty Meats always has them on hand, and they also ship these throughout the Eastern Seaboard, from here to New York.

The family spent Wednesday in Pensacola, enjoying one last trip to the Pensacola MESS Hall before they close for the school year. After our time at the MESS Hall, we looked for an inexpensive — but not fast-food — lunch option.  There are typically numerous restaurants along Gregory St. near the Civic Center and we wandered up and down the main drag for something appealing. Nothing jumped out at us.

When I took a side street to make a U-turn, down an industrial-looking street, we discovered a place called Cajun Specialty Meats. It appeared to be a warehouse, but we noticed a small restaurant in front. It was still open for our late lunch so we decided to check it out.

You can read here the story of how a Cajun meat packing facility ended up in Pensacola.

The lunch menu was great (and inexpensive), and you could shop in the store while you waited for your red beans and rice, po-boys, muffulettas or etouffee.

Here’s what goodies we found at Cajun Specialty Meats!

  • One of the original national retailers of “Turduckens“.
  • Many of their traditional Cajun lunch fares are available in vacuum-sealed bags: red beans and rice, gumbo, and etouffees, for about $5-8 per 24 oz.
  • Savoie’s pre-made roux from Opelousas, LA.
  • Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup from Abbeville, LA — an alternative to corn syrup when making pecan pie.
  • Meat, meat and more meat!  Seasoned steaks, chickens and sausages galore!
  • Crawfish and seafood pies
  • Natchitoches-style meat pies!  This one really caught Dave’s and my attention, since we loved going to Lasyone’s in Natchitoches when were stationed in Louisiana in the mid-1990s.

If you’re looking for something completely different the next time you’re looking for a restaurant in Pensacola, just head one block directly BEHIND McGuire’s.

Florida Discoveries 31: Steve’s Farm in Walnut Hill

06. August 2012 · Comments Off on Florida Discoveries 31: Steve’s Farm in Walnut Hill · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Steve’s Farm is in Walnut Hill, Florida, just below Atmore, Alabama (home of Wind Creek Casino).

This past Saturday the family headed to the northwest corner of Florida for some catfish fishing.  I know that sounds strange, hauling so far up north when we have amazing fishing all around us, right?

We’re first heard about Steve’s Farm through our Cub Scout pack, they had an outing up to the farm earlier this spring.  We had other plans on that day, but we had promised the kids a trip up to the farm.  Especially since Timmy had won a brand new Shakespeare fishing rod and reel as a door prize from the May Cub Scout meeting.

The farm is about an 90 minute drive from our house in Navarre.  It’s run by a Mennonite family and everyone who helped us out was so incredibly nice.

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