The Wide Angle

Here's a shot of a mylar balloon on the ceiling of my daughter's messy room. It makes a neat 360 effect, and makes the room look much smaller than it actually is.

Why I was late for work ...

Ah, the joys of driving to work on a two-lane road.

More flowers ...

... just becuase I haven't posted anything in a while. These are the same flowers from the last post, so you can see that they survived the snow and frost from the past week.

Spring is in the air ...

... along with snow, ice and some freezing cold winds. On the second day of spring, we had temperatures in the 20s and a light dusting of snow. Here's a couple of pics from this morning. Above is some of the icicles that had formed reflecting the sun early this morning. To the right are some flowers that had poked through the ground during last week's 70-some degree weather, but were now coated with snow.

House full of chicks

We try to buy our daughter nice stuff, and I know we usually buy too much. But, like nearly all kids, she seems to have the most fun with some of the cheapest stuff out there. Such is the case with her Easter chicks that came in yesterday. She saw these things in an Oriental Trading catalog a while back, and has been bugging us to order them since. We caved (after all, they were just a few bucks) and when they arrived yesterday, you'd think we had given her a real pony or something. I've never seen her get so excited over a bunch of little toys that look like they were made out of pipe cleaner and a couple pieces of cardboard. Anyhow, since we had so many new chicks, we had to line all of them up for a photo op, and then let them party it up in the Fisher-Price beach house. I don't think our daughter was this excited on Christmas morning.

Peek-a-boo

A picture of my daughter from the other day during a trip to the playground at Central Park in Ashland.

Signs of Spring?

We have some daffodils coming up in our yard now, probably blooming after last week's 70+ degree weather. Now, if tonight's 20-degree temps don't kill them ... anyhow, it's nice to see some signs that spring is around the corner.

What's This No. 17

This one may not be too fair, but I'll post it anyhow. Does anyone know what this is? Post your guesses in the comments section below.

UPDATE: Okay, no takers. It's the ceiling of the Cincinnati Museum Center. The building was once a railway station, and has this really cool half-dome shape. I was hoping someone would guess some type of festive plates, because I thought that's what they looked like. Anyhow, I have posted more museum photos.

Scuba photos

Like I said recently, I was going through some of my older photos, and ran across a bunch from a scuba-diving trip back in 2002. Here is one of the more neat shots from the trip. It's a statue of Jesus that's in about 30 feet of water just off the coast of Key Largo. It's become one of the area's more popular diving attractions. Also during the trip, we got to dive down 100 feet to see the recently-sank Spiegel-Grove, a U.S. Battleship that was intentionally submerged to someday form a natrual reef. When we went on the trip, it has just been down there about a month, and it was pretty neat. You can see more pics from the scuba trip here.

Tired little man

He usually doesn't make it very long on the commute home, but he's starting to like wearing his sunglasses.

I love when I find stuff...

I'm not the most organized person in the world when it comes to keeping track of all my photos I take. I've done a little better recently, trying to tag and name and place stuff on my hard drive so that it makes sense, but I occasionally look through some older folders to find photos that I completely forgot that I had taken. Here is one example, a rainbow behind our house during the evening when the sun gave everything an orangish glow. I thought it was a pretty neat shot, especially for something I didn't even realize I had. I also found a bunch of shots from a scuba diving trip to Florida a couple of years ago, and when I get around to it, I'll post a bunch of those as well.

The Mighty Mouse

As I've mentioned before, I'm a Mac person, and we recently got some of the new Intel iMac G5s at work. One new thing they came with was Apple's Mighty Mouse. Before, the standard Mac mouse had only one button. The equivalent of a right-click was to hold the control key on the keyboard down while you clicked that one button, which at the time seemed fine to me. One button was plenty, I didn't need more, and when the Mighty Mouse came out, I stubbornly said my one-button standard was fine with me ... until I actually used one. The Might Mouse still has the same one-button feel, but all sorts of new features. The small button in the center is actually a scroll wheel that can scroll either up and down or left and right. You can also assign a feature for when you press down on the center button (i.e., mine activates a Mac feature called Exposé that shows all my open windows at once). Even though it still looks like one button, it senses whether you're right or left clicking. Also around the base of the mouse are buttons where your thumb rests, so when you squeeze this area, it acts as yet another button (mine is set to activate my Dashboard widgets). Overall, I'm impressed with how much I like the Mighty Mouse, and miss it when I'm on my home computer and catch myself tring to use a scroll button that's not there.

What's this No. 16

Another mystery photo a la Rick Lee. Can you guess what this is? Post your guesses in the comments section below.