OmegaMom

::OmegaMom walks into the blog space, blows some dust off the furnishings, looks around…::

Hey there.  It’s been long enough for a post from me that BlogHer advertising sent me a “tsk, tsk” email and turned off the ads.  Hah!

Oh, well; I’ve been busy and tired and uptight enough that blogging (and Twitter) has taken second (third?  Last?) place in the scheme of things.

The good news is that my mom is so, so, so much better.  We moved her into assisted living yesterday; she has all the furniture she needs and today’s chores include moving some plants and paintings and photos so that her space is even more her space.

Every day in the past two weeks has been jam-packed with things related to getting her better, getting the move coordinated, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, vacuuming, cleaning.  Twenty-five years at one location does tend to make one accumulate stuff…and much of it, as mom says, “Nothing precious”.  My main learning point–aside from the need for retirement funds, and how expensive assisted living is–is that the investment in a weekly cleaning person is a Must for those who do not have the cleaning gene.  All the dust and the stress has combined to give me a lovely cold with a dollop of super-duper sinus infection on top.  Hah!

Arizona has been irritatingly sunny and beautiful, all the while I have been unable to rest and enjoy it.  Grrr.

My brother arrives today–yay!  Someone else to take the burden!  And I head home on Sunday, to a dotter who finally last night broke down during our nightly phone conversation to say, “I want you to COME HOME!!!”, with her voice cracking into tears on the last two words.  Oh, yes, OmegaDad wants me home, too, but he hasn’t cried–it’s been me bursting into spontaneous tearfests on his long-distance shoulder every few days.  He’s a good dude, y’know?  I’ve done something right to have the Kozmik All let me find him all those years ago.

My main focus with mom’s move–aside from, well, the move–has been to create a colorful and welcoming space for her in her new place.  One of the things I did was taken directly from a blog that my commenter and long-time virtual friend Kaz pointed me to named Attic24.  The lady who writes Attic24 is a lover of all things bright and colorful, and her January 21 post made me re-assess my inward sneer at tulips.

I have always thought that tulips are just too, too niffy-naffy and snooty for words.  Stiff, formal, upright–ptooey.  But in the midst of her posts filled with bright mixes of color, A24 showed a vase jam-packed with multi-colored tulips.  It was bright, springy, the furthest thing from “formal” you could imagine.  So I started searching the local florist shops for tulips.

Of course, none of the local florist shops had gotten the word:  tulips in arrangements meant all one color, all stiff, semi- to very formal, and very little variety in color.  Red was big.  So was white.  And pink.  Never in the same store, though!  Bah.  But Monday I was at the local grocery store, struck by the “manager’s specials” of leftover Valentine’s Day bouquets and tchatchkes, and was lured into their flower cooler.  There, in the corner, was a bucket of tulips, gathered into groups of five stems, each group one color.  But they had orange.  They had red.  They had purple.  Pink.  White.  Yellow.  A riot of colors.  So I cornered the young lady who was putting “for sale!” signs on the manager’s specials, and described what I wanted.

She came through!  One of the nicest things about the move was walking mom into her new place and having her delighted with the (beginnings of) big splashes of color…one of which was a small vase jam-packed with tulips of all different colors, sitting on her dining table.

It’s the small things that make me happy sometimes.  That vase of colorful tulips was a symbol to me, a symbol that mom’s life is not going to shrivel up into a blank nursing home stare, that she’s going to have spring and life and color for time to come.

One of my Christmas cacti bloomed, the pink-and-white striped one.  The Christmas cacti live in my office window, in the window in the front landing/entryway, and some babies in the kitchen window.  They provide a bright splotch of color at odd times; historically it seems that we can get them to bloom by stressing them (in other words, by forgetting to water them for a while).

So I took out my new camera and fiddled with it for a while, trying for some macro shots of the blooms.

And, as always with macro shots, if I had a composition where most of the flower was on one plane, it turned out well:

But, alas, when I tried a different angle, where the camera was aimed down the lovely shimmering throat of the flower, and the yellow pistols dusted with pollen were fountaining towards the camera and the purple stamen was drooping away from the camera…well, it didn’t work.

Bummer!  I want more depth of field!  Those dainty translucent petals came through very nicely, though.  (Those are actually two different flowers above, but the last picture, directly above, is a different view of the first in the post.)

It would work, I think, if I had a narrower aperture (f-more-than-8, which is the limit on this camera).  So I am investigating the CHDK (Canon Hackers Development Kit, I believe, though I couldn’t find it specifically defined), in hopes of getting a higher f-stop.  If that won’t work, they have auto-bracketing, producing multiple pictures with different focal points which you can then merge into a single file with a program called CombineZM.  The CHDK was recommended by Jen From Alaska in one of the comments to my first post about my new toy–many thanks, Jen!

It’s such a pretty flower!  I really want to get it all the way!

Here it is, the fifth of September, and we are well into autumn weather and colors here in Alaska.  This is Labor Day Weekend, three days off, and the Kozmik All has graced us with beautiful sunshine, sparkly clear skies, and (relative) warmth.  The dotter wanted to spend her time today watching TV.  I said, “No way, Jose!”, and dragged her out into the backyard to kick the soccer ball around a few times.

And then I dragged her on a hike.

Lately, she has been quite down on the idea of hikes.  All summer long, at summer camp, she avoided most of the hikes because her gymnastics class was scheduled in the middle of the day, ending after the kids were bussed off to wherever that week’s hike was.  When she did go, she pooh-poohed the experience.  My heart sank each time she did that–I love to go hiking, and she seemed to be deciding that Nature, and walking, and looking at the beautiful world around her was just BOR-ing!

Well, bah humbug, says I.  That’s no way to grow up!

So there we were, and it was a glorious day, and I pretty much told her to suck it up, we were going on a hike.

We grabbed the dawg, motored on up to Margaret Pass, where the Little Lady River runs, parked by one of the trailheads, and headed up the lower reaches of Gummint Peak.  The trail was wide and open, alongside a creek that joins the Little Lady River, with many little offshoots of the trail leading to the creek.  The dotter paused to look for rocks to throw:

The trail crossed a neat wooden bridge; I’m not sure why it was built that way, with the two parts:

Then the trail suddenly became small and narrow and steep, heading up a ridgeline very quickly.  I warned the dotter that we would have to come down the trail on our butts because it was so steep, but that only made it more attractive to her.  I tried to take pictures of how steep it was, but none of them showed it properly.  Here the dotter is clowning around on a rock on the trail ahead (and above) me:

There were oodles of fireweed in full fluff, and with scarlet leaves:

The fireweed are splendid wildflowers.  They bloom bright pink flowers all along their stalk, above green leaves; then, when they’re all done blooming, the stems to the flowers turn dark pink, the leaves turn scarlet, and the seeds covered with fluff burst open.  When the wind picks up, the fluff from the fireweed dances off into the skies.

When we got up to a bench on the ridge, we stopped, rested, rehydrated, and took pictures.  First, a vista:

I took the landscape pictures, then the dotter demanded the camera.  First she caught the dawg resting, looking Noble:

Then she did a self-portrait.  Note the faint orange mustache from her Gatorade:

She took a picture of me, but I’m not putting it in here, ’cause it shows my impending wattle, yuck.

Then we turned around and slid back down the trail.  The dotter wanted to go back up and slide back down, but I nixed that idea; the butt of her blue jeans was getting pretty damned grubby by that time, and I was afraid that any more grinding action would engrain the dirt to the point where it was impossible to ever get out again.

On the way up and back down, I was constantly clicking the camera, grabbing shots of autumn colors.  Some more fireweed:

Some berries (not edible, I think):

Purty fall colors:

Once we were back at the trailhead, we crossed the road to the Little Lady River, and played on the rocks and in the water.  The dotter collected a large number of speckled rocks, which she proudly proclaimed were river dinosaur eggs, and that the eggs needed to be right at the edge of the water to hatch, so that the baby river dinosaurs could just swim away when they hatched.

Then we went home.  On the drive home, the dotter informed me that she just loved hiking, and could we do it every weekend?  Har.  My nefarious scheme is working!

I have been driving one hundred miles a day this week, hauling OmegaDotter off to China Camp in Big City.  Luckily, we hooked up with another local family sending their daughter to the same camp, and we’re splitting chauffeuring duties–I drive the girls in, A’s dad picks the girls up and drives them home.  The girls seem to be enjoying the camp, and are learning lots of fun things and getting lots of “OMG, I’m not the only person in the room who looks like me” reassurance.  But I have to say, getting up early and schlepping the girls into town, then hauling ass back home so I can log in to work is, frankly, wearing me out.

So I thought I’d put together a post on an interesting issue I am having with photography and our Olympus digicam.

While we were out on our (wonderful, relaxing, fun) road trip a week and a half ago, we encountered some lovely lupine clusters in the woods by the side of the road.  I got close-up and personal with the lupines with my camera, expecting hoping for some gorgeous pictures.

Take a gander:

Isn’t that blue absolutely lovely?  Isn’t it almost celestial?  All those little slippers with those little purplish tips.  Ahhhh.  It’s breathtaking.  I have done not one thing to this picture except to reduce the resolution so it works on the blog.

I’m not happy–even though I love that picture and find the blues delicious.  Why?

The problem is that those lupines did not look like that to the nekkid eye, at all at all.  They were not that lovely, heavenly, celestial blue with bits of purple on the tips.  They were purple.  Mostly.  Even close up and personal, they were purple.  After a great deal of fiddling around with color replacements, this is more like what they should look like.  Sort of; it’s very fake-y because I used a lot of “replace color” and there are still some splashes that needed the color replaced but I had gotten tired of fiddling and the overall cast was similar enough to the real live flowers that it suited for this demonstration purpose.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered this problem; way back in late October, when the dotter decided she wanted to be a cheerleader for Halloween, I took a picture of her in a purple cheerleader costume–which ended up looking almost navy blue.  No other colors behave this way with our Olympus digicam–just purples.

Anyone have any ideas as to (a) what causes this response and (b) what to do with the camera to avoid it?

(The roadsides around here are filled with purplish flowers.  On one road, we have cascades of lupines.  To the side of the highway in to Big City is a field overflowing with wild iris.  The local streets have some type of lavender-purple bellflowers.  I don’t want to be taking pics of all these things if I’m going to have to dick around inside my photo software to get some vague semblance of the real deal.  Harrumph.)