Well I had a lifelong dream come true last night. I have ALWAYS wanted to see the northern lights or aurora borealis. Early this morning I was very well rewarded for standing out in the cold (36F).
At first I just took my camera. Which was really dumb, a camera without a tripod, taking shots of northern lights, is silly. But I tried to prop it up on the fence anyway. Below is the result.
Then I SPRINTED back to the house, grabbed the tripod and raced in the car to Golden Gardens and took this really cool shot. I was hard to see them, but the camera captured it very well.
Then we drove back to Sunset park and I got a better picture, even though the peak had passed.
It is really a truely awe inspiring sight to see this phenomena live and in person. (Even if my hands were so cold that I could barely push the shutter button on the camera).
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So I’m in an interesting state of pregnancy. Chewie’s anticipated birthday, Nov. 13, is exactly 2 weeks away as of tomorrow. I’ve had 2 examinations with my OB that seem to indicate early signs of ripening. My OB is betting Chewie comes early. This has had an interesting psychological effect. Every twinge of my belly seems to be suspicious. We’re both anxious to meet this little girl. She’s been kicking me since July. I’d like to see the hands and feet causing all the trauma to my abdominal wall.
This is the point where one needs philosophy. I went to my Mom’s group today and talked to 2 women who had the same “ripening” signs and came 2 weeks late. So my song at the moment is “She’ll Be Coming Out the Uterus When She Comes”.
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Wow time flies! It’s been one whole year of blogging since we moved into our new house. I started up the blog on Oct 23rd last year. Kinda of fitting that our 1 year blog anniversary was posted with an entry about pumpkin carving.
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Our neighbors, Ken and Erica, hosted us and 30 other close friends for a pumpkin carving party under their carport. Monday set records in the amount of downpour in Seattle in 24 hrs. We were afraid the same would happen, but today has been sunny. We drank warm cider. They had a fire for warmth. I made a near perfect smore using Andes mint chocolate instead of the Hershey standby. Finally, there was pumpkin carving of over 20 pumpkins. The picture shows a decent sample. Wayne duplicated Mike Wazowski from Monster’s Inc. (top row, second from the left). I went for a demented theme (bottom row, on the right). Mostly, we had lots of fun and got into the spirit of Halloween.
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So I spent some time this weekend and stitched together 3 different panoramas of Mount Saint Helens. The first is from a lookout on the side of the road on the way to the Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center. The other two are from the newest visitor center at Johnston Ridge (amazing views can be had from here!).
The second panorama was taken with a polarizing filter. While this yields much better color saturation, the stitch program has a hard time resolving the different exposures of each of the different shots.
Warning, the panoramas are large and take awhile to download, but they are definately worth it for those of you who have high bandwidth internet connections.
Near Coldwater Ridge – 181kbytes
NOTE: Nice view of Mount Adams over the horizon in this one.
Johnston Ridge Lookout – 534kbytes
NOTE: A higher resolution, and one can see the viewing platform below the location where I setup my tripod.
Johnston Ridge Lookout w/polarization – 217kbytes
NOTE: The nice thing about this shot is that the moon was rising and is fairly visible near Mount Adams behind the ridge.
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