The cactus seedlings are six months old now and starting to show typical spination. There are more pictures here.
More spines and fuzz
Category: Photo gallery
Maple season
On the way to work this morning.
Not pictured: Spiderman
I spent part of the afternoon downtown today at the Air Capital Comic Con. Overall, the cosplayers were underwhelming — perhaps they wore their better outfits yesterday — and there was a surfeit of Spidermen and Harley Quinns, but there were a few who made bringing the camera along worthwhile. There are more pictures here.
Pictures, mostly pretty
Man Ray’s powder puff
I’ve posted a few more portraits of cactus seedlings at the photo site.
On your toes
I finally finished processing the pictures from last week’s ballet rehearsal. You can see them here.
Coming all too soon: Nutcracker season.
Coming soon to a website near you
I shot too many pictures at the dress rehearsal Thursday evening for the Friends University Ballet fall program, and it will take the rest of the weekend or longer to go through them all and process the best. They’ll be at my photo site, soon, I hope.
DYCs and anemones
I took the day off and spent the morning taking pictures at the botanical garden. You can see them here.
Picture this
If Flickr decides that there has been suspicious activity involving your account, or if you want to access Flickr from a different browser or a different computer, you need to prove to them that you are indeed whoever it is that you are. It’s a simple matter. In my case, I need only respond to emails sent to either of two long-defunct addresses.1 This doesn’t quite make sense to me; I used a different address, which they have, to launch my account there. But the ways of IT are mysterious and not for ordinary mortals to comprehend.
At this time, I can log into Flickr only with one browser and only on one computer. It’s just a matter of time before I’m locked out of my account entirely. Therefore, I’ve started a weblog for my photography, here. I’ll occasionally post a picture or two on Zoopraxiscope, but the full galleries will be at the new site. You can see the rest of the pictures from yesterday’s visit to the Great Plains Renaissance Festival there, for instance.
Four o’clock at 8:40 a.m.
I grabbed a few pictures before leaving for work this morning.
Varieties of fuzz
The cactus seedlings are steadily coming along. The hooks of M. pennispinosa, above, are as sharp as they look. I keep a pair of embroidery scissors handy when I repot such little hookers so I can detach them from my fingers when I’m done.
Texas Star
I visited the botanical garden yesterday, where I found both the red and white forms of Hibiscus coccineus, the “Texas Star” hibiscus (though it’s not actually native to the Lone Star state) in bloom.
In other Texas news, Ubu remains in Houston despite Harvey and has been writing about the pleasures of life in the time of hurricanes.2
Shadowplay
I didn’t have an appropriate filter to place on my camera lens during the eclipse, so I pointed the camera down rather than up.
Spine feathers
From the local cactus club show at the botanical garden yesterday. Click to embiggen.
Hairy things
Another one of my pictures is a Botany Photo of the Day.
Horticultural note
One of the pleasures of growing sunflowers is that they grow like weeds but are not weeds.3 They get big. They’re plants I can see eye-to-eye with.
Stay on the path
In years past one occasionally found such plants as argemone and corydalis in Wichita’s Sedgwick County Park. However, careful management has eliminated most of the pesky wildflowers, so that nothing distracts visitors from the splendid displays of Toxicodendron radicans throughout the park.
The same drive toward tidiness has also simplified the flora of the fields east of the park. Formerly, one would sometimes stumble across Mentzelia nuda, for instance, or Delphinium carolinianum, but gradually such conspicuous species disappeared. A few still remain, such as Oenothera rhombipetala and Dalea villosa, but if current trends continue, eventually the area will be just neat and tidy grass.
Sun in shade
Little duckie lost
Found in a pot of Dichorisandra thyrsiflora at the botanical garden this morning.
Horticultural snapshots
… well, not exactly “snapshots,” since the images were all done with stacked focus.
This little nigella couldn’t catch a break this year. A mole took out most of the plants, and thunderstorms pounded the survivors onto the ground. I rinsed off the flower as best I could, but it’s still rather gritty.