Tag: photography

Before I punch out…

IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch - 1929.

Just a quick post before “punching out” for the night.   The meetings I’m attending this week are at an IBM facility.   IBM celebrated 100 years of innovation in 2011.   Let’s hope the next 100 are as impact-ful.  These and other former state-of-the-art artifacts grace the lobby.  The placard for this one says:

IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch.  The development of automatic feeding and ejecting mechanisms for keypunches and duplicators helped to increase the speed of key punching and reduce operator fatigue.  The Type 016, introduced in 1929, fed cards into the punching unit and automatically removed or ejected the cards after punching.  It was withdrawn from marketing in 1960.

This one’s even older.   Not electric.  Notice the hand crank.

IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch - 1926.

And it says:

IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch. Brought to market in 1926, the Type 501 automatically recorded on a series of punched cards common fixed data from a master card. This punch operated at the rate of 125 cards per minute, and was withdrawn from marketing in April 1948.

I guess progress is always relative to where you’ve been…

Day and night.

Pink Pentas.

This morning started early, as usual.  I’m leaving for NY again this morning and I still had to pack.  I took a walk out back after a few calls.  This is a shot of one of the recently planted pentas, well in bloom;  with droplets from this morning’s watering still there.

I made it to La Guardia without incident.  This is a shot going over the Whitestone Bridge – perennially under construction.   The sunset was pretty.  I was hoping to get a shot of Manhattan from the port side of the plane, but for some reason, the plane approached from the east on landing, instead of the west, so I missed getting a shot.

Westchester bound.

 

One fine evening.

Some shots from last night.

I had a nice time last night.  First, dinner at the Grove Wine Bar.  Can you believe that appetizer plate?!  I had wine flight #1, bubblies from Italy & France.  Monte had flight #8, Italian reds.  The cappuccino afterwards was almost too pretty to drink, but I’m glad I did, it was one of the best I’ve had in a long time.

Then we headed to One World Theatre for the Diane Schuur concert, which was great.  She played for about 2 hours… with someone on drums, sax and bass.  She sang numbers from Duke Ellington, Chuck Mangione, Stevie Wonder, and Patsy Cline, to name a few, and ended with Amazing Grace, one of my favorites.

A lovely evening, indeed.

Gimme a kiss.

Keeto at about 8 months.

Keeto is about 8 months old.  His flight feathers are in and he has mastered flying.  He loves to sit on his perch in the window, which is about 2 feet away from a hummingbird feeder.   When the hummingbirds fly up to the feeder, I don’t know who is more freaked out, the hummingbirds or Keeto.   He also will fly between Monte and I when we are all sitting down to watch TV.   He seems to be pretty house-trained.   Good thing. …and he loves to give kisses.

Today is day 2 of an absolutely beautiful weekend.   Monte has headed to the lake,  and I am working.   Ok.  Well.  I will be as soon as I post this.

We are looking forward to a fun evening at the One World Theatre.   For Christmas, I gave monte tickets for 2 for the Diane Schuur concert this evening.   I made him humongous paper tickets for the gift.  The real tix are actually at will-call.   But we’re bringing the home-made tickets with us to see if they’ll let us in with them anyway 🙂

Great seats.

Oh, and Happy Earth Day!

My favorite lantana.

Multi-colored lantana bloom.

Lantana grows here in abundance, without needing anything from humans to help it along.  It is one of the great native flowering plants in Central Texas.

We have yellow, orange, purple and white lantana in different places in our yard.   But my favorite is the multi-colored pink & yellow lantana.  Before we built the shop, there was a beautiful, huge multi-colored lantana growing right in the middle of where the slab was to be poured.   It ended up getting torn out.  I’ve mourned the loss of that lantana ever since.

So, today I was very happy to see a new lantana growing in the backyard that is just starting to pop out with those great multi-colored blooms.

Yay!

So pretty.

Friday. Friends. Fun. And fundraising.

MS-150 Tee.

This is the weekend of the annual Houston-to-Austin MS-150 bike ride.  I don’t ride, but I am a sherpa (along with Irene) for 3 friends that are riding:  Lori, Doray and Laura.  For the last 10 years or so, they have been riding and fundraising for the MS-150.  And I ride in the truck with them from Austin to Houston.  We eat every year at Lomonte’s, an awesome Italian restaurant right off I-10.  We stay in the hotel overnight.  I take them to the start line in the morning, and then drive the truck back home.  It’s a sweet deal for me, because I’m home by 10AM saturday morning.  They pedal their way back all-day saturday and sunday.

It’s a fun girls’ weekend – for a good cause.  🙂

Nuff said. Nite nite.

The view from 14A.

Enroute from HPN to ORD.

I made it home tonight by about 11:30.   Yay for no delays or major travel issues.

I am an aisle seat person.   If you want to ask me to swap my aisle seat with your non-aisle seat on a flight so that you can sit next to your honey or your friend, you’d better be a little old lady, or a newlywed.  Ok.   Well.   If it was a window seat, I’d probably swap with you, but *that’s* what I’d be thinking.   You’ll have to bribe me (alot) to swap for the dreaded middle seat.

That being said, I do love looking out the window.   I suspect I look a lot one of those people that you’d think was on their first plane ride.  Oh, and I take pictures out the window, too.   Sometimes even when my electronic devices are supposed to be turned to the off position and stowed.

The plane I flew from White Plains to Chicago today had single seats on the port side of the plane, so my window seat was also an aisle seat.  About as good as it gets on a little regional jet.

Here’s your meaningless factoid of the day…  did you know that American Airlines saves lots of $ a year in lower fuel costs (plane weighs less) because they don’t paint their planes?   Now ya know.

Tuesday. Tax day. Traveling. And a troll.

Troll doll.

At the party, over the weekend, several little kids were there… all about 2 years old.  Monte brought out a box of toy trains and track that they played with at the picnic table on the patio.  I think these were toys that he had as a kid.  In the box was an old troll doll. Remember these guys?    I couldn’t resist….

To those fellow-procrastinators out there…. get those tax returns in today!

I’m off to New York for the week.  Ta-ta!

Sunny morning.

A view inside.

A Monday haiku for you.  Have a great week!

More tulips in bloom.
Tall, pink, yellow…one bent down.
A star is inside.

Wonderful weekend.

Elvis sighting.

We started out this evening with dinner at Z-Tejas downtown with the visiting Three.   Frozen mango marg and a salad for me.   Delicious!

Friday, Saturday and Sunday night… a trifecta of fun.

Walking to our car after dinner, we stopped by a statue store to take some pics.  Ran into the King.   Then we headed over to Lori’s to play a few rounds of a game that Denyse told us about… called Telepictionary.  It goes roughly like this… each person writes a sentence at the top of a piece of paper.  Then they pass it to the right and the next person draws their interpretation of the sentence.  That person folds over the sentence, so the next person can only see their drawing.  And the next person then must write a sentence that captures what their interpretation of the drawing is.  Then this person folds over the drawing and passes the paper to the next person, who can only see the sentence that they wrote from the previous drawing.  This goes on for several more passes.   We had 7 people playing tonight.  When the paper makes its way back to the person who wrote the original sentence at the top of the page, the round is over.

It’s funny to compare the original sentence to the last one on the page.  The shot below is of one my sentences after having made it around the table.

You get the idea.

I love a good party.

Retirement crown.

We had a fun time at Lori’s Friday night.  Tonight we threw a party to celebrate Monte’s retirement.  It was a blast.  I wish every day was a Saturday, with a party  🙂

Monte got a lot of funny gifts:   a double-barreled beer helmet, retiree t-shirt, this lovely retirement crown, wine & champers, a giant inflatable tentacle (yep), to name a few.  The retirement crown was given to him by another friend named Lori, who retired last week herself.   She wore this at her party.   We will pass it on to the next retiree, who will pass it on to the next person that retires, and so on…until all our friends are dead… speaking of which… one gift was a funny little picture book for adults called All my friends are dead.  You can read part of it online here.

Tomorrow… clean up the party and finalize my tax return…

Friday night lights.

Homeward.

Today is Friday the 13th.  It passed without incident.

After work we headed over to Lori & Dave’s house – several friends of ours make an annual visit to Austin, and it’s always a big party when they get here.  Lots of laughs…and lots of mob dancing to 80’s tunes.   🙂

The car in the center of the picture was what I was trying to get a shot of… an old timey volvo or something.  Didn’t turn out, but I like it anyway.

Goodnight!

Beer me, Marge.

Rover's neon.

I love that it’s getting dark later these days.  I can get more things done after work.  But it does tend to make the days longer.

Tonight it was 8:30 by the time we both sat down and and starting thinking about what to do for dinner.  So, we decided to pop out for a quick, late, bite.  We ended up at our local pub, BB Rover’s.

BB Rover’s is a great bar.   Good food.  Nice patio outside.  Tons of beer.  They have over 300 beers from all over the world to choose from every night.   They have a tradition at BBs – once a patron has tried 100 different beers, their name goes up on the 100 Beer Club wall of fame.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to drink all 100 of them in one night.  🙂  To help keep track, they have a form that you can use to check off different beers as you drink them.

We’ve been going to BBs for a long time…over 16 years.  We have friends that have made it to the wall of fame.  But, I can never seem to make progress towards the 100 milestone.   Oh, I’ve tried.   I just dug up my old scorecard.  I have 23 different beers checked off, so far.  But, try as I might, I usually just end up ordering a Stella on draft.  I guess I know what I like.   Maybe I’ll give it another go.   It could happen.

In our travels to the Caribbean, I’ve found some local lagers that I like:  Carib (Trinidad & Tobago), Kalik (Bahamas), Hairoun (St. Vincent & the Grenadines).  But they are hard to find in the US, so they haven’t made it to BB’s checklist.   I guess we’ll just have to keep going down to the islands for a cold one of them.

I’ll leave you with this (source unknown):

The Beer Prayer 

Our lager,
Which art in barrels,
Hallowed be thy drink.
Thy will be drunk, (I will be drunk),
At home as it is in the tavern.
Give us this day our foamy head,
And forgive us our spillage,
As we forgive those who spill against 
us.
And lead us not to incarceration,
But deliver us from hangovers.
For thine is the beer, the bitter, and 
the lager.

Barmen

Little lilies.

Alstroemeria.

We had a very nice weekend at the homestead.  Soon weekends will be full of lake activity, so it’s nice to play homebodies for a while.  We watched the Master’s final round coverage yesterday.  And I grilled a ham on the weber, and topped it off with sweet potato casserole and baked beans.  Everything turned out great.

These little lilies have been blooming every spring that we’ve lived here.  The bulbs are extremely hardy, and can stand drought and hard freezes.   But, their blooms are short lived, lasting only a week or so.  I looked up their name online and am pretty sure they are alstroemeria, aka peruvian lily or lily of the incas.  Your flower factoid of the day:  alstroemeria flowers symbolize friendship and devotion — faithful bloomers.