Well, I’m sorry if you spent all morning digging your car out of a snowbank, but this is what San Diego looks like right now…

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I am also sorry about the quality of these photos, I took them with my phone. That is Mission Bay.

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That is Mission Beach.

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Bay side…

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Beach side…

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Bay…

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Beach… with lifeguards still on duty…

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Nobody had to dig their sailboat or surfboard out of a snowbank.

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But hey, nobody made you live where it snows, either.

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Some loons in the bay. They might be loons, but even they move South for the winter. Or maybe they don’t… maybe they live here all year long… but why undermine my own point?

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And they do have to worry about being run down by a sailboat… so…

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Pelicans, flying over a palm tree above the beach.

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And I saw an Osprey in a nest!!! More on that later… uh oh… wait a minute… I have to stop teasing you about the weather. I took all these pictures yesterday, but I just noticed that it is raining outside. Dang it!

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Light and darkness, stillness and movement… experiments with photography… part 2…

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Okay, for a while, these will be the last of the ‘low-light-long-shutter-opening-wiggling-the-camera-while-I take-pictures-of-colored-lights-in-various-weird-forms’ posts…

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I am not giving up on the premise…

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And, as I may have mentioned, I am saving the best of these photos to do some fun stuff with digital effects on…

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But I have a not-quite-new project that now demands my attention…

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I have someone who is editing my latest novel…

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And as it nears the time where I send it in to the self-publishing place I use…

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I am going to use some of my time, in between making the editing changes, and formatting the novel, to do that other project…

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Some of you who have been here a while will remember some photos I took of Mollie, my younger daughter, when I had her pose as the main character of the novel to use as the cover art for the book…

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So I am going to start finishing the cover art project, and I will post it all on the blog as we go. How about that?

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Idle on piano…

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Just some random funny pictures I made for my buddy, Eric, and sent to him on Twitter. His publisher is looking for a photo for a book cover, and I figured, why not?

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Fun with the sun… (or); Instead of just showing you the rest of those photos of the sunset over the San Francisco Bay that I took when I went with my mom into the hills above Berkeley during Christmas vacation, what if I intersperse them with copies upon which I worked some digital magic… part 4… special ‘liquefy filter’ edition…

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I don’t know why I haven’t spent more time playing with the ‘liquefy’ effect in Photoshop! It has a twirl option!!!

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I tried to twirl only the sky and water in that one.

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But the smudgy tool is fun too.

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You don’t know what you are going to get, but it will be weird.

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The bloat tool is a little hard to control… I need to play with the settings.

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But a little bloat goes a long way, as I always say.

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The pinch tool is fun, but once again, I need to work on controlling it.

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Also, these will be totally different on other kinds of photos.

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So maybe the normal smudge tool is best.

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But then again…

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Maybe not.

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Another of those things I see in the world around me that nobody else seems to notice…

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I was at work one day, not too long ago, and I looked down at the flagstones, and spotted this Aztec chief in a big, gold, jewel-encrusted crown… or war helmet… or whatever.

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He is right there, in plain sight. All you have to do is look.

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I have done quite a few of these posts. I did a whole series of things I saw in my fence. In the flagstones at work, there is also a guy in a serape doing something unspeakable to a llama, but I am not going to share that one.

I could have done a better job on his war helmet-crown, but I have other things to do.

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How I ended up with this haircut; a story that highlights the creative and unusual ways that I make my own life difficult, with the help of the crack squirrels that live in my head…

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Okay, so I have a place where I go to get my haircut. Haircuts have not been, historically, something that I worry about. In the first place, I was a Bay Area hippy when I was young. I had hair down to my butt. Also, I don’t really worry that much about how I look. But now I have that annoying job as a private security officer, I have been forced to take grooming more seriously.

So, I have a place. I had another place. It was full of attractive young Asian ladies who gave the haircuts. Mostly, it was close to my house. But, it turns out, speaking English for both parties involved in the hair cutting process is actually pretty important. Let me rephrase that. It doesn’t matter what languages the two people involved speak, as long as they have at least one language in common.

So I found my new place. But something happened to it. Either the corner of the front wall was undercut by the heavy rains, or maybe a car tried to invent the drive-through haircut. But it has been closed. So, as a blast from my own past, I tried a Supercuts like I went to back in the day. This is where I learned that, even if the two people involved in a haircut do speak the same language, they actually have to be able to communicate effectually.

So, long story still long, I used my own trimmer to tidy up a little. Guys, you know how when you are shaving your face, and trying to get your facial hair choice even, and you go too far on one side, then you go too far on the other when you try to even it out, and you end up with no facial hair? Well, I did that on my own head.

It started off fine. But then I tried to run the trimmer with the length-guard straight back the top of my head, and all of a sudden, the length guard decided to guard for a different length… a much shorter length. I had, in essence, a reverse Mohawk. One stripe of really short hair down the middle of my head. Oh, I manfully tried to fix it. I ended up with what can only be described as a patchy mess on my head. I looked like a had the mange. Like a dog that had lost a fight to a weasel. Like semi-decomposed roadkill.

So I had to go to a barber to try to salvage what was left… and that is what is left.

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Colors; in which I intersperse photos from two different ongoing series of posts, and offer no explanations whatsoever, thereby interrupting the flow of this post with annoying words, but which you will already know all about… if you are following along, that is…

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A love bench and a double rainbow…

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So I am cleaning some photos off my cell phone. My wife just had a birthday, and I made her a little love bench. But it is also a photo stand, because I carved a slot in the seat of the bench. The flowers are carefully crafted so that they still look like flowers even if the top part of the bench is covered by a photo, and I doubled up on the initials of us and the kids.

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This little bench is sort of a matching gift with the tiki I made her for Christmas…

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Yes, that one.

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Don’t worry, we got her other stuff too.

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But hand-made gifts are always nice, right? I just need to varnish it now.

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On the way to work the other day, I took some pictures of a rainbow. I didn’t know, until I just looked at it more closely, that there was another rainbow, over to the right.

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These aren’t the best double rainbow photos, but still…

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Pretty cool, right?

 

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In which my pussycat is sort of a dickcat…

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I do apologize for that title, but hey, the cat stole not only Koa’s bed, but his ball too. Then she swiped at the dog whenever he got close. Koa was very upset…

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SQUIRREL!!!

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The cat was like; ‘hey, the bed is comfy, and it’s in the sun… I don’t even need the ball.’

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Koa got the ball back… eventually. But not the bed.

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In which my cat expresses her viewpoints on modern society… a series of pictures telling a story…

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I caught my cat watching the TV yesterday. She looked quite concerned about the underpinnings of our economy, the wage gap, and the threat to middle-income families.

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She did seem to be slightly hopeful that our home state was at least working on the problems of infrastructure and job growth.

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She is obviously a supporter of fair wages.

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But shed is a bigger supporter of breakfast food, it turns out.

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Any breakfast food…

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Especially pancakes…

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Particularly if they come with a free beverage, and as long as the servers and cooks are paid a fair living wage.

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Uh… no, sorry, cat, that isn’t the number we call for pancakes.

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Then she totally freaked out when the picture went away for a brief moment. I assume she thought that the cameraman wasn’t getting paid enough.

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Then the political news came on…

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And she was like; ‘seriously???’…

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‘I am so outta here’…

 

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