jgrussell – my world

Sunday, it was back to the same-old, same-old, with the birdies in the backyard. This lovely house finch seemed to be studying me every bit as much as I was studying her!

Who's studying who?

Saturday we took the boys to the Liberty Science Museum. It has a lot of hands on exhibits, though not everything in the building should be considered hands on…

Hands off the reptile!

The boys each got to choose which animal they wanted to do a report on to be a Junior Zoologist — and to my astonishment both of them chose snakes.

Dennis the zoologist supervised by Mom

I personally was a lot more comfortable when we got into rooms where the focus was on things like wind power…

Duncan directing wind at power wheel

… or understanding geothermal energy…

Duncan learning geothermal energy

… or even climbing a rock wall!

Dennis climbing the rock wall

Months and months ago, my brother Bill, his wife Carolyn and I agreed that we would get tickets for the August 28th night game at Yankee Stadium — the Yankees against the Chicago White Sox. Carolyn is a Cubs fan so she wouldn’t mind seeing the White Sox lose, and Bill simply loves sports. It was to be the first regular Major League game for my nephews Dennis and Duncan, and I’m doing my best to turn the boys into Yankees fans (as long as they’re not playing the Cubs, that is). Almost as soon as I got the tickets, Bill discovered he’d be on travel this weekend and wouldn’t be able to make the game. Fortunately for me, the rest of the family was willing to make the trek without Bill (and another sibling took the extra ticket) and we headed off to the Bronx on a chilly, dark, rainy Friday afternoon.

The first thing that struck me was that I was really surprised at how very much I like the new Yankees Stadium. I didn’t expect that, because I loved the old one. But this one immediately won a place in my heart. It’s big, but feels intimate. Even though we were in Section 315, the view was terrific — there aren’t many bad seats in the place. The beer is still cold (there are even cupholders in the new seats), the hotdogs still warm, and I was able to turn six hand-held shots into this panorama of the new stadium (you have to click on the image to see it bigger):

The new Yankee Stadium

(Some of my camera friends thought the image should be brighter, so here’s another view with brighter processing — but the one above is really what the stadium looked like then!!)

A brighter view

Dennis was thrilled to be at the major league park and the wet seats and light drizzle didn’t seem to bother him one bit.

Dennis

Duncan is nowhere near as much of a sports fan as Dennis, but he was game, and was a real trouper throughout the long rainy evening. (Hotdogs and popcorn helped a bit, here and there.)

Duncan

It’s awfully hard to argue with a baseball game that starts the real action with a home run by one of your favorite players. Watching Derek Jeter swing for the fences and blast a first inning home run was a fantastic way for the boys to begin what we can all hope will be a lifelong love of baseball (and the Yankees, right, Carolyn?).

Jeter swinging for the fences

Got a few other action shots during the game… Mark Teixeria swinging away…

Teixeria at bat

… CC Sabathia with yet another strike…

Sabathia throwing strikes

… but with the rain continuing to fall and the very real chance of a rainout looming at any moment, all I really wanted out of the entire game was to get to the middle of the third inning. I know Carolyn kept wondering why I kept saying I would be perfectly happy if we could just get in three innings in the game (she knows perfectly well you need five for a legal game)… but she found out during the middle of the third inning when I told the boys to make sure they watched the left-center field video board…

Yankees welcome!

At that point I basically sat back and enjoyed the game (5-2 Yankees with a three-run walk-off home run by Robinson Cano in the bottom of the 10th!!) and brought the camera out from under the poncho I was wearing only rarely… such as for the seventh inning groundskeepers…

Y-M-C-A!

… and to see if I could even begin to capture the weather…

Baseball in the rain

A good night, a lot of fun, and we really did miss you, Bill! (Well, maybe not Kacy so much, but…)

I drive past this location often, since it’s on the route from the law school to the office. Had a moot court executive board meeting today and decided, finally, that the time had come to get a shot. Makes you wonder about the sign and all… this seems to me to be simply… the door to nowhere.

Door to nowhere

I’m beginning to be convinced — totally and absolutely convinced — that all my friends have changed both their first names and their last names. Seems that just about all the calls I get these days are from these renamed friends with the first name of “Unknown” and the last name of “Caller.”

Story of my life...

Long day today with lots of things that had to be done and nowhere near enough time to do them. Got my car brakes repaired and ended up with a loaner where first I couldn’t find the parking brake release (reason: there isn’t one; you have to put your right foot on the regular brake and left foot on the parking brake and press both until the parking brake releases!) and then couldn’t find the gas cap release (and the gas station attendant couldn’t find it either! turns out you have to push on a particular PART of the gas cap… geez…), so when it came time to get a photo of the day, well, I was stumped for a while. Then my eyes fell on a small glass bottle that had turned on its side on the cabinet, and it struck me that, well…

The genie escaped!!!

The fall semester at the law school seems to begin earlier and earlier each year. Somehow starting classes on the 24th of August seems just wrong… it’s still summer… it’s too early… should be after Labor Day. But… somehow they also expect the professors to be in their classrooms…

First day of class

I’ve discovered that it’s a great deal easier to get a cat to sit still for a photo if you shoot from way across the room with a telephoto lens… Even Clancy — who usually sticks his snout in the lens to see what I’m doing — wasn’t paying too much attention this way!

Looking up

It was a nasty, rainy, overcast, grey day today, totally spoiling my plans for getting great photos at a park in the Meadowlands. (Try shooting from under a poncho. Not fun.) So when I got home, I decided to play around in the backyard with a flash enhancer called a Better Beamer. Neat toy, and very effective at creating light where there is none.

"Beaming" sparrow

It’s hard to believe that we’re already in week 11 of the farm share this season. If anybody told me six months ago that I would happily get up early on a Friday morning to be able to pick up my farm share at 8 a.m. (had other chores to run later in the morning), I’d have laughed at ’em. But that was before I started this, and before I had gotten things like fresh raspberries…

Raspberries

… or fresh grown jalapeno peppers…

Jalapeno peppers

… or snap beans right out of the garden…

Snap beans

… or fresh greens for my daily lunch salads…

Greens

… and long before I fell head over heels in love with summer squash…

Summer squash

… which is a very good thing, because even after giving away two pounds this week, I still have four more pounds to cook and freeze!!!