Dragon's Orchid Garden

I took my Panasonic Lumix and tripod out to the yard tonight to try to get a great picture of the moon at apogee . It was just rising over the trees and is the closest it has been to earth as a full moon in 18 years. I used at least 5 different settings, but found I miss my old manual 35 mm for this. The one thing I did not do is find the manual focus. That would have done it maybe. I still think the picture is kind of nice, with the focus on my house and the lights inside. I did a better job when the moon was in eclipse . From Blogger Pictures Mara , I took your advice even before I read it! I'm fascinated with astronomy, especially moons. Twice a year we host a Star Party at my library. I am honored to host the St. Petersburg Astronomy Club volunteers who bring their big BIG telescopes out for everyone to look through. Our next Star Party will be in November (damn you, Daylight Savings Time!).

If you missed it, or live in a cave and didn't know about the total lunar eclipse that happened ridiculously early on the morning of December 21st, 2010, I have pictures!  You won't get to see another one from North America until April 15, 2014. Before Wayne and I went to bed that night, we got out the big tripod and my tiny Panasonic Lumix and set them up.  I set the Lumix to it's 'night scenery' setting, because I can't  be bothered to figure out the optimum manual settings.  I also set out warm clothing to jump into when the alarm went off at 3:00AM.  Then we went to bed and I did my usual before sleep reading (I was reading a really good book... Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, which I hope is not a foretelling of the world of the next lunar eclipse in 2014).  The book was so good, that I didn't put the it down until something like 1:30AM.  Two minutes later, the alarm went off.  Wayne, jumped right out of bed and got dressed ...

I've been catching up on reading some of my favorite knitting blogs.  Anne Hanson's KnitSpot  post featured photographs taken from a moving vehicle while on a trip through New York.  I thought about my other favorite knitting blogs and realize that all of them feature photography, not just pictures of knitting, but really good photographs by people who also knit. Anne's post made me think about how I also carry my camera everywhere.  Shooting pictures from a moving vehicle is quite a bit easier with the automatic digital cameras available today.  I don't recommend taking pictures while behind the wheel, with the car in gear and traveling down the interstate at 75 mph, but I admit to doing it.  The following were taken while driving home from south Tampa to north Tampa on a stormy summer afternoon.  They were taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3. Click on any of the pictures to go to my Picasa web album and see them larger. From drive-by ...

Last summer, I bought some yarn. Some really beautiful yarn. Not very much of it...just two balls. It was expensive at $13.00 for 60 meters. This always happens when I go to my LYS, Fiber Art, Inc . There's a forcefield that draws me first into the Noro room, then into the sock yarn room, then I begin wandering all of the other little rooms becoming more and more indecisive because there are just so many "shiny things", and I end up with an armload of yarns with no definate plans for their use. But they look really nice stacked into my antique cedar armoire and I WILL use them. They're insurance. The yarns and the patterns I've collected (my 3 inch binder is almost full, plus 2 dozen knitting books and this just since I restarted knitting in May 2009 with my sister's shawl as the first project) are and affirmation of life. I intend to use all of them someday, and I'll have to live forever in order to do so. The yarn I selected that day last summer was No...