Tag Archives: Chris’ Camera

Beehive the 60’s Musical

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Tuesday night I found out all of a sudden that we were going to the theater that evening. We had to move our tickets from our usual night, because other more pressing social engagements were crowding it out from that spot. After school on Tuesday, Anne went to the box office to exchange our tickets. We had planned on going next Tuesday, but there were no good seats that week, but there were excellent seats this week. So she made the executive decision to go for last night’s show. Then she had to inform me of her decision, which was no easy task. You see, these days, I’m a bit of an itinerant worker, going from one office to the next. I’m never at one phone number for long (not that Anne would know them anyway) and I’m not allowed to bring my iPhone into any of my work areas. So, I am somewhat hard to get a hold of at times. Fortunately, I called her and then she informed me of our plans and then I beat feet from work, so that we could make the play on time.

A rockin’ musical celebration of the girl groups who unmistakably left their mark on 60’s music and on many of our lives. Relive music’s golden era and an empowering time in history with “The Name Game,” “The Beat Goes On,” “Respect,” “Natural Woman,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “One Fine Day,” “To Sir With Love,” “It’s My Party,” “Proud Mary,” “Downtown” and many more! Through the hits of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Shirelles and others, six energetic women and one very hot band take you on a journey through the look, the sounds and the electricity of the times.

The second birthday in this week’s all star lineup of birthday celebrations, is my Mom’s. Today is Jackie’s 85th birthday. We weren’t sure if she would make it to see this day, but she has and I want to wish her an extra special birthday, because of that. Happy birthday, Mom, and many happy returns!

Mack and the boys, the notorious slackers from John Steinbeck’s classic novel, “Cannery Row,” are lounging on the hood and bumper of a Ford Model A truck, grinning sleepily, with any problems clearly relegated to the back burners of their minds. The full-color mural by Salinas artist John Cerney that is now on permanent display on the back wall of Mackerel Jack’s Trading Co., along the Recreation Trail between Prescott and Irving streets in Monterey. That was the location of the Del Mar Canning Co.

Sick Day

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I took a sick day on Tuesday, in order to visit the doctor. Don’t worry, they were routine appointments, and everything was fine. When I first started working at a job that offered paid sick leave, lo these many years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible. Back then, sick leave was supposed to be for when you were sick and for nothing else. It especially wasn’t for caring for sick children, but that was then and this is now. Thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act, and a change in company policy, I can use sick leave for my time at the doctor.

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with sick leave. I’ve been blessed with good health. I rarely get a cold and since I have regularly been getting the flu shot, I haven’t gotten the flu for many years. So I have been banking a lot of sick leave. Banking I say, but not really saving. Company policy encourages the use of sick leave, because otherwise you lose it. I accrue much more sick leave in a year, than I use. At the end of the year only half of the year’s balance is rolled over. I’m not complaining (even though it sounds like I am), because paid sick leave is great to have when you need it. OK, I am complaining, because the system I work with encourages abuse. Some people use their sick leave as extra vacation, this isn’t right, but still it is done.

A previous employer solved this dilemma by combining vacation and sick time into one pot, called personal days off. This combination only added five of the original ten sick days to personal day off pot, so there was some grumbling about that, but it was mainly from people who were abusing the sick leave policy. With this new policy the stigma of being out sick disappeared.

In other news, Dave contacted Drexel and scheduled a campus visit for next week. He will meet some of the faculty and hopes to get a better idea of what he would do there. In a related topic, I spoke with my Father on Monday and when I mentioned that Dave had been accepted at Drexel, he told me that he had also been accepted into Drexel’s biomedical engineering program. It was 1970 then, we were living just outside of DC and my Dad was retiring from the Navy. He had won an NIH doctoral fellowship and was shopping around for a school. Since, he would come already fully funded, Drexel was all over him to come there, but he chose Michigan instead and the rest, as they say, is history.

Chris and his camera are back on the job. The big software project that he has been working hard on finally launched. This photo shows a mural of two boatmen on an old seawall along Cannery Row, in Monterey, CA.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

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The pictures with this post are from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The first two, I took last year and show a couple of species of jellyfish. The Monterey Aquarium has one of the best jellyfish collections in the world. The final picture was taken by Chris. It shows the entrance to the aquarium. He took the picture with his new 14mm 2.8 L II lens. Its wide-angle characteristics account for the acute perspective point of view. The aquarium was built-in an old cannery.

Not all jellies sting, but the sea nettle does. It hunts tiny drifting animals by trailing those long tentacles and frilly mouth arms, all covered with stinging cells. When the tentacles touch prey, the stinging cells paralyze it and stick tight. From there the prey is moved to the mouth-arms and finally the mouth, where the prey is digested. Moon jellies are swept along by the ocean’s currents, but they are not just passive drifters. They can swim on their own as well. A jelly’s gentle pulsing lets it move around within the currents, traveling up and down or back and forth to find good patches of food.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is the crowned jewel of Monterey’s cannery row. When the boys were young we would always visit it. Once my Mom arranged a behind the scenes tour of the aquarium. I remember looking down into the dark waters of the aquarium’s largest fish tank, the one that held the sharks. You couldn’t really see them, but you knew that they were there. You knew with a knowing that viewing the ocean doesn’t match. I kept my hands in my pockets.

And The Winner Is …

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Tonight the 83rd Academy Awards will be broadcasted, so what better time for another installment of le Marquis’ Bad Film Festival, except that I have already been upstaged by the Razzies. The Razzies is that awards ceremony that you definitely don’t want to find your name listed inside any of its envelopes. The Razzies is dedicated to recognizing the worst films of the year. I’d seen their nominees list and fortunately the only movie on their list that I had seen was Sly Stallone’s The Expendables and that film was truly expendable. So if I can’t write about bad films that just leaves the good ones, I guess.

In preparation for tonight’s Oscars, on Saturday night, Anne and I went to go see The King’s Speech. After watching this lovely show, I find it hard to believe that the tag-team of Rush and Firth won’t be able to bull-rush their film and themselves to the gold. We’ve seen four of this year’s ten best picture nominees. In addition to The King’s Speech, we also saw The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network and True Grit. I wanted to see Black Swan, but that will just have to wait for DVD.

So rest assure as soon as Monday’s post is written, Anne and I will be in front of the TV with our dueling pair of Oscar bingo cards in hand. We’ll be waiting for someone to say or do one of the following, winner crying, someone wearing sunglasses inside, 5+ people accept one award, “Go to bed kids”, well you get the idea. Bingo is supposed to make the TV show more interactive. I think that I’ll still end up going to bed before the end of the show. By bedtime, I’m sure that I will have imbibed enough glitz and glamour to last me for another year.

I purchased Adobe’s PhotoShop and Premiere Elements (version 9). Not only has Adobe finally synced-up the release of their PhotoShop and Premiere Elements products, but also the Windows and Mac versions too and all in one release. I started playing around with some of PhotoShop’s new features and have included a result. I used their out-of-bounds technique to create the preceding picture of a Great White Egret.

In other new, Chris’s photograph (see below) with this post shows some of Saturday morning’s snowfall in Monterey. Hardy Midwesterners may be underwhelmed with the accumulation, but this is a lot of snow for the central coast of California. Also, Dave never made it back to DC on Friday. He got as far as Chicago, where he had to get a room for the night. He flew back on Saturday.

National Engineers Week

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Photo by Chris.

Wednesday morning, just in time for the morning rush-hour a freezing rain hit Saint Louis. My first indication of trouble was the morning traffic reports. I had a 7:30 meeting, so I was up and moving earlier than usual. There were accidents reported, but none along my commuting route, so I didn’t give it too much thought. Later another traffic report spoke of many more accidents, including a 30+ car pileup downtown. Responding emergency vehicles only contributed to the crash totals. Stepping gingerly out of the door, I found only wet pavement. The only ice that I found was scraped off of my car windows.

In between the time that I left the house, stopped at Starbucks and headed towards the highway, I heard more accident reports. The first one reported two blocked lanes at Olive. I decided to head north on Hanley to get around the backup, but by the time I was far enough north to get back onto the highway a second accident at the Rock Road had the highway completely blocked.

So, I stuck with Hanley Road all the way to work. The only overpass that I had to cross and it was only on the overpasses that the ice had formed was where Hanley crossed I-70. There I found two cop cars, cherry lights flashing, sitting out in the middle of the overpass. They just sat there to ensure no one tried to do anything stupid and I didn’t. I made it to work safely as did Anne. I never even felt any ice while driving.

This is National Engineers Week. I started working as an engineer over thirty years ago at Chrysler’s proving grounds in Chelsea, MI. I didn’t like that job much and my work performance soon showed that, but one task that I did enjoy was helping to set up an automated test stand to calibrate the accelerometers inside of crash test dummies. Accelerometers are the instruments that measure the impacts that crash test dummies endure during simulated car crashes.

The test stand was pretty simple, drop a disembodied dummy’s head 10” onto a steel plate and measure the accelerometer’s response. You could try this at home by hanging upside-down and then releasing yourself onto a hard surface, but I would not recommend it. It would really hurt a lot.

Later in the day, I came upon two other engineers and in a riff off of the morning’s commute they were watching the following video. Produced by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, it commemorates the advancements in car safety in the last fifty years. This YouTube video shows two cars, a 2009 Chevy Malibu and a beautiful mint condition 1959 Chevy Bel Air colliding in a near head on collision. The results are dramatic and also surprising. One might think that the bigger, heavier and Steel Bel Air would fare better than its smaller, lighter and Plastic opponent. You would be wrong.

You would be just as wrong as my back-ass former Chrysler managers were. These very same managers bellyached about needless government regulation and complained that it was ruining the auto industry. I knew that they were wrong then and I did not want to work for them. This video shows that they were wrong and that government requirements can effect a positive change. Any Insurance Institute is unlikely to back needless government regulation. I just mention this, because sometimes positive change is hard to recognize.

Thirty years of engineering has taught me two things: 1) anything is correct if it is argued well; 2) in the end the truth do tell. Engineering is a collaborative endeavor. When engineers work together technical disputes are mostly settled with logic and data, but not always. Engineers are people too and sometimes emotions carry the day in an argument. Over time facts will eventually dictate who is right, but that may not matter much to who is left.

I don’t mean to sound so negative about work and engineering. Things are actually going pretty well these days. Today, I got to attend a 30-year anniversary luncheon for my walking buddy, Barbara. We went to Hendel’s Market in Florissant. Barb’s and my old boss, Denny, appeared there too.

Blue Devil’s Soul Food Supper

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Anne and I went to the 12th annual Soul Food Supper on Tuesday night at the Maplewood-Richmond Heights High School. This is the school district’s regular celebratory dinner party for Black History Month. The menu consisted of fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes and corn bread. A menu that may not be totally good for you, but it certainly tasted good. Pictures are of the Blue Devil Jazz Band that in addition to the choir performed musical numbers through dinner. After dinner they had Rockin’ Jake, not to be confused with Shaky Jake. Rockin’ Jake is a New Orleans harmonica player and is still very much alive. In addition to the supper the high school also had two basketball games going on, so the event was a bit of a three-ring circus flavor, what with band and choir members coming and going all of the time.

Since the Soul Food Supper is a Black History Month celebration, you might be asking yourself, why are there no black people in any of my pictures. There was a black vocalist that sang with the jazz band and she was quite good, but the jazz band was loud, too loud for me. At my insistence, we backed up. I was too far away and too satiated to work my way up close again when the quite diverse high school choir performed. I apologize for my mistake. I won’t apologize for how well they played. They sounded good.

Dan called on Monday night. He needed some help filling out his FASFA financial aid paper work. He is applying to two nine-week summer residency programs for emerging visual artists. He hopes to be able to attend one of them this summer. One is at Oxbow, Michigan (near Holland) and the other is at Skowhegan, Maine. Personally, I hope that he gets the one in Michigan, that way we will be able to see him this summer.

Dave is flying to West Lafayette, Indiana on Thursday. He is interviewing at Purdue for graduate school. I hope that he is able to dodge all the blizzards that have been regularly rolling through the Midwest this winter.

The final photograph with this post is from Chris. It shows the bell tower of the old Spanish mission in Carmel, California, officially known as San Carlos Borroméo del río Carmelo. The Carmel Mission is one of the oldest missions in northern California. It is the only one to still have its original bell tower dome. Originally located in nearby Monterey, it was soon moved to Carmel to put some distance between the mission’s neophytes and the powerful military government at the Presidio of Monterey. Was this the beginning of the separation of church and state in California?