Hydrangeas

A few months ago, Dave and I bought some lush, colorful hydrangeas at Shop-Rite and put them on our balcony. One was bright pink and the other the standard dusky blue. They looked great for weeks and weeks, but eventually, as all hydrangeas do, they began going to seed. The flowers got dry and faded; the leaves began to curl and brown at the edges.

Dave wanted to throw them out, but I just couldn't do it. They were still alive, with green buds and leaves and thick stems. They looked pretty ragged, but I wanted to give them a chance.

We asked our apartment complex if we could put them in the ground in front of our building. Control freaks that they are, the managers said no. Yesterday we planted them anyway. (Come and get us, managers!) We'll see if they survive. I'll help them out with occasional watering.

Last night Dave and I went to a Drum Corps International show in Trenton. Like my first DCI show, this one impressed me with the precision of the marching and music. I still think it's weird that they throw around fake guns, though.

Somehow I didn't notice last year that DCI groups are all brass, drums and color guard. There are no woodwinds and even no trombones. Dave says this is because the groups grew out of a bugle corps tradition. Seems like they'd want to add more instruments to achieve a greater variety of sound.

(Photo: Cat stencil in SoHo, two weeks ago. I miss my cat!)

Night

After my recent post about the impossibility of photographing fireflies, my friend Kevin suggested I try to shoot them using a tripod and the manual settings on my camera.

I'd been thinking about buying a tripod. But fortunately Dave already had one -- a mini-tripod that he used with his own point-and-shoot digital camera. Last night, I screwed my camera onto Dave's tripod and went out to the field behind our apartment.

Unfortunately, there weren't many fireflies around. The field has been mowed, and it's also been bloody hot the past few days -- maybe these factors diminished their activity. The few shots I took of fireflies alone turned out muddy and unfocused, with faint green blurry dots or streaks. (How does one focus a camera in pitch darkness, anyway?)

So I turned the camera lens on our apartment building, and got some cool shots. This one includes a few fireflies, visible as green streaks. I like how the lights in my neighbors' windows blaze as brightly as suns. In a larger resolution (click photo), there's more detail to the building, the trees and the grass, and the stars are visible in the sky.

Butterfly Park

Yesterday afternoon I took a spin on the bike over to the local butterfly park, which isn't far from our apartment. The paths at the park lead through both cultivated, blooming gardens and wild forests, and I got some good photos of various critters. Ironically I didn't find many butterflies -- maybe it's too early in the summer? -- but I did find lots of birds and insects.

Several white butterflies like the one above were bobbing and weaving around the flowers along the path, but they were very hard to photograph. They landed only briefly before flitting away.


Many of the flowers were loaded with bees.


My most exciting find was this grey-bodied bird with a bright pink head. I think it's a house finch. It was bathing in this puddle, but took flight just as I snapped a picture. It flew to a nearby branch and sat for a while, watching me. This was the clearest shot I could get:


I also saw robins, redwing blackbirds and woodpeckers. Then I went riding for a while before coming back home to a welcome shower.

More Pigeons and Fun Links

Here are a few more variations on yesterday's pigeon photo. I really liked these shots, and with all the pigeons whirling around my head I took several versions to catch them (and their shadows) in action.




And here are a few links I've been meaning to share:
-- Remember Mr. T cereal? I bought it briefly in college because I thought it was pretty funny. It tasted like Cap'n Crunch. Tagline: "I pity the fool who don't eat my cereal".
-- This site is an interesting collection of images of old Afghanistan, before we, the Taliban and the Soviet Union all turned the country into a giant crater.
-- The New Yorker recently had a hilarious article about the peculiarities of the Eurovision song contest, in which European countries each enter a pop act to compete for subcontinental top honors. Here is the Lithuanian act InCulto, which apparently became a gay favorite at Eurovision when the boys whipped off their plaid pants and paraded around in spangly shorts while singing about their "Eastern European kinda funk." (After reading The New Yorker's description I had to look it up.)
-- Here is the other gay fave, from Greece. I kinda dig this song, actually.

Cipher in the Snow

Do any of you remember seeing a film in school called "Cipher in the Snow"? I was reading an article about bullying this morning in Newsweek, and it made me flash back on this movie.

I saw it in sixth grade or so. The story follows a quiet, bullied boy who mysteriously drops dead in the snow after getting off the school bus. His teachers are left to figure out what happened. The upshot is that he died from lack of love; he was essentially ignored and bullied until his heart stopped.

I got online and, of course, found the movie on YouTube. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here. Background info can be found on the Wikipedia page here.

Apparently, the movie was produced by Brigham Young University, which kind of blows my mind. What was my public school doing showing a movie with roots in the LDS Church? Seems like that should have raised a few eyebrows, even though the film contains no overt religious message.

Anyway, I remember it freaked me out. I was already feeling more than a little socially awkward, and I identified with the scene where the boy goes on a long walk picking willows and gets yelled at by his stepfather for daydreaming and ignoring his chores. I was bullied, I wandered, I daydreamed -- did all this mean that I could just drop dead?

The movie was effective enough that I've remembered it all these years. But I wonder if the school was really right to show it -- not only because of its LDS connection but because it was scary and perhaps not entirely realistic.

(Photo: Pigeons in a parking lot, Manhattan, last week.)

Colorful Van

When I was a kid, I wanted to live in a van. In the mid-70s my mom worked with a long-haired guy named Jeff who had a cool custom van, with an interior entirely covered in blue shag carpeting and a kitchenette. We all went out to the parking lot to look at it once, because my mom knew I was into vans.

I wonder if she knew there was undoubtedly a whole lot of pot being smoked in that van?


I was into motor homes, too. The idea of being able to take your house on the road just seemed unspeakably cool. Of course, at that age, I wasn't thinking about driveability or gas mileage.

Speaking of vans, I came across this gem while walking in Bushwick a couple of weeks ago. It's common to see panel trucks with elaborate graffiti decoration, but it's unusual to see graffiti -- especially such good graffiti -- on a van.

Recycling

We have three dumpsters in the refuse area for our apartment building. Two are for garbage and one is for recyclables like metal, glass and cardboard.

For months now, I've been separating our trash and throwing the recyclables into the recycling dumpster and the garbage into the others. But I've noticed that many people completely disregard the distinction and throw any and all garbage into any of the dumpsters. Part of the problem is that the two garbage dumpsters aren't large enough and always wind up overflowing before pickup day, so people resort to using the recycling dumpster for garbage.

Earlier this week, I was carrying some recyclables to the dumpster while the garbage truck happened to be there. To my surprise, the driver told me it didn't matter which dumpster I threw the recycling into -- he put it all in the same truck. I asked, do the recyclables actually get recycled? He said the garbage was separated at the utility plant.

Well, this seemed pretty puzzling to me. Why have people go through the trouble of separating their trash if it all ultimately gets thrown together in the same garbage truck?

I called the town recycling center and was surprised by the answer. For single-family homes and many multi-family developments, separating trash works. But apparently because my apartment community has so few dumpsters, the trash gets comingled to such a degree that the garbage collectors have essentially given up on us. And contrary to what the driver said, the recycling coordinator told me that all the trash in our development goes to the landfill. It's not cost effective to separate it.

Of course, as a committed recycler, I'm really disappointed to hear this news. No matter what I do, my trash is all destined to be buried, because my neighbors so completely disregard the separating instructions.

I asked the recycling coordinator if there were any other options. He said I could drive my recyclables to the recycling center in town, but that seems counterproductive because of the gas I'd use to get them there. (It's not in a part of town I'm likely to pass otherwise.)

Ugh! So much for environmentalism!

(Photo: Steps on the side of a petroleum tank, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.)