Hangin' Around

My daughter has these little bobble-head pet toys with magnets on the bottom. The other day, I find several of them hanging upside down from our treadmill handle.

Water Drops

As seen flower blades after a rain

Regular, premium or menthol?

You know your in the middle of the world's smoking capital when gas stations put the cigarette prices right up there on the signs. Maybe they're trying to make the gas prices not look so high when they put them next to a pack of smokes. Personally, I can't wait for the day when smoking is banned anywhere in public. Right now, we often drive to Huntington, W.Va., because all the restaurants there are smoke-free. I really wish restaurants here would go that route, but when every other person you see smokes, it makes it seem unlikely.

As seen at the Grayson Dairy Queen

I just thought the World's Largest Easter Bunny would be .... ummm .... larger.

April Fool's Day Rainbow

We got a really nice rainbow Saturday afternoon. Here's a shot where I zoomed in close. I pumped up the color saturation in Photoshop to give it a little more pop, but I think you can actually see all the colors very vividly.

Bubbles

Actually these are water droplets that formed on the inside of a bottle of handsoap.

What's this No. 18

Does anyone know what these photos are? Post your guesses in the comments section below.

Thoroughbred

Here's a shot of some thoroughbreds along the "Green Mile" in our office building. They're actually little horse statues that we get as awards every year for PR stuff at the hospital.

More Flowers

We had a good rain last night, so early this morning everything was still pretty soaked, which made for some good photos. The dampness really brings out the colors.

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.

Signs of Spring

We have this big pot of dirt that has sat in our garage all winter long, and apparently there were some bulbs of some type planted in it, because they have recently started to sprout out. Just the other day, I noticed that one of the bulbs was getting ready to bloom, so surely spring isn't too far behind ... even if it is just inside the garage.

Big Ol' Sound Board

I run the sound board at our church. It's this monsterous 40+ channel console that's about six feet wide. Here are a couple of detail shots I grabbed with my new pocket camera.

The Blogger Widget test

I'm testing a Mac widget from Google that lets you use Dashboard to quickly post stuff to your blog. We'll see how well it works. Also, I got a couple of new toys. One for work, which is a 20" Intel iMac. After having a few issues with migrating my old user account, I'm finally up and running, and I like it. Also, I got a Fuji F10 pocket digital camera to carry with me, so hopefully I'll be posting some more photos soon.

The glowing pen

I had thought about doing this as a mystery photo, but I decided it would be just too weird of an object. It's an ink pen from some drug company or something. Anyhow, it's pretty cool. The glowing strands change color ... I haven't posted anything in a while, so I'm kind of stretching it :-)

What's this No. 15

This is something I saw this morning that I thought might make a good mystery photo. However, my focus group (aka, the guy I share an office with) got it right off the bat. Post your guesses by clicking the comments link below.

Winter letdown

I love a good snow, but it seems like we just don't get many here in Northeast Kentucky anymore. This weekend, forecasters kept predicting 3-6 inches (which these days is a good snowstorm for us) but it never happened. It snowed on and off for three days straight, but it usually melted as fast as it fell. We barely had enough sticking to the trees for me to grab this shot Saturday morning, and I don't think it ever accumulated much more than an inch.



Seems like when I was a kid, we used to get several inches of snow several times a year. Perhaps I'm cramming the memories of a bunch of winters together in my mind, but everyone else seems to think the same thing. A really big winter storm (8 inches plus) is simply unheard of anymore around here.



We got the kids sleds for Christmas this year, and so far haven't had a chance to really use them. We dragged them out early Saturday morning before everything melted, but with only about an inch on the ground, there just wasn't much to it. With February half over now, the outlook for a big snow is once again dwindling away.

What's this No. 14

Wow, 14 of these things. Of course, it's nowhere close to Rick Lee's sixty some. Anyhow, can you guess what this is? Post your guesses in the comments section below.

Statue at Boyd County Courthouse

I shot this at the Boyd County Courthouse the other day in Catlettsburg, Ky., and actually stopped for once to read who this was a statue of. It's of a former Kentucky Court of Appeals judge named John Milton Elliott, who was also a state representative. He died in office after being assassinated by Col. Thomas Buford on March 26, 1879 at the Capitol Hotel in Frankfort, Ky. The one thing I'm not sure about is what he's doing in Boyd County, because I could find no local ties to him. He was born in Scott County, Va., and later moved to Morgan County, Kentucky, in an area that is now Elliott County. Elliott County is named after him.

Catlettsburg is a pretty neat little place with some historic buildings and neat architecture (at least for this area). One day, if I get some free time, I would like to wander around the downtown area and shoot a few shots. If I do that, I'll post a web photo gallery to look at here.

What's this No. 13

Here's another mystery photo that I think might be way too easy, but after cropping thought I'd float it out there and see. Do you know what this is? Post your guesses by clicking the comments link below.


UPDATE: Here's the answer. It's empty coal barges parked along the Ohio River.

Some kind of lily

Here's a close-up of a lily of some type (peace lily ... maybe???) that we have in our house. I'm not much of a plant person, so I'm not sure what kind it is exactly. Anyhow, after a few years, it finally got another bloom on it. It helps when I remember to water it occassionaly.

What's this No. 12

Got a couple of mystery photos this weekend that I'll have to post. Here's the first. Do you know that this is? Post your guesses by clicking the comments link below.

Photo of the Day

A while back, my six-year-old daughter and I went out on a picture taking trip. She uses my wife's little Kodak EasyShare camera, and I think she came away with the photo of the day. She snapped this of a river with some fall leaves that is reflecting the sky and part of a bridge above. The only thing I did to this photo was to bump the color saturation up a little. She composed and shot it herself. Anytime she gets a hold of the camera, she can fill up a memory card in a matter of minutes ... mostly with photos of the television, which I think is her favorite subject. Anyhow, I was just going through some of the shots she had taken yesterday and came across this one that I somehow missed the first time around. I think it's a pretty nice shot.

Architectural details

The building I work in is an oddly made thing. It's a five-story glass structure with these big eaves that hang over each of the floors. I noticed walking in earlier today that if you look straight up at it from right underneath the eaves or close to the building, you get some neat angles. The second pic makes for an optical illusion that the eaves are pointed up instead of down, which is kind of neat.

Flower detail

Here's a close-up of some flowers sitting on a table in our office.

What's this No. 11

I haven't done one of these in a while, but here's a mystery photo (a la Rick Lee). Can you guess what this is. Post your guesses in the comments section below. I thought this one would be easy, but I showed it to a few people who didn't get it right away, so I thought I'd post it.

Through the Windshield, part 2

Here's another shot taken on my way to work Monday morning. This time of year, we seem to have lots of nice sunrises, and the big white streak from the jet just added to the shot. I actually like the power lines in this photo because they are running the opposite way from the jet streak.

Mixed Media

I had thought about posting this as a mystery photo, but I think the combination of stuff would have been too tough to guess. Besides, it's not an original photo idea. I saw a photo like this on BetterPhoto.com's Web site. It's salt crystals and a drop of cooking oil on the back of an old DVD. The oil really makes the prism colors do some cool things.

Buildings at dusk

This is Ashland, Kentucky's version of a "skyscraper." Anyhow, I just liked the way the three structures in the photo looked as I was on my way out of the office a couple of evenings ago. The setting sun was still hitting the top of the taller building and part of the parking garage, while the rest was shaded.

Yet another way to waste time

Sorry for not posting any photos today or yesterday, but I'm running out of stuff on my desk (I really need to get out more). Anyhow, a co-worker once said that the Internet was simultaneously the biggest time-saver and time-waster there was. With sites like this one he appears to be correct. If you like photos of cats with stuff on them (and who doesn't?) then you should check this out. A great way to waste some time. And, for any aspiring photographers, they take submissions.

Now, Andy

I raided other offices on my floor looking for a pic of something to post today, when I found a statuette of Barney Fife that seemed to fit the bill. (And, yes, that's R2-D2 in the background). It sort of made me realize that there are very few people in this world who don't like The Andy Griffith Show ... and the ones who don't like it, well, there's just something wrong with them.