Category: Travel

metal locusts and memories of past science fiction

whbeebe

This was taken at the Tama Zoological Park, just outside the main building of the Insectarium. I thought these two were interesting the moment I saw them. But they also triggered the memory of a short science fiction story I’d read decades ago, about a lone man, a lone woman, and their lives together in the aftermath of a nuclear war in New York City. The story started about the man finding the woman, and progressed about the two of them slowly growing closer. As their story was being told, there was the back story of odd happenings in the city. The story ends when one day, after hearing strange noises coming from Central Park, the two find that the Alice in Wonderland statues have been re-carved into insect forms. It’s at this point the two realize their end may be a lot closer than they realize.

I don’t remember the story’s name nor the author, only that I read it sometime back in the 1970s. It had come as part of an anthology from the Science Fiction Bookclub. Or at least I think it did. I may be mis-remembering all of this.

christmas in denver

whbeebe

I spent a quiet Christmas in Denver with my youngest daughter. I’ll spend New Years Day with my oldest up in Gainesville. Such are the logistics of keeping track of adult children scattered across the country. These two photos were taken just east of Bolder, looking west towards the Rockies. It was cold (lows in the single digits) and it snowed Christmas day to give my wife one thing she wanted, a white Christmas.

The Sunday before we left my wife and I drove in the general direction of Estes Park, stopping around Bolder to do a little sight-seeing and for me to grab a few long distance photos of the Rockies. I had a new lens with me, the M.Zuiko 14-150mm Mark II. I had it mated with my E-M5. That lens, and the 17mm f/1.8 were the only pieces of camera gear I took with me besides spare batteries and a charger. I left everything else at home and depended on my iPhone 6s+ as my backup camera. The top photo was taken at 150mm, while the bottom was taken at 14mm. The one body, one zoom and one prime kit is the most practical I’ve ever taken with me on travel, and it’ll probably remain that way indefinitely.

One reason I wanted the long view of the Rockies is as documentation of what snows look like on the Rockies. With all he talk of climate change I wanted a small remembrance of what snow looked like on those peaks before it melts completely away. While it got cold while we were there both the cold and the snow were short lived. When we left the following Monday it was starting to warm up to temperatures above freezing towards the end of the week. Back here in Orlando the temperatures during the day have been in the low 80s. We do live in interesting times, don’t we?