Pictures & Words
Playing in the Pond
It's a beautiful Sunday here in Wisconsin. Morning the past week have been great—crisp and dewy early on, with a bit of fog hanging over things. It's a sign that summer is coming to an end. The pool water temperature is also getting 'fall-like'. Hopefully Noah and I will be able to tough it out for another month or so.
Jen's pond looks great. The water lilies have really come around, as have the grasses. Fish and frogs are happy. Looking forward to another couple months of good weather!
Elianna from the archives
I've found a few more photos of Elianna from my files: one of Noah's birthday parties and a class trip to the state capitol. I still can't believe that she's gone.
In memoriam: Elianna Boyd
Elianna, a beautiful young lady with a 1000-watt smile and an even brighter spirit, passed away this week after suffering a brain hemorrhage. She was only twelve years old. She was a classmate of Noah's and had been in the Brighton Drama Troupe for a number of years. My thoughts and prayers are with her parents Dan and Louise and her younger siblings Dan and Jessica. She was a wonderful, funny, thoughtful, and charming young lady—this earth is a little dimmer without her presence.
God bless her—we're all going to miss her terribly.
Sigma Shooters Meet
This past Thursday I had the opportunity to go into Chicago and meet up with some friends for dinner, conversation, and a little bit of photography. This dinner was in honor of our good friend Rudy Guttosch, a nember of Foveon (Sigma's R&D division). Rudy was out visiting family this week from California and managed to shake free for a few hours to have dinner. Chunsum was the gracious Chicago-land host, and Scott Greiff and his wife Rita joined us from Columbus (they came in to see Lollapalooza).
We had a delightful dinner at the Gage on Michigan Avenue. Scott had an SD1 to play with and Rudy brought another. I took a few shots inside the restaurant to play with the handling. My initial impressions were that the body feels really nice and the autofocus system seemed to be a step up from the SD15. It's so far out of my price range that I really didn't worry too much about it. It was much more fun to give Rudy a hard time about price and continue to bug him about all the X3 'liabilities'.
After dinner we strolled along Michigan Ave and then wandered into Millennium Park. These are some of the photos from this evening. It was really great to get the gang together, even if it was only for a few hours! These are all out of the SD15 and either the 85 mm f/1.4 or the 10-20 mm f/4-5.6.
When is a vacation Monday not a vacation?
When you've got a bunch of landscaping work to do. This is day three of building a path from the front porch to the driveway. Excavation took the better part of the first two days. I got landscaping fabric down yesterday afternoon and then got some gravel on top of it to hold it down. These shots are from this morning. The blocks went down reasonably well (Max showed up to help), and I got them all laid by 2 pm or so. We've got another load of gravel coming for the fill.
And some swallowtail butterfly shots. I saw a new species of swallowtail today; it was yellow on the 'outside' like this guy, but it had broad brown stripes horizontally across the inside. I've never seen one like it before. I couldn't find it on Wikipedia in my five minute search...
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