Roesntcrantz has had a difficult time the past few weeks. He got a piece of food stuck between his gums and back teeth, which became infected and the infection did a lot of damage to his kidneys. He spent three days in the kitty hospital last week getting fluids and antibiotics. I brought him home last Saturday morning and we are "waterboarding" him twice a day now (subcue fluids), and he just finished his last round of antibiotics. I took him in for a checkup and blood work Wednesday morning. His temperature was normal, he had gained a little weight (could have been from the waterboarding), and his BUN had come down 100 points from 258, but is still way too high, so the vet had us increase the fluids to 200 Milliliters twice daily.  

After his morning waterboarding, Rosencrantz likes to go outside and lounge in the cosmos and have us rub catnip on him. He nibbles at it and rubs his face in it, but he swears he doesn't inhale. I told Laurie it's medical catnip because he enjoys it so much, perks up a lot and seems to feel much better after rolling around in it, having it rubbed all over him and nibbling on it.

The sunflowers have been reaching for the sky for over a month, but just over the past week or so their blooms have gotten ahead of the grasshoppers, so you can see how overgrown and tangled up with the cosmos they are. Guildentsern was good enough to lie on one of the paths for scale. Walking the paths through the garden with the cosmos at eye level and the sunflowers towering above you is like walking through a labyrinth with kaleidoscope sides.

Turning my lens to the night sky, I was surprised to find a praying mantis in space.

Najar and Sasha inside looking out of the catio. The middle photo is a Siamese that was in the neighbor's yard. Since this is Labor Day, I have been laboring to replace the bathtub after the one I put in three years ago when I remodeled the bathroom cracked. It was a plastic tub with thick styrofoam on the base of the tub. I don't think the styrofoam was stable and the bottom of the tub and it cracked in several places. I replaced it with a modern steel tub with a porcelain finish and a fiber coating surrounding the outside of the tub. It's as thick as a cast iron tub, but much lighter, although it weighs a lot more than the plastic tub, so it was a lot of work wrestling it into place. Since the dimensions are slightly different between the two tubs, I had to redo the plumbing to make it all line up properly. 

After I got the tub set and the drain connected, I was working on adjusting the piece of wood that slides into the opening under the tub that gives me access to the drain connections. I had walked back in from making a cut, and I saw Sasha's tail disappear into the opening where she was able to crawl under the floor. While I was really mad at her, it was good I saw her slip into the opening, otherwise, I would have sealed her in the floor under the tub. 

I finally got the shower enclosure back up, so the new tub is ready to go. All I need to do now is finish the area around the top of the enclosure and put the tracks back in for the ceiling. I finished the ceiling a few months ago after thinking about it for almost three years, only to take it apart to remove the shower enclosure so I could remove the cracked tub.

We got more decent blooms on some of the various sunflowers we planted in early summer.

The sun had not come up as I approached I-25 in my Mazda RX-8 on my way to meet Tristan at the Mazda dealer. She dropped off her Mazda RX-8 for maintenance and repairs and we rode into work together from there.

Engine housings and rotors from a Mazda RX-7 (left) and Mazda RX-8 (right) that sit on the service counter at the Mazda dealer. They are small, 1.3 liter engines that are turn out 232 hp at 8,500 rpm. 

We planted a variety of sunflowers, and they have all grown up, but the grasshoppers have been chewing off the buds before they can bloom. The grasshoppers must be slowing down because the sunflowers are finally getting ahead of them.

A few pics from a walk along the southern edge of Downtown Albuquerque.

Disney land as it would be put into a slide projector

If you are old enough to remember Kodachrome slide film, you might remember how vivid and saturated the colors were. Kodachrome was a complicated and expensive process, but the results of a well exposed slide could be quite spectacular. Kodachrome was introduced in 1935 and Kodak stopped manufacturing it in 2009, and ended processing in 2010.

There is talk in these times of digital photography about whether photographers who shoot raw files and then process them in Photoshop or other image processor are cheating. I say processing raw files is not cheating because it's really no different from processing and printing negatives. If you shoot JPEGs, then your camera is making the adjustments for you. So which is cheating? Having the camera make the adjustments to the raw file or the photographer making the adjustments to a raw file? I prefer to make my own adjustments to raw files.

Since some people have the idea that making adjustments to digital images is cheating, they must believe there is some form of "pure" photography or "pure" images that somehow define the perfect photograph. In the world of digital photography I can't imagine what a "pure" image would be or what a perfect photograph might be. There are so many options available for making an image fit a mood, and look the way the photographer would like it to look, that I believe all manipulation is fair in digital photography. The only cheaters are people who steal other photographers' images and claim them as their own.

Using slide film is probably as close to "pure" photography as anyone can get — the composition in the slide is what it is (cropping is done with the camera), the color is determined by the exposure, and the quality of the exposure is in the quality of the slide, no "ifs", "ands" or "buts" about it. The image could be cropped and enhanced by having a print made from the slide, but the slide is the "raw" image and as close to a "pure" photographic image as anyone is going to get. All the images in this post are photographs of slides I had taken in the early 1980's (only the first two photos show the full cardboard holder the slides are mounted in).

Disneyland upright, but still reversed left to right

Spike

Woman in Red (Laurie's sister)

Kid, our first Manx

Notice how vivid the red and black in the dress is

Scorpion in a shower

A sassy gander up close and personal

My Saint Bernard, Pepper

Soft focus effect using a sheer piece of cloth

The Sandias from Rio Rancho. This area is completely built up now.