Happy Easter

Nimue is happy to report that she received a solid chocolate bunny, as well as numerous   jellybeans and assorted goodies.

We had Todd and Sarah and kids over for Easter dinner; as usual, Todd and Chad performed demented Easter Bunny duty. 

 Kids move too fast for photos while searching for eggs.

A yummy birthday chocolate cheesecake was snuck in at the end.  Mmmm...chocolate.

March goes out like a lion and brings April flowers

We finally got some rain at the end of March, and I've ridden my bike way too much lately, leading to an uncharacteristic lack of bike motivation, so last week I took a day to go search out wildflowers at Santa Teresa County Park.  This park down in the south part of San Jose is on many lists as a local wildflower hotspot; I took my mom here last year when she visited at the end of May, only to find that that was a little too late.  I had to go back.

 This year, perhaps I was a little too early.  Still it didn't stop me from finding a couple of lovely hillsides full of flowers, and a total of at least 30 species that I was able to at least tentatively identify.  Much of the landscape is on serpentine, which around here at least seems to lead to numerous interesting blooms.  Here are a few for you to enjoy:

Two of my favorites -- cream cups and blue-eyed grass.  I just find them aesthetically pleasing (and easy to identify!), and I just like the name blue-eyed grass.

The poison oak is looking glossy and fecund.  I'm not sure I was ever aware that it flowered visibly before.  Evil itchy stuff.

I can't help but include the teasel for my mom, who famously made my dad stop on the side of the road to collect some on a long-past family vacation.  Species name dipsacus, so y'all learn a new word.  Invasive, but sort of cool and sculptural.

Topsy-turvey two-toned tidytips.  I don't remember taking this (must've been an accident!), but like the alliteration.  And the lopsided-ness.

A couple of new ones for me:  this poisonous Blue Witch, and the bright pink checkerbloom

The park itself is fairly small, but you can still pack in an 8 1/2 mile hike and not hit all the trails, with views of both Mt. Hamilton to the east and Mt. Umunhum to the west.  (yes, there are views of Hamilton without the power lines, but I am constantly amused by the urban/wild interfaces around here.

Along with all the flowers, there were a number of bugs and critters to stalk.  There seemed to be a particularly large number of turkeys -- the last shot is of one getting a running start just before it took off in flight and glided over a 100 foot ravine to get away from me.  I didn't know they could do that...most amazing.

One tough kiddo

The Small One, after walking 59 laps at her school walk-a-thon last week.  She just didn't stop -- not for bathroom, not for food, not for drink.  I periodically handed her sustenance from the sidelines like one of those people who hold out the bags of food and water bottles during bike races.

Then she skiied powder all weekend, in keeping with the mantra "Be tough like Ma!"  Good kiddo.

Who Did You Bite??

I came home the other day to find thick gooey bloodstains on the carpet.  (Cat toy included for scale)

Hmmm.  A grisly feline offense, perhaps?  The two cats don't get along, so my first thought was to check out victim kitty (aka Mariam).

No sore spots.

Check out the Bobber:  also no sore spots.  Nothing else out of place.
A closer look at evil kitty revealed some tell-tale spots on her fur under her chin that she was unable to clean off.  Aha -- evil kitty is indeed the perpetrator.

But who did she bite?

I've been waiting all week for the other shoe to drop.  Mariam hasn't shown any signs of being bitten.  One fears some hapless small critter snuck in through the garage when we weren't looking, only to be met by compulsive Fang-O Bobber.  Something will start to smell.

I ran the roomba, even though I feared it would drag some small carcass out from under the couch by its mangled foot.  Nothing.

Days later, there is still no reek.  Maybe she ate it wholesale?  A mystery, and Bobber's not telling.

PG&E entertains the neighborhood

I never really thought about how power poles in people's back yards were replaced before.

(seen on the way home from school)

Collaboration

I happen to really like the label that Nimue and Chad created for Chad's most recent batch of beer.  (For those not in the know, Space Kitty Commander #1155 Smudge Gizmo is Nimue's alter ego, who writes many of her school reports and shows up all over her drawings.)

Happy Spring

Though it's been raining all weekend, I did get out earlier in the week to investigate the early-season wildflowers over at Pulgas Ridge Open Space Reserve.  Here are a few for you in more northerly climes to enjoy:

Star lily and red trillium

 

Bush poppy and bigberry manzanita

 

Giant lupine and mission bells

 

Lotus stipularis (I think it is anyway; this one is endemic to Ca)

And of course, the obligatory banana slug.

Lego VW Bus build

I got this wonderful Lego kit for Christmas, from my family -- I actually built it soon thereafter (with help from my trusty assistants, Nimue and the cat) and took photos as the assembly progressed. I just now got around to turning the pictures into a time-lapse movie, which you can see below!

It turns out, I am not by any means the only one to have thought of this... these guys (amongst many others) did much the same thing, but in far greater detail and with more finesse... their video looks great! 

For the technically interested (and for myself, so I can remember how I did this), I used the following steps to make the movie from my collection of stills:

1) Export images from iPhoto into a working directory. There were 88 photos for this sequence.

2) Resize images to something more suitable for use on the web:

mogrify -resize 800x600 *.JPG

3) Change the filenames from something like 'DSC_2835.JPG' to 0001.JPG, keeping a numerical sequence. For this, I used a Perl script (based on the canonical Larry Wall 'rename' but with a mod to handle the sequential numbering; found here):

rename.pl 's/^[^.]+\./sprintf("%04d.", $n)/e' *.JPG

4) Build the video. I initially tried qscale = 2, which resulted in a 9.3MB file -- too big for sharing on the web! qscale = 10 gave a more reasonable ~1.3MB filesize.

ffmpeg -qscale 10 -r 10 -b 9600 -i %02d.JPG bus10.mp4

Done!

If I were to do this again, I'd definitely get a remote control for the camera, and take lots more stills to smooth out and lengthen the animation.

Ma + Ni + Da = Happy!

On the thirteenth (which is also Gramma Eileen's birthday), Daddy adopted me. We went to a big courthouse in San Jose, and we waited what felt like hours but was really only forty or fifty minutes, and we saw a judge who told Ma and Daddy to sign stuff, and we said a few things, and then we went home/back to school/to work, but not before eating a delicious lunch! The great thing is that I got to skip Math Class!