The pictures with this post are both from my brother Chris.  The first one is of the house near sundown and the second shows the field across the street.  These pictures capture the late afternoon  light with an almost eeriely realistic effect.  Chris continues to experiment with different photographic techniques.  He has purchased a DVD from the same guy that he had already taken a class from and is now working his way through the lessons that it contains.   In these pictures he works with tone mapping, which according to Wiki is:

Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map one set of colors to another, often to approximate the appearance of high dynamic range images in a medium that has a more limited dynamic range. Print-outs, CRT or LCD monitors, and projectors all have a limited dynamic range which is inadequate to reproduce the full range of light intensities present in natural scenes. Essentially, tone mapping addresses the problem of strong contrast reduction from the scene values to the displayable range while preserving the image details and color appearance important to appreciate the original scene content.

Anne and I rode the Tour of Wildwood bike ride on Sunday morning.  We only did the short route of 23 miles, because the ride was way hillier than what we have become accustomed to riding.  There were three big hills on our route, the last one being Ossenfort.  Ossenfort is the name of the road that this hill is on, but the hill is more widely known then the road.  It regularly appears as one of the ten hardest hills in the Saint Louis area.  In addition to being hilly, Wildwood is also a very rich community.  The city of Wildwood sponsored the ride, so it was free to all of us cyclists.  There were any number of lots for sale as we rode through this rural environ, but they were all for three acres or more and surely out of our price range.

Sunday evening we have a Team Kaldi’s pot-luck party.  We’ll get our riders packets for this year’s MS-150 and New Jerseys!  (Not to be confused with New Jersey.)  In two weeks time Anne and I will be riding in this year’s MS-150 bicycling ride.  We don’t have much time left to train, but we need to do quite a bit more than we have to date.

We have completed most of the arrangements necessary to extricate Dave from upstate New York and then install him in our nation’s capital.  His stuff will be shipped via one of those mover’s boxes.  The movers will drop-off the empty box in-front of his summer place in Rochester, Dave will pile all of this stuff into it, the movers will pick it up and then Dave will fly to Saint Louis.  All of this should wrap up by Tuesday.  Dave will hangout here in Saint Louis for about a week and then fly to D.C.  He and a roommate will share a one bedroom apartment.  I dare not mention how much more they will be paying in rent then we pay in mortgage, but still it looks like a nice place, at least on the apartment’s website and it appears to be in a good location too.  He will be able to take the Red Line direct to work at NIH.  All these machinations mean that we will not be buying any vehicles this year, which with all of the expenses of this move, means I’ll be saving money over what I had originally expected to spend.  Anyway, progress marches onward and upward!

UPDATE:  OK, Saint Louis Cardinals maybe you are going to make the playoffs or maybe you are not, but Washington is the worst team in baseball.  You fielded your best pitcher on Sunday and you have already taken out their best pitcher, so how come only two runs?  In four games you Cards have lost three to the worst team in baseball.  At this rate Dave is likely to switch from being a Cardinals fan and become a Nationals’ fan.