Laurie named her Black Widow Wealhþeow after the Queen of the Danes in Beowulf.

Cary Grant is a thorny rosebush that produces beautiful roses. Grant had a difficult childhood, and while he had a handsomeness that appealed to both women and men, he was said to have been a '..."mass of contradictions" whose life was "painful, even tortured"...' The thorns on his namesake's canes are fitting.

Rosencrantz watching out for monsters while I photograph thorns after sundown.

It was 2:00 am and Spunk watched the monsters while I battled leaves in my ditches and gophers geysers while irrigating.

I dropped by a local car wash today on my way home from getting materials for two more sit / stand desktops I'm working on. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, with no clouds to be seen through the air still air and wiggles of warm drafts rising off the pavement. After I rolled into the car wash, and the stop light  turned red, I got an unworldly display of abstract images as what I presume was water, soap, wax and brushes seemed to be spraying and beating a year's worth of dusty roads, muddy rains and windstorms off my car, but then again I could have been in the twilight zone.

The battle begins.

Deeper into the red zone.

Fire and water are a strange pair.

A quick check in the rearview mirror showed some semblance of civilization beyond the wash.

The last thing I remember was ball lighting bouncing off the sideview mirrors and smashing against the windows.

Strangely enough, I woke up in the middle of Corrales on the ditch bank with a clean car.

Many years ago, when I was racing bicycles, in a race through Jemez Springs to Los Alamos, NM, one of my teammates, Joe Green, broke away, and had a pretty good gap on the peloton. A few of us were up front blocking for Joe, when all off a sudden Rich, another one of our teammates, came flying around us from off-the-back with riders from other teams on his wheel, and they started chasing down Joe Green. We yelled for him to stop chasing, but Rich had blasted by so fast he couldn't hear us, so he pulled the whole peloton up to Joe Green. We were racing for Nunzio's Pizza at that time and we wore red, white and green striped team jerseys. At the end of the race, Joe Green came up to me and asked "What's the deal with Rich? Is he colorblind or what?" Rich is colorblind with a red and green deficiency, and he told me many times that the Nunzio's jersey looked pretty much the same as any other jersey to him.

If you have ever wondered how the 1% to 2% of the population who are "colorblind" see color, my good friend and fellow photographer, Susan Graham, has just published Seeing Color Colorblind: Protanopia Part I on Kindle books available from Amazon at http://smile.amazon.com/Seeing-Color-Colorblind-Protanopia-Part-ebook/dp/B01CUVBB86/. Susan is working on a print edition, as well. Since you need to view the photographs in color to see how "colorblind" people see them, you will need to use a Kindle Fire, a Kindle reader on your color hand held device or computer, or open it in Amazon's Cloud Reader to see the book in color.

Seeing Color Colorblind: Protanopia Part I is an excellent introduction for people who see color to see how "colorblind" people see the world. Susan's father was colorblind and her son is colorblind, also, but she said she never really understood the impact that color blindness had on them until recently. Through her photography and the many tools available for digital image processing, she has created a series of diptychs, with a normal color photo and the same photo processed to the colors that a person with protanopia (severe red deficiency) sees set side by side. Her son has helped her with the images so when he looks at the pair they look the same to him (if you look at the photos on a regular or paper white Kindle, both photos look the same). YOu can see samples of the diptychs on Susan's blog at http://susanbgraham.com/blog/2016/04/02/colorblindness/.

It's really amazing what Susan has accomplished by putting this book together and showing us what people with protanopia see when they look at color photographs. I had the common misconception that people with severe colorblindness see the world in more of a black and white or gray scale, when it turns out that they see color in black and white because they are not seeing the colors of the spectrum blended together that make black and white as I see it. Seeing Color Colorblind: Protanopia Part I is a fascinating view into another world, and is uniquely Susan because it is 100% art on the one hand, and 100% science on the other blended together into a single source.

Susan always wondered how her father and son could watch a football game on their black and white TV and talk about the "blue team" and the "yellow team". She thought it was a joke, until she finally realized they were seeing the teams in blue and yellow. Susan writes:

On March 15, 2015 I saw the first in a series of videos made by EnChroma, a company that makes glasses that help many people with color deficiencies see a broader range of colors. I must have watched the video at least twenty times that day, and cried throughout. I thought of the times my son had said, "I wish just once, even if just for a minute, I could see the world the way other people do." Finally, here was a chance, I thought." My mother saw the video, and immediately ordered some of the EnChroma glasses for her grandson.

It turned out that the glasses didn't really do a lot for her son, but they helped a little. Since the technology is not to the point that it can help her son see color more like the most people, she started to wonder if there was a way that she "could see the would through his eyes." And the answer was "yes" and the result is Seeing Color Colorblind: Protanopia Part I.

About Susan:
Susan Brandt Graham, an award winning photographer, is a photographic artist offering a unique view into the creative feminine mind. By training, a social anthropologist (PhD University of Arizona), and board certified Obstetrician and Gynecologist (MD University of Kansas, and Ob-Gyn Internship and Residency University of New Mexico), she has taught Anthropology at the university level and had a private Ob-Gyn practice until retiring. Living in the "Land of Enchantment," she is never at a loss for photographic subjects. Currently her main interest lies in conceptual photography and photo essays.

Vote early! Vote often!

I chased this giant fly all over the yard trying to get a decent closeup photo of it. It would not let me get close enough to do a real macro photo, but it was so big, I got pretty good detail with a normal 50mm lens. I think this fly could identify with Miley Cyrus about being pestered by pesky paparazzi in her music video Fly On The Wall after I chased it around with my camera all afternoon.

Home Hardware would have been on the eastern edge of Albuquerque at 4607 Menual N.E. in the late 1940's. Home Hardware is long gone along with the 2 letters + 4 digit local numbers like the one used to "Dial AL" that where replaced by the standard 7 digit phone numbers in the 1950's. Yet like a ghost from the post war past, Al's old truck keeps on truckin' around the streets of Albuquerque.

The wind blew hard all day the night before the full moon came up, and dust filled the air creating a soft veil over the Sandias as the moon rose behind the towers.