Spunk Paints His Nails
Spunk thinking about painting his nails.
Spunk heard Laurie talking about how gel nails make her nails really strong and durable, so he decided that even though he's a Tom Cat, he was "Cat" enough to paint his nails. I told him that I paint my nails when I play guitar. There is an animated gif of Spunk searching through the nail polish at https://photoofthedayetc.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/spunk-paints-his-nails/.
Checking out the colors.
Trying to get the colors he wanted to take a closer look at out of the box.
Deciding between orange, red or blue.
He finally chose "Camera Ready" red.
Using Laurie's Sensationail UV LED lamp to set the nail polish.
Spunk: "What do you think of my painted nails, Guildenstern?" Guildenstern: "They look bloody dangerous!"
Spunk Discovers Fire
Curiosity burned the paw as spunk got interested in the candle in the centerpiece Laurie had put together, and decided he wanted to se what the flame felt like. Go to https://photoofthedayetc.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/spunk-discovers-fire/ to see an animated gif of the last three photos.
Snow Daze
Laurie did this photo of the undisturbed snow in the labyrinth I cut in the black bamboo last summer before she took her daily walk through it.
The snow keeps coming and hanging around even after a day of rain.
Field of snow
Rainy Days and Reyes
A view of the west side of downtown from the 16th floor of the bank building
It rained most of the day on Día de los Reyes Magos. The rain stopped and the clouds cleared around 4:00 pm so I was able to light torches that lit the way to the house for the pilgrims who joined our celebration with tapas, coffee and Spanish Chocolate.
Sasha checking out a cup of Spanish Chocolate
Rosencrantz listening to us tell stories about life, the universe and everything.
Día de los Reyes Magos
Tapas: olives, Spanish tortilla, chorizo, bread
On January 6th each year we celebrate Día de los Reyes Magos (Epiphany) with tapas and Spanish Chocolate.
Thick hot Spanish Chocolate
Paparazzo en Bici
Believe it or not, back in my racing days, this Z jersey actually fit me. Can anyone name the American who was riding for Team Z the same year he won the World Championships and the Tour de France in the same year?
Several years ago I got the idea I could be a paparazzo en bici and photograph races from the middle of the pack. It took practice, several spills, and the right jersey and sunglasses before I got the hang of it.
Tying out my skills at the double barreled "ride by" shooting. Although the skill was as much in getting into position before the timer ran out on the camera I had set on self-timer on a tripod — remember my fotoplanking?
OK I didn't quite make that "ride by" work. You can see from my knee this was not the first time I went down doing these silly selfies.
I decided the Z jersey was cutting off my blood flow, so I changed to my Tarantula jersey, put on my cool Harley Davidson brand sunglasses, I a started to get down how to be a paparazzo en bici.
Got the ride by down.
My racing skills regained!
On Catnip
I went outside and found some fresh, green catnip under the dried catnip, brought it inside and divided it up among the kitties. Sasha and Lola were in kitty ecstasy, rolling around in the catnip and then rubbing on keyboard and chair. The other kitties enjoyed the catnip without as much exuberance.
Spunk doesn't inhale!
We Sprung for a Springy Faucet
Laurie's photo of Sasha and Spunk unpacking the new faucet.
Laurie and Sasha with the new faucet.
Laurie, Lola, Spunk, Sasha and the new faucet.
Laurie surprised by how good the new faucet looks on the new sink.
Laurie braising the pork to go into the black eyed peas.
Laurie celebrating the new year while preparing pork for the black eyed peas.
Najar likes the new black sink.
More Spunk in the New Year
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
New year, new name, the same old place
Spunk looking out for the New Year.
Spunk helping sort through the black eyed peas looking for bad peas. Having black eyed peas on New Year's Day is thought to bring you good luck in the new year. It's more of a Southern tradition not very common in the Southwest, but we do it every year.
Taking a closer look
Spunk filling a stockpot with water in preparation to soak the black eyed peas over night.
Laurie under the lights when we went out to dinner party on Tuesday.
You can read my first installment of Letters from Madrid at Off Center & Not Even POTDE Archives on WordPress if you are interested.
The end that starts a new beginning T – 1 Day
Cranes playing in the orchard
As 2015 closes, so does Photo of the Day, Etc. as it’s been done for the past 2000 consecutive days. With the start of 2016, I’m not going to necessarily do a blog a day, but then I’m not going to limit myself to only one post per day either. After I moved the photo blog for WordPress to T and L Photos in February, I’ve been generally posting a link to my daily photo blogs on WordPress. The main reason I moved the photo blog from WordPress is that I didn’t like the changes they made for creating new blog posts. I already had to spend a lot of time reducing photos and putting my name on them to minimize what people who were copying photos from my posts could do with them — but then the changes WordPress made to creating posts made it even more difficult to work with photos. My T & L Photos site works well for the photo blog because it’s easy to post photos and the security is really good so people can no longer copy photos off my blog.
I am going to continue to use T & L Photos for my photo blog, but I am going to start using WordPress more for written content that does not have images or is not based on images. While searching through archives for images and content to go with first the “Tales From My Youth…” and most recently the last 25 posts of 2015, I found letters I’d written and my journals from when we lived in Spain, images from when we studied and performed flamenco, artwork and photos from when I was a student in the Art Department, etc. All of this is good blog material, but the photo a day, blog post a day had become too restrictive and inflexible for all the material I’ve been finding, the things I’ve been thinking about doing, and the projects I want to work on. So between the two blogging platforms, I’ll be taking a new approach to art, photography and writing in 2016.
The Day the Film Died T – 2 Days
Our property in Corrales not long after my parents moved here around December 1958. This style of slide mount in this photo was used by Kodak from 1955-1959.
Five years ago, on December 30, 2010, the last roll of Kodachrome film that came off of Kodak's assembly line when they stopped production of the film in 2009 was developed by Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas. Freelance photographer Steve McCurry, who is probably best know for his work for National Geographic, asked Kodak for the last roll of Kodachrome film they produced, shot the film in NYC and then, with no other choice, he had that last roll of film processed at Dwayne's Photo, because it was the last photo lab left in the world that processed Kodachrome film. December 30, 2010 was the last day for commercial processing of Kodachrome. The very last run that used up the remaining supply of chemicals was on January 18, 2011 when Dwayne's Photo processed more than 100 rolls of Kodachrome taken over the previous year by photography students at Webster University. But the processing of the last roll of Kodachrome taken by Steve McCurry on December 30, 2010 marks the day the film died.
This is me taken probably in early 1959. Kodak first used this style of slide mount in 1958/1959, and phased out the slide mount in the first photo during the same period.
The Devil's in the Plumbing T – 3 Days
The start of looking for the source of water coming up under the floor in one of our offices
Some say that "the Devil's in the details", which seems to be the case for legislation that our congress men and women believed they had to pass so they could find out what's in it, but I think the Devil is especially in the plumbing. I can consider myself lucky that I only had a couple of tiny leaks during the installation of the new kitchen sink I got for Laurie after yesterday's round of plumbing at the office. It all begain last month when water started coming up under the floor in Andy's office again.
About 6 months ago, water was coming up under Andy's desk near the wall. After tearing up the floor we found an uncapped drain and capped it. So it was even more mysterious that water was coming up under the floor in a different place last month. We assumed it was another uncapped floor drain that overflowed from what we discovered was a collapsed sewer pipe in the alley behind the office. Once the pipe in the alley was replaced, the wet spot subsided in the office, so we got the carpet cleaned and scheduled capping the offending drain for this week between Christmas and New Year's when the office is closed.
After breaking up the floor, we discovered the sewer lines inside the chase wall that connect the plumbing upstairs, connect to a larger cast iron pipe that run under the floor in the office, and that old cast iron pipe had rusted out and is leaking, but as long as the sewer lines were clear, the leaks were not bad enough saturate the soil and soak up through the floor. So now instead of simply capping an old floor drain, the old cast iron pipe has to be replaced.
Following the pipes back from where the water came up under the floor, the hole got bigger and bigger.
The workers were still breaking up concrete and digging out around the cast iron pipe to expose it when I left in the afternoon.
Crows in the Snow T – 4 Days
Crows in the trees during the snow storm.
Sandhill Cranes Getting ready to land in the Rio Grande with snow covered Sandias in the background
Snow Geese Flying J
99% full moon at 1:00 AM Christmas Morning.
That Sinking Feeling T – 5 Days
Spunk helped me illustrate the problem with our old kitchen sink — a large stock pot did not fit well, and when we had a standard faucet, we couldn't fill a large stock pot directly.
I gave Laurie a new, black kitchen sink for Christmas. We had been looking at large sinks for the past 3 years, but we had put off getting a new sink to go to Paris, and then vet and dental bills have been cutting into our sink budget more recently. The sink we liked the best was well over $1000, but now it is not available, and similar sinks cost even more. I'd stopped by the Habitat for Humanity's Restore occasionally to look for sinks over the past couple of years, but I hadn't found any I liked until last week. They had the black sink I gave Laurie for Christmas, which is not as wide as the sink we were originally looking at, but it had large enough bowls to fit our 16 and 22 quart stock pots, 16 inch skillet, and large mixing bowls, so it was a good compromise at an unbeatable price.
Installing the new sink was fraught with problems, as always seems to be the case with DIY plumbing. The first issue was there were no shut-offs for the water to the kitchen sink. I was thinking there was, but the only shut-off was in the water line for a dishwasher. My first trip to Lowe's was to get shut-offs, and maybe a new faucet that we looked up on Lowe's website and it reported the one we liked was "in-stock". I headed out under mostly sunny skies, but very cold temperatures. Lowe's didn't have the standard in-line shut-offs like I installed in the water lines in the bathroom when I remodeled it back in 2012. They didn't have the faucet either. I got what I thought would be good solution, but then while messing around with the water lines under the sink, I cracked a joint and a light stream of water was spraying in the cabinet, so now I had to cut the pipe much lower than anticipated, so the shut-offs I got wouldn't work.
I ordered the faucet Lowe's didn't really have "in-stock" from Amazon because it was $30 less and with prime shipping I'll get it much sooner than if I had ordered it from Lowe's website. I then left for my second trip to Lowe's to return the shut-offs, and get parts to replace the cracked joint. The sky had become overcast and threatening to snow, and by the time I got back with the parts, a light snow had started falling. I put the new lines together with shut-offs on one end and elbow joints on the other, walked out to the pump house and turned off the water to the house. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground.
I sawed through the water lines under the sink, connected the new lines with shut offs, and secured them to the wall under the sink. I walked back out to the pump house through a quarter inch of snow and turned the water on. I walked back in and discovered a leak around the threads of one of the shut-offs. After tightening it down as far as I could, it was still dripping, so I yelled about the sorry quality of parts, and trudged back out to the pump house, turned off the water, trudged back in and found a rubber washer to put in the sorry shut-off. After tightening the shut-off back on with the rubber washer, I trudged back out to the pump house through about a half inch of snow, turned the water back on, and trudged back inside — success! No leaks.
Next I removed the old sink. When I pushed in the plastic clips to remove the sprayer hose where it was connected to the faucet, the plastic clips broke. I removed the faucet and set it aside while I cut out the countertop to enlarge the hole for the new sink, installed the baskets and drain pipes on the new sink, and put the new sink into the enlarged hole in the countertop and lined up the drain pipes. Now I had to figure out how to secure the sprayer hose onto the faucet or plug the connection. With faucet and sprayer hose in hand, I made my third trip to Lowe's on slushy streets that were starting to freeze to see if, by chance, they had the part I needed or a new sprayer hose that would clip onto the faucet. Of course they had neither, but the plumbing associate who was helping me took a close look at the connection and he suggested a zip-tie might hold it in place. I looked at it, agreed with his assessment, and headed back home.
The zip-tie did indeed secure the sprayer hose to the faucet after I put the faucet in the sink. I set the sink into the hole in the countertop, connected the drains and water, turned on the shut-offs, checked for leaks (none), turned on the hot and cold water, ran water through the drain and checked for leaks (none), grabbed the 22 quart stock pot, called Spunk, and photographed the solution to the dilemma of filling and washing large stock pots and other large pots and pans — a big, black kitchen sink.
Washing large stock pots, 16 inch skillets, large mixing bowls, etc. was difficult in the old sink and we usually ended up as wet as the things we washed.
Laurie got this photo of me cutting out the hole in the countertop so the new sink would fit.
Spunk helping demonstrate the solution to the dilemma of washing large pots and pans — a sink with larger and deeper bowls.
Now we can wash our large pots and pans without getting ourselves as wet.