Q's "on the verge"

I'm on the verge of moving and have this (and lots of other) paperwork to do.

Craig's On The Verge

I'm sorry I have nothing new this week, so I offer this from the archives.

At the top of Mauna Kea, almost 8:00 Hawaii time. It's on the verge between day and night, and you're on the verge of being able to make out my subject!

Ryan's "On the verge"

We're on the verge of fall in Nebraska. Trees are starting to change, nights are cool, and the sun is setting earlier and earlier.

I wandered around at Schramm Park today. This is the best I could come up with:


/rl

Cory's "On the Verge"

As you can see, we're on the verge of starvation in the Lueninghoener household.

Sadly, there's no exciting story behind this one. It's just a can of Quality Kraut in an empty cupboard. Mmm, Kraut!

Mike's "On the Verge"

The Sapp Brothers truck stop at Highway 50 and I-680 has an iconic water tower that has been around as long as I can remember. It looks like a large coffee pot. My first memories of it are from trips to Gretna to see relatives. It and Gretna seemed so far away then, but the city has grown. It's “on the verge” of a new look.



Most of us who travel by it, are used to its red, white and black colors. The last couple of weeks, it has been under this large paint curtain with a coat of white on it. It is an odd site. I'm sure the guy working on it, feels “on the verge” as well! I should mention that Sapp Brothers is a chain, and that there are many of these water towers in the mid-West.

Next week: "Post 9/11"

"On the verge" is on the verge of being due.

/rl

Q's "don't touch"

This is a sign I've always liked on a statue of a horse not far from my apartment.

Craig's Don't Touch!

I started taking ukulele lessons. Just because. Unfortunately, I have wide fingertips, which means I'm having the same issue on the uke as I was with the guitar -- dead strings. So I kludged up a solution!

I bought a baritone uke (it's *biiig*), and strung it up with tenor strings (since baritones have a different tuning). Now my fingers aren't covering more strings than they're supposed to be!

New instruments are a bear to keep in tune. I imagine my kludge-y stringing is even more so. So it's nice and satisfying when I can light up my tuner all green with perfectly tuned strings. But it's super-sensitive. Once you get it in tune, you don't want to touch those pegs. Example demonstrated here.

Ryan's "Don't Touch!"

Roses have an odd way of saying "I am soft" and "Don't Touch!" at the same time.

Incidentally, they are apparently tasty in drinks, too.



/rl

Mikes "Don't Touch!"

This week I found myself in all sorts of peril. I tried to take pictures of Wasps and Bees. I attempted to take a dog's bone away from him.

I imagine that I had found a rattle snake, I would have tried to milk it.

Cory's "Don't touch!"

We've been giving Maddy actual food lately: bananas, green beans, rice cereal - the normal stuff. In the above case she was "eating" apple sauce, which involves intercepting the spoon as it approaches her mouth and pulling the food off with her hand. After each "eating" episode, we have two parents with sticky hands and one baby with sticky everything. You definitely don't want to touch her after that.

On a side note, I believe that the cleanup of eating babies is a great study in exponential decay. If you clean the high chair tray first, she dirties it up again with her hands. If you clean her hands first, she messes them up again from the contents of the tray. Instead, you have to trade back and forth between the two, cleaning off one half-life worth of goo with each pass. Eventually the amount of mess remaining drops below ambient levels and she is safe to handle again.

Next week - "On the verge"

"Don't Touch!" is due tomorrow.

/rl

Craig's Fingerprint

I own a few computers, and almost all of them have glass screens. It's taking some getting used to, even though I'm approaching a year of use -- the matte screen is just better at hiding flaws. But the glass screens are so bright and vibrant. Honestly, I don't know what I prefer. It sure does attract fingerprints, though.

Cory's Fingerprint

"And friends, somewhere in Washington, enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints."

Ryan's "Fingerprint"

It seems there's always some jerk that can't look at the little map to figure out which chocolate is which:

The culprit left partial fingerprints. I need the CSI folks - but not CSI Miami. I can't stand David Caruso.

/rl

Mike's "Fingerprint"

I wanted to do some real CSI work, but I would probably just end up implicating myself that the prints on the garage light switch are mine.

We have a Family Video down the street from us, and what you see below is a common problem.



If your kid comes to you with a PBJ sandwich and wonders why his Wii does not work. Check the disk.

Next week: "Don't Touch!"

I think Cory came up with this topic after being inspired by Maddy.

"Fingerprint" due tomorrow.

/rl

Mike's "Fractal"

Sorry, I am late. I spent the weekend on the family homestead, though I took quite a few pictures there.

Being an aging techie, this should not have been so difficult for me. Having owned computers where the memory was measured in kilobytes, fractal generators were quite common for break time amusement. Very long breaks.

I too decided to look for fractals in nature. I explored pond scum, cow poop, blow-outs, anything with repeating patterns, and this is my submission.




I also considered using this picture of what I believe to be ragweed.

Q's fractal

My fractal is a stretch. It's along the same lines as Ryan's -- in that it's one that appears in nature -- but in this case it's one I'm depicting. This is a frame from a time-interval video that I'm putting together on an illustration I'm working on. In this part I'm cutting out a tree trunk.

Ryan's "Fractal"

A fractal often enjoyed with cheese:




/rl

Cory's Fractal

A few years ago, I was inspired by a picture I found in the internetses to build some Mega Lego: large-scale versions of normal Lego pieces. Luckily, I never took them apart and was able to pull them out for a quick fractal photo shoot. I also built a washing machine piece, but I sadly wasn't able to find it for this picture.

And yes, you can build stuff with the big pieces. Just not very exciting stuff.

"Fractal" due today!

Next week we will do "Fingerprint".

/rl