Wow, another new breed! I had heard of these before, but I think this was the first time I met any. And there were at least four at the festival, and they all looked like perfect twins. Well, I guess it’s much harder to see the difference between dogs when they’re under a long coat of floofy sproingy fur.
There are eyes under there, I promise.
They actually look a lot like curly-coat retrievers… not a comparison that is terribly helpful for most people, I’ll grant you.
I promised some people some eclipse pictures today, taken from a rather nice spot in the Shaw Nature Reserve, Gray Summit, MO. So… here they are. Unfortunately they’re not quite all I’d hoped.
It seems that there was something that the gentleman who sold me this lens didn’t tell me when he sold it to me. It’s possible he didn’t know: certainly neither he nor I had the appropriate camera to test it with, nor the appropriate adaptor to use with our cameras. It’s a Nikon F-mount lens, which more or less went out with the dodo, the Charleston, and most of my hair.
I only got the adaptor on Friday, shipped to me at my hotel, and I didn’t even have a single hour to test it with before I got down to where I was going to watch the eclipse. Not that it would have mattered: it’s not like I could have easily bought another one of these.
You’ll see the problem immediately: I appear to have gotten two lenses for the price of one, which is much more useful when they aren’t in the same casing and offset from one another by about a tenth of a millimeter. It’s easiest to see in the last picture, where there is actually a line of darkness between the two bits of sun peeking around the rim of the moon. I assure you, that effect wasn’t visible in person. But at least that one looks kind of neat… the one of the total eclipse, with corona, is just horrible. And all the rest that I took during totality were even worse.
All the lens needs is alignment, but since it’s a lens from 1991 I’m not even sure there’s anyone still in business who knows how to.
Welp. Anyway. That’s all I’ve got. Next time I go to see an eclipse, I am going to have a nice long lens well tested beforehand, probably by taking lots of adorable pictures of sea otters. And next Sunday I will have some rather pretty pictures of the grounds of the reserve, which I took with a different and less inebriated lens.
This cat would not do well in our apartment. It tends to get kind of dusty…
I would not have guessed you could get a tail to look like that without sticking the other end into an electrical socket.
You get a bonus post today… not only is it Caturday, but it’s also National Dog Day! I wanted to post a picture I took today, but I didn’t run into any dogs today… not a one! So here’s Charles, who I ran into yesterday. He is four months old and indistinguishable from a golden-doodle in appearance and temperament… which is in no way a negative thing!
It is next to impossible to get Charles to look into the camera.
Combine that with the fact that his mom is much more interested in looking at him than she is in showing off for the camera, and it explains why, though I took almost two dozen pictures of the two of them together, there was not a single one where both of them were facing the camera.
Another dog from my vacation.
Pretty sure this dog could knock this boy over with his tongue.
And lo, there was another new breed for our blog: our first Irish red-and-white setter. I have actually met one of these before, also at the Milwaukee Irish Fest, but this time I got a couple of usable pictures.
Very distinctive dogs. Very pretty, don’t you think?
The camera’s not tilted: he’s a leaner.
Proud dad showing off his ‘Celtic Canine’.
If you think this picture doesn’t look much like Chicago, Milwaukee, OR St. Louis, you’re right… this is from my trip back in July. I plead exhaustion: it’s the day after I returned from my trip, I have a September 1 deadline for two major projects I’m working on, and I got home at 7:45 and it’s laundry day.* So you get a greeting on the beach today.
* (Okay, okay, I will own up to one thing. We all have our little luxuries. I don’t have cable, or any kind of limited-access TV. I only have an expensive cell plan because my company requires me to be on call 24/7 (which UGH UGH UGH). But one luxury I do pay for is to have someone pick up my laundry in front of my door on Thursday at 7 AM and return it, washed, pressed, and neatly packaged, by 3 or 4 PM on Friday. I’m sure doing laundry in a laundromat is good for the soul or something, but if so then my soul is just going to have to suffer for a bit. NOT trucking my laundry up and down a 25-degree-angle hill and NOT sitting there for two hours while it washes and dries is well worth the $80 or so a month I pay for the privilege.)
Wish I’d gotten a picture… I saw this golden earlier, laying against a tree the exact color that he was. I honestly thought he was a dog-shaped piece of log. And then he got up and ran over here to make some new friends.
Howdy from Amtrak! I’m training from St. Louis up to Chicago today, and am procrastinating from work (which is how I’ll be spending most of the train ride) by posting a picture.
I met this pup on the light rail in Chicago on Sunday. I didn’t get her name or breed, so I have decided to name her ‘Ears’.
She doesn’t like it much if you play with them. But it’s so hard to resist.
There ARE dogs in Milwaukee! I ran into a couple just a block from where I’m staying. I got dozens of good pictures of Mushu (6 months old and named after the character from Mulan) but I am so busy being on vacation that I only have time to share one tonight. More soon!
Mushu was apparently recovering from an illness. He seemed in fine fettle to me, although he did get stuck in a silly position for a while.
I put in about four miles of walking today, and for a while I thought I was going to run into not a single, solitary pup. Finally, though, and fortunately before it got dark, I did run into Eebee, who gave me puppydog eyes and nosesmooches, so it was all good.
I also ran into some bunnies, but that was after dark, alas.
Freckles!