Another poison day

Today is a another scheduled day for Derek's chemotherapy treatments. As a result, he'll likely feel sick for the next couple of days and may not be blogging. We hope that this won't be the case, but past experience tells us to expect it.

Really cool

When the days get really hot, trust the kids to come up with a neat solution to cool off. Here's our granddaughters so cool idea:










Hooray for the nice days of summer, and... no school!



(Click on picture for large view)

Light pollution

As most of you know from my previous post, one of my hobbies is astronomy. Every now and then, I take a some photos, too.

Last night, seeing that there wasn't a cloud in the sky, I decided to set up scope, and attach my DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera to it. The reason is that that telescope follows the rotation of the sky (caused by the turning of the Earth); astronomical photos normally require several seconds to many hours of exposure time, because we're dealing with very faint light here. Therefore, the camera has to follow the night sky, otherwise the images get "smeared" by the sky rotation.

As it turned out, after only about 3 seconds, the stray light in this city - in my neighbourhood caused by a large shopping centre nearby - and the myriad of unshielded streetlights which throw so much wasted light into the city sky caused the picture to "wash out". Some of this can be overcome by using the current graphics programs (i.e. Photoshop) to overcome some of these problems. Here's an example:





"Orange" light pollution, mostly from sodium vapor lamps












"processed" image.


Click on each image for more detail.

Long weekend

With the long weekend coming up, we're looking forward to better weather (it's been cloudy and rainy for the last several days). Sunshine is in the weather forecast, but let's take that with a grain of salt. I put weather forecasters into the same group as economists, and their track records aren't exactly stellar, as far as I'm concerned.

Derek just went through his second chemotherapy and monoclonal antibody session, and hasn't been blogging - the chemo is having some fairly pronounced side effects. He's beginning to feel better, so I expect that he'll be blogging soon.

Fireworks

Today was Derek's scheduled chemotherapy day - and he's not feeling so hot right now. To give both him and Airdrie some rest tonight, we have our granddaughters here for a sleepover. We haven't seen them very often in the last three weeks. They spent almost a week with their "other" grandparents in Maple Ridge (where the granddaughters have many friends) and then almost another week with Derek and Airdrie in Whistler. Fortunately they all came back a couple of days before the large landslide, which is currently blocking the highway to Whistler came down.


Last night we were invited by our friend in West Vancouver and sat on her balcony to watch the Celebration of Light fireworks. This time, it was China's turn. Here are some pictures, taken with my general purpose 18-200mm Tamron zoom lens:









For more images, click here:



http://www.flickr.com/photos/mimiandpapa/sets/72157606503877604/

The music which was part of this presentation was transmitted by one of our local FM stations. I did not get a sense that this music was well co-ordinated with the visual display - the display was very nice, though. Now, to be fair, our location had us watch the show "sideways". I'm sure that the fireworks were "optimized" for those people who looked at them more directly and were much closer. We were about 5 km (3 miles) from the fireworks barge anchored in English Bay, but there was of course no delay in hearing the music, since it came from the radio next to us.

Derek's on vacation

For those of you who wonder why Derek's last blog update was a couple of days ago: Derek and family are taking a well-deserved break at Whistler this week. I expect that he may be blogging occasionally from there. We're holding the fort here - i.e. watering the flowers, making sure their house is ok, etc. Since we share a duplex, this is an easy task.

I also uploaded a couple more pictures to the "casual" folder - they are "sunset" pictures taken from the living room window a few days ago.

mp3 player comments

Derek has had a frustrating time installing the Zune software. I bought a Samsung mp3 player some months ago, but didn't have anywhere near those problems. The software installed without major bumps along the way, although I seem to recall that a couple of things had to be repeated before things worked correctly (I've never installed a Windows program that didn't have a hitch somewhere during installation). None-the-less, the mp3 player works well - it has most of the options Derek is talking about regarding the Zune player. By the way, the Samsung software runs on the same computer which Derek used to install the Zune player a second time.

The main purpose for which I use this player is through the radio in my van (my radio does not have native mp3 capability), and I listen to it when I'm using the excercise bike on miserable days when the weather makes walking for exercise a challenge.

All-in-all, I haven't had the problems Derek ran into with the Zune software.