elainegrey

Eclipse trip was lovely but exhausting. I've had to catch up on sleep. It was damp, so unpacking needed also drying time. I have most stuff up now, so that's a good record for me.

Nothing can capture the awe i feel during an eclipse. All the astounding astrophotography is gorgeous, but it's not the experience.  I don't plan to fly to Iceland or Spain for the next one -- but i'm urging my Dad to take his sweetie to see the total eclipse in the north of Spain. And if they offered to take me.... well, it's really tempting. The video tries to get some composite representation of the change in the light..

I've been working on the sciencey data collection and documentation, with a little frustration that it is slow going.

I'm disappointed that my work in putting a schedule in a timer app on my phone failed: i was using an exercise app that you can put in text that is read out and then the duration. I had "exercises" like "corona visible in 45 seconds" and it would read that out and then in the last three seconds of the exercise it would read out "three, two, one" and then read the next "exercise," "Corona." The time drifted. I think there's a few seconds between exercises. So i turned that off and "winged it." I hadn't brought my written out plan, so the different time lapse rates are not symmetric around the totality and  i turned off the camera before the eclipse was over.

I've spent this week fixing a four frames that had problems and figuring out what to do with some dropped frames. I'd forgotten to turn the power supply on for the aged GoPro, and it started beeping and turning off. I thought it was overheating, so i wrapped it in foil, getting two frames with significant foil in view. There were also two frames during totality where the camera took very short exposures (while recording full exposure times). I've adjusted the exposure (and a little color on the wind sock).All shades of my dissertation experiment where i spent years trying to get beamline contamination removed from the signal. One frame is still ugly, and it gets doubled due to missing frames: but it's good enough. I will not let perfection get in the way of completion over that frame.

The drops in exposure did get me thinking, and so i extracted metadata from the images and was able to extract the light level the camera shot for. I recognize both our eyes and the camera adjust to the light levels, so i didn't want to try and adjust all the exposures to give an objective sense of the actual change in light. Instead, plotting the light level the camera shot for with the temperature measured gives a nice sense of how the light change happens ahead of the temperature change.

This demo appears to have the graph synced with the video, but it is just proof of concept. It's "impressive" how folks animate the graphs. Essentially you are sliding a piece of virtual paper off the graph to reveal it. Hey, it works. I just need to get the rate change points lined up.

As part of marking my new year, i am trying to record the mundane day to day aspects of my life. The larger arc doesn't change much. Big personal changes recently included our move to NC in mid 2016, Mom's stroke in late 2018, and my ceasing engagement with a (Quaker) Monthly Meeting in mid 2021.

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I'm in my mid fifties, and have been married to Christine for over thirty years. She and i met in high school and married after college. I understood who she knew she was before we married: it took many years for her to be in a position where she was ready for expressing her true gender to everyone. She changed her name and gender markers in the early 2000s.

I attended college in North Carolina, graduate school in physics at the University of Pennsylvania. My long tenure as a graduate student was because i was also taking a life class in major depression. I eventually set a deadline for myself, got pneumonia that set me back and mde me miss my deadline. I took a job as a systems administrator for the Franklin Institute, and then, in 2000, and old friend recruited me for a job in San Francisco. In 2000, a non-profit had no chance of hiring technical staff in San Francisco as everyone chased the dot com boom. From our archive nonprofit, we watched the bust. Churn at that non-profit led me to a job at a non-profit that works for libraries, museums and archives. In 2006 that non-profit (the minnow) merged with a much larger but quite similar non-profit (the whale).

After some extremely stressful years, the management at The Whale became more stable for the technical teams. I moved from management to technical and systems architecture, and am very happy with my work in authentication and authorization systems.

In 2016 we left the Bay area -- the rising rents and the droughts -- and moved back to North Carolina. My family knew my mother's mind was declining: in late 2018 she had a massive stroke just days after receiving a diagnosis of Cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a condition in which proteins build up on the walls of the arteries in the brain. CAA increases the risk for stroke caused by bleeding and for dementia. My father became my mother's primary carer. While the prognosis was clear to me in the days after the stroke, it took several years for my father to understand that not only was my mother not going to "get over" the stroke, but that she was actually going to continue to decline. In mid 2021 he hired help, B--, a woman he met when she was tending bar at one of his pre-COVID hangouts.

My sister L-- lives nearby with her husband T--, and teen children W-- and E--. She quit her job in late 2019 for several reasons, one of which included spending more time caring for our Mom. My brother N-- lives in Singapore with his wife M--, and his teen boys Z-- and D-- and youngest daughter S---.

I was active in different Quaker monthly meetings over the past 20 years. The meeting i began attending in North Carolina I felt led to join as a stretch. It was not the large university or urban meeting, it came from a different branch of Friends. I felt comfortable and welcomed, but it took a long time for me to realize the meeting's understanding of Quakerism is rather different than mine. In mid 2021, i left the meeting informally, and currently am pursuing my spiritual leadings in a solitary way. I had engaged in Friends' community for the practice of community: i feel that bringing what i have learned to the community that is my family is where i should be at this time.

My engagement with photography and yarn craft has fallen by the side as i now passionately engaged in co-creating a sustainable, more ecologically balanced environment on our four acre lot. "Yard work" and "gardening" mean so many things to me, and they feed my energy.

Maryland style crab cakes are so not "cakes" but, wow, is it a delicious way to prepare crab. I used this recipe, scaled down by a quarter but with a whole egg and some celery, and made it while Christine was out of the house. Her trip depressed her, and i feel a little guilty not joining her -- i could have distracted her! Or not encouraged a drive down memory lane on a dismal day! -- but i cooked and ate, took another photo for my daily gallery, and made progress in garden planning.

The photo is not as in focus as i would like, and i need to learn how to use this macro lens in which i invested. However, i got all the right kit out, after several backs and forth, and think i have things packed back up in a way that will ease getting out my "mini studio" for a shoot. The ring light -- some cheap thing from almost a year ago that was an asked-for gift -- worked just right.

Today's forecast is YET MORE CLOUDS.

I attended a Quaker worship with a deep hour of waiting worship. I need this, having lost the habit, and having less time weeding mosses as i did in my first years here. Midway during worship i had the clarity that i am afraid and that it is safe to be afraid. I don't have much experience with letting myself feel fear, but i think i've held those feelings away during this pandemic. It was a little free floating fear, a mishmash of pandemic, my memory and my mother's dementia, and something around Quakers and separating myself from my current meeting for what i need. That's got fear of failure mixed in it, which is a fear i suppress and which leads to a good bit of my depression. Anyhow, the safety of my faith allows feeling the fear, faith that i can be the person with my feelings, and that it is better to be her than a person without. It was good, a bit of clearing away.

One small problem, i realize, is that for years my meditations were visualized as work in imaginary gardens. These visualizations now get pulled into concrete gardening thoughts: not meditations. I think i might be able to continue if i make the visualizations more fantastic and ethereal.

Monday: productive? Wow, cannot remember.

Tuesday: afternoon was spent with my parents at an surreal and time consuming appointment. At the UNC Cancer hospital they ask you to show up 30 minutes in advance. Then we were called for the appointment 30 min late. So, an hour spent hanging out with my parents is valuable, but not planned. Next, the resident explained that they were puzzled why we were there because Mom doesn't have cancer, and they do cancer. We spent probably an hour with the resident and then the doctor who did Mom's first biopsy.

Thinking this was where we would be told about the pulmonary fibrosis, ( i still learned some things )

Mom left feeling great. Yay! No cancer! (Which we had known.)

I left feeling like they had given strong indications that mom (likely) has a fatal diagnosis. On the other hand, if it were me, i would be relieved at having a diagnosis that could take effect and not leave me lingering in a dementia twilight, with the possibility of more strokes making me dependent on others for bodily care. But i can't tell how well Mom can think through things with the dementia in place.

Christine's brother has recently been given a memory loss diagnosis and is receiving Alzheimer's medications. Their mother died of complications from Alzheimer's, and Christine fears getting it herself. It doesn't help that this is the sibling from whom she is most estranged.

Wednesday i worked from Mom & Dad's. Dad had forgotten that Mom had a physical therapy appointment and it threw him for a bit of a loop: i recognize the way a small perturbation can cause outsized distress from my own wrestlings. He ended up only going grocery shopping and not taking the boat out.

I brought over to them a "pre-ferment" for making sourdough rye waffles. Dad added the egg and salt but not the baking soda when he made them for lunch. I thought they were quite good, Dad would have preferred them to be harder and more cracker-like. I had added sugar per the recipe, but it wasn't particularly sweet. They were delicious with fresh tomato from my sister's and my garden, mayo, salt, and pepper.

I off loaded many large slicing tomatoes to them. I'm trying to get ahead of my garden as i will be out of town Monday through Friday next week.

Yesterday: i took the bread pre-ferment that had been bubbling since Wednesday early and the rye berries i'd soaked, and made bread loaves. This time i remembered to let them rise. That makes a big difference! I didn't add malt or sunflower seeds, but did add caraway (or fennel seed, not sure which), coriander from the garden, and molasses. Next time i think letting the rye sprout even more would be good. The loaves baked beautifully, although they spread out horizontally a bit more than rising up. I may use a bread pan resting on the baking stone next time to see about a more square loaf.

This morning the loaf end with cream cheese is delightful.

Work was busy, and i had a little headache.

We've had a touch of rain that has filled the bottom of the tank. That's gratifying.

I have started binging on season two of Once Upon A Time (still using fast forward occasionally).

I set up an Acurite weather monitoring system and hooked it into WeatherUnderground. I don't know why, when this page finishes loading, the temperature changes from the correct value to some confusing representation (Celsius, but the interface thinks it's F, so it shows the temperature as blue? Went away when i logged in.) I've wanted a weather station for a long time, so i finally splurged.

I also splurged on a new lens for my camera. I was testing it last night, and tried to use the flash -- and i think my camera's flash shorted out taking the memory of all the camera settings with it.

I am a little terrified but the camera seems to at least take photos still, so i'll troubleshoot eventually.

The weekend was sort of mixed, with a dark contractor cloud hanging over our heads. The fencing job is "done" except for the parts that aren't or need to be fixed. Christine's anxiety spikes when she thinks of the done poorly, done stupidly, and not done bits. I am holding space for the owner to take a look and see immediately what needs attention. We did have my Dad look at it to help me assess the level of pickiness we were at. Christine worries that as two women, contractors see us as easily taken advantage of.

I also tried setting up the camera for some "studio" shots. I couldn't find my "green screen" felt or much of my equipment for a while, because i was looking for the plastic box it was in when we moved. Eventually, i found where i had concentrated most of my photography equipment. I still didn't see the green felt -- which may still be packed from the move -- and i have misplaced the most recent lens cap, and generally feel a sort of entropic misery. Happy news is that i was actually using the still new camera, and put on my old macro lens. It's a budget rig of tube extensions that remove any camera control over focus (use the manual focus ring) and f stop (paper wedged in the lever about mid stop). The new camera seems rather cranky about lenses it can't "talk" to. And i recalled my irritation at the change in location of all the controls, many to digital menus. Fie. So, i took photos, yay, and just sitting with the camera outside in the screened deck i became totally soaked with sweat. The air was saturated. I loaded 1001 photos into Lightroom, the application i manage and "develop" my photos -- i think i hadn't imported any images but a few of the camera trap from this year.

Photos were of the purple corn -- we'll see if i get them developed. The ideas i had wait for it to be temperate enough for me to stand working outside. I imagine making patterns out of the kernels and using the photos as the basis for fabric pattern designs, but fussy nudgig around of small bits needs a bit more comfort.

Overnight 1.71 inches of rain. That puts us at 11.87 inches in a month we normally have 4.76 inches.

I identified four new-to-me plants, and happily three were natives. Two were in the genus of St John's wort, little shrubby plants with little yellow flowers. One was in the lobelia genus: Lobelia inflata (Indian tobacco, puke weed). It's not terribly showy, but i'm glad to have preserved some colonies of it. The fourth was a singular plant out among the buckwheat: i got it before it set seed. Chinese Senna (Senna obtusifolia)

Oh no, despite the name it *is* native. Oh fiddlesticks. It was kind of attractive. Fie. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/15616930 Maybe i'll get another chance.

Saturday night we stayed up late to watch the entire Amazon (or BBC One) miniseries, Ordeal by Innocence. From wikipedia i gather enough of the plot was changed that my wondering about a particular detail seems moot.

That particular detail is that, between this mystery and a Father Brown episode, i've two data-points of a fifties period depiction showing wealthy white British families adopting non-white daughters. The white son and the non-white daughter then develop a sexual relationship. Sympathetic others don't show any horror, concern, or disgust at this. My eyebrow raises at the gender and race dynamics there. I'm of the impression that sexual relationships between siblings by adoption have usually been considered "creepy" and problematic. The racial difference in these two cases underscores that there isn't a genetic issue with the relationship; would it play so easily if the siblings were of the same race? And then what if the brother had been of Chinese or African descent and the sister white? I'm used to the BBC pieces having a bit of The Society of Creative Anachronism's principle of righting past injustices (and thus the complete anachronistic non-worry about mixed race marriages is welcome), but something about these two plot lines seems ... problematic.

So i think i will want a new camera soon.

I started with Minolta, so i'm now shooting a Sony A55. I like it, but it kept freezing up in Death Valley. (Solved by taking the battery out and waiting a while -- missing the light.)

( talking to myself, really, but open to advice  )

I returned home from my ten days of travel with a bit of under-the-weather level lurgy. I think i'd been fighting it since leaving Ohio, and possibly had the cold reinforced my nephew & niece who were both under the weather, as well. I had a good bit of sleep and reading, and Friday tried to catch up. I spent much of today at the Meetinghouse, where we were trying to have a fundraiser without customers.



Someone bought one of my prints!

For Thanksgiving, Christine had an attack of the blues that was not particularly surprising. Indeed, when i think of some of the holidays in our early years together, she greets holidays now in a much better state of mind. I read a novel and made way through the backlog of email. While i had skimmed it on my iPad while traveling, my habit is to file it on my own hard drive. Somehow, reading email on the iPad (or my phone) feels ... hampered ... unlike reading novels on the iPad.

It's a bit chilly here and i surmise many of our neighbors (whose heat diffuses into our space) are out of town.

Tomorrow is going to be busy: i managed to get myself committed to overlapping Meeting things from ten am to six pm.

Happy weekend.

I'm going through photos from February, adding observations to iNaturalist and editing the "studio" photos.



The goal is to feel ready to both start planning next spring's collecting trips and taking china photos.

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My attempt to stain the crazed lines is not resulting quite in the results i want. I've moved on from the fluid acrylic paints, but i have a feeling i really need to warm up the teapot to open the cracks enough to get strong pigment take up. I'm trying markers right now.

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We went to see the David Foster Wallace movie, End of the Tour. Intense and saddening. OK, depressing. But good. It was nice to get to know the guy, even if it was third or fourth hand. Christine really has enjoyed his work.

There's a device called a ring light that goes around the camera lens to provide light in the macro setting where the lens is so close to the object. Last evening i tried several LED flashlights rubber-banded to the lens. Bleh.




I took this photo of a lupine flower (not the whole spike, called the inflorescence) over the weekend with incandescent lighting and no focus stacking.

I wasn't using the incandescent bulbs because we were still in the low power use period. The lighting was fine for my experiment in focus stacking, and i learned a good deal. Since i'm deleting the images, here are some notes:

So, i glued the flower higher to the stick, but in the forward lighting the wood in the stick gleamed. In this image i've removed the stick with the spot tool, but i don't like it as much as when the support was visible but unobtrusive (and the removal isn't that well done). The black-black background seems more clinical than the softer black in the previous series. Focus stacking is not bad, but i did touch up the top tip in Photoshop with a manual addition of one section. There is no blending of the black background there, and so that technique will need work if i have a more gentle background.




This photo of a lupine flower with LED front lighting

I think i found a new time sink that really should be avoided. It's a site named viewbug, and i feel like it is all about pulling mostly ambitious amateur photographers in and farming them. The contests are by folks selling to photographers, and you have to pay to submit to some contests and pay to get lots of features and access most contests. There's tons of "social" interactivity - liking, awarding, favoriting, commenting -- i've transferred a bunch of images from Flickr with the free two weeks of "premium" and am trying not to get sucked in. Does this meet any of my goals? I don't think so.



I did get a trundle in around Edgewood while Christine and her sister watched a movie. This netted a nice collection of observations for iNaturalist: http://www.inaturalist.org/calendar/judielaine/2014/3/23

I'm hoping that between the post-visit relaxation, a hormonal shift, and giving in to my naturalist self (writing the essay on Forget-me-nots and the Edgewood trip) i can now return to everything about which i have been procrastinating. None of it is particularly onerous, but i think i wanted to do something for my naturalist future so much that holding off from that to do other things was tying me in knots.