Tag Archives: postaweek2012

Weekly Photo Challenge: Today

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This morning I have been wandering around Vancouver taking care of some final errands before checking out of the hotel and heading for the airport. In the back of my mind for the last couple of days has been this weeks’ photo challenge ‘today‘: the requirement is simply for any photo so long as it has been freshly snapped on the day of posting…

Near the end of my travels, I stumbled (almost literally) across this sign and while it strike me as very ‘today’ – a meal here and you might not have any tomorrows…! I wonder sometimes about teh seafood industry and whether it needs to seriously start thinking about creating a body to oversee restaurant naming conventions…? This is from when we were in Crystal City a couple oif months back…

So somewhere there is a chain of Illegal Sea Foods restaurants??

Weekly Photo Challenge: Summer

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This week’s photo challenge was ‘summer‘ but since I’ve been in Canada, the weather hasn’t been very summery, still quite pleasant and not uncomfortable in short sleeves but kinda damp. This afternoon though we went on a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the Vancouver Aquarium.  The afternoon was warm and it felt pretty summery around the pool…

…and this gal was keen as to get out and about in the sun….

…but the African penguins didn’t seem too impressed…

…and it’s always summer in the Amazon Room…

…with a big burst of colour in the anemone tank too…

Really enjoyed our afternoon at the Aquarium and can really recommend it to anyone looking to kill a few hours in Vancouver…

Reflections – An Alternate Photo Challenge

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The daisy chain went something like this: The Retiring Sort liked one of my recent blog posts and, as I try to always do, I popped on over to have a look at that blog…from there I saw the link the the alternate weekly photo challenge on Where’s My Backpack? offering ‘Reflections’ as a theme int he absence of a timely ‘offocial’ challenge from WordPress (c’mon, folks, how hard can it be to pick a  word every Friday – or even prior to that for a pre-scheduled release?)

I had intended to pick a relevant image from the photo library at home but never got round to it after creating the initial draft post and so found myself on the road in search of something ‘reflections-y’…

Due to high demand and overbooking, my hotel did not have a room for me when I arrived on Saturday night (but had arranged a very nice room in another hotel all the way back over by the airport) and I had to wait til around 3PM for my room to be ready on Sunday. After having a walk-around the waterf ront and doing a little exploring, I retired to the hotel lobby to wait on the room. This was not unpleasant as it was very comfortable and I am working my way through an anthology of Ray Cummings Golden Age SF on my Nook at the moment (now that I have shrugged off the tyranny of Barnes and Noble  efforts to inflict its version of rights management on overseas customers) and the foyer couches are very comfortable.

As I read, I noticed the reflections in the pool just on the other side of the window – nothing spectacular but enough to meet the requirements of the reflections challenge…

…but still quite tranquil until…

…this chap showed up and started to muss up the reflections theme…

He seemed very friendly and sat quite happily preening himself for a good twenty minutes, during which I had to point out the difference to a nice lady who offered the comment “…that’s a nice duck…”! She hauled out her phone to take a picture and, now clearly offended, he flew off before she could line him up…

The End

Five Question Friday!! 5/25/12

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1. Are you a napper?
Nope…not really…if I let myself nod off, then I will probably be out for hours and wake up at o-dark-30 all refreshed and energised which just perpetuates the problem. If possible, I prefer to push through to a normal(ish) bed time for a rest…of course it doesn’t always pan out according to plan…



2. What was your favorite subject in school? Most hated?
I liked English, reading and writing from the very start – had my first story published in the Sunday Times when I was seven and found this year that I still have the first exercise book in which I wrote stories…it’s all in pencil so I need to scan it soon before it all fades away…hated maths from Day 1…

3. Did you have the something old new borrowed and blue at your wedding? What were they?
Old was probably me, new would have been the wedding cake (rings and wedding dress we have bought a few years before), borrowed would be the two witnesses that we met at the hotel, and blue would be the lagoon behind the beach where we had the service…I’m travelling at the moment so don’t have access to any of the pictures so will update this is a couple of weeks…

4. What one thing are you determined to do this summer
Noting that we are the bottom of the planet, summer is a few months away..reroofing the house was the main objective for the ‘summer’ just gone and we got it done in the only four day break of decent weather all ‘summer’ – finished at 8-30PM on the Thursday night and it was bucketing down by midnight! This coming summer might be focussing on levelling out the lawn and pushing civilisation all the way to the fence around the house…

5. Ice cream or Popsicles?

Is that even a question? Ice cream -hands down!!!! And none of those dodgy marketing flavours…good old-fashioned vanilla or hokey-pokey will do nicely with fresh fruit in summer and melting over a hot butterscotch pudding in winter…

Cutting and running today as I still have to finish packing etc…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Blue

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Eliminating ‘blue‘ sea and ‘blue‘ skies from my quest, I simply scrolled through my Picasa library and waiting for a ‘blue’ (no! not that sort of blue!!) picture to catch my eye…the winner was this Martin B-10 at the USAF Museum near Dayton, in the common pre-WW2 scheme of blue fuselage and yellow wings…

Then I became curious as to the ‘why’ of this colour scheme which seems counter-intuitive for operational military aircraft and found this explanation at War and Game:

BLU AND YELLA

 The use of two color schemes, Light Blue for trainers, and Olive Drab for tactical aircraft, caused logistical headaches for Air Corps maintenance facilities. Quantities of O.D. and Light Blue paints were required in stock at all time. Another problem was the need to know an aircraft’s ultimate destination before paint could be applied: examples of many aircraft served in the training roles, and thus could require blue fuselages.

 The solution, as recommended by the Chief of the Material Division in January 1934, was to standardize one paint scheme for all aircraft, regardless of role. His choice was Light Blue fuselages and Yellow wings and tails, reasoning that high visibility was essential for trainers, while temporary water paint camouflages made the lower-contrast Olive Drab for tactical aircraft unnecessary. Stocks of Olive Drab were at the reorder point, making a timely decision that much more important, and in February the recommendation was approved by the Chief of the Air Corps. Revised specifications and T.O’s were printed in May, and shortly afterward, tactical aircraft were noted with Light Blue fuselages.

OK, I can live with that….

Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun

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This was my first crack at Sun…I normally try to avoid it it for the obvious reason that it tends to wash out my shots and I’m too lazy to remember what camera settings will mitigate that effect (OK, that’s two obvious reasons)…in the flesh, this looked awesome as the sun burned through cloud directly over the cone of Mount Ruapehu – which is an active volcano so at first glance it appeared that it was acting up again…

But then, while aimlessly driving through Picasa, I came across this…

While not directly including the sun in the picture, the two sand buckets evoke sun, sea and surf, and the shadows on the snow offer quite a sharp contrast in both the imagery and what you can assume the ambient temperature to be…this is just one of those shots that appears a good idea at the time but which I can no longer remember what that idea might have been…and it was only last winter – or maybe that should be ‘this’ winter as the intervening summer doesn’t appear to have happened…

Note: another reason for placing my ‘best’ picture last in sequence on the page is that, when sharing or publicising via Facebook, it is always the last image that is the thumbnail for the post. I think that’s dumb too but, hey, it’s Facebook…let’s not look to closely for signs for life or logic in the machine behind the Timeline…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Two Subjects

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The two subjects caught here as part of the Wordpress Weekly Photo Challenge are one of the quick-firing guns on the USS Olympia, one of the earliest modern armoured warships, and, across the Delaware, the USS New Jersey, one of the last of that breed where big guns ruled the waves…both are worth visiting and worth supporting as once naval heritage like this gets scrapped, it can never come back…

Postscript – Weekly Photo Challenge: Through

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This the picture that I really wanted to use for the ‘through’ photo challenge but couldn’t access because I was away from home – some days (just some days) the ‘cloud’ doesn’t seem like such a bad idea – I still like what I did use in the end though….