Heading for the hills

It's festival time again. We're off this (Thursday) afternoon, back Saturday night.

Have a great weekend everyone. May your skies be blue, may your air mattresses not leak (oh wait, that's my wish), and may your music always be in tune.

Spring, posterized

Because it's nicer than the actual view of my roof after yesterday's excitement.

(Click to enlarge)

Why I'd rather have been at the circus

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I had a picture all lined up for this week's Ruby Tuesday post - see it up there? My mom took it when she and my dad brought the kids to the circus over Passover. Looks cool doesn't it? Impressive acrobatics, glitzy costumes, and definitely very, very red. Good choice for today's post? I thought so too.

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I'd much rather have been imagining a trip to a circus than dealing with what I had to deal with today:

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The wind did that. All of that. The white you see in the sky isn't fog - it's dust. Thick, choking, dust. And the wind? It's HOT.

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That bent metal rod? We'd put it in the shed doors to try and keep them from blowing open.
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It didn't work. The wind blew so hard it BENT the metal and left the doors open anyway.

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We had the mother of all wind and dust storms today.

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Holy crap was it loud. And scary. And did I mention loud? And HOT too - the house is getting really stuffy with all the windows closed but I don't want to turn on the A/C because I'm afraid of clogging the filters with the dust! I was up and down all night from the noise, and from worrying about something important blowing off the roof to kingdom come. So much for a decent night's sleep.

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This was a major one. Besides knocking over my big potted palm tree, again, it ripped off part of my pergola top and worse it ripped a water hose right out of my hot water tank and flooded mine and my neighbor's roofs. I spent half the day locating a plumber who could get here immediately to fix it. Thank god I did too, because he said the tank had leaked and was completely empty and about to go sailing nine stories down to the ground! While he was up there fixing it he also saw that another neighbor has lost her a/c unit - it was lying on its side pouring out gas all over the floor!

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Several homes in nearby towns caught fire when power lines came down, our electricity went in and out a few times, and the sky is so white you'd swear you were in the middle of a whiteout blizzard. Very freaky and end of world-ish. It's nearly 7:30pm and only now is the storm showing early signs of breaking.

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All told, I'd rather have been at the circus.

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Yet another odd-looking cactus

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It's been terribly gray here the past few days, and right on time for Aileni's Monochrome Maniacs, too. Hopefully the sun will reappear sometime soon and I'll be able to get back to shooting the lovely bright colors of spring. In the meantime, it's either quite a lot of black and white or repeated trips back into the archives to see what pops up.
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I should have saved yesterday's mono shot for today, just to give you all a break from the "strange unidentified cactus-type plant converted into black and white" that I seem to keep doing lately. I do seem to have a fair amount of them and cactuses just seem to lend themselves very well to monochrome, and goodness knows it isn't hard to find a cactus in this part of the world.
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This particular one is growing at the Tel Megiddo archeological site, which you may know better by its Christian name - Armageddon. (Follow that link for more pictures from our recent visit to Tel Megiddo.)
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Firewood anyone?

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This week's theme for Thematic Photographic over at Carmi's place is musical. While I have dozens of shots of musicians performing, including some I really love, I don't publish photographs of others without their express permission so they will have to continue to languish away in my archives in silence. (Not exactly. In fact I've uploaded most of them to some private online albums available to the performers and members of our folk music community here in Israel, but I don't feel right publishing them indiscriminately on my blog.)
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Disclaimer aside, that left me with a few shots of either members of my own family, or else instruments set down on the sidelines. The original shot of these banjos was too golden for my taste thanks to some weird lighting inside the performance tent, and the highlights were a bit blown, so I started playing around and ended up with the stylized shot (enlarge to get the full effect) you see above. I kind of like it, it's got a sort of gritty feel that appeals to me.
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If you're wondering about the title, I should be commended for not sharing any of the 4,762 banjo jokes which immediately sprang to mind when I pulled up this shot...
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Let there be light

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Click to enlarge

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Jay installed our new living room light fixture last weekend and it looks fabulous! I'm so pleased with how it turned out and how well it suits the room. As an added bonus, it actually lights up said room so we're no longer living in perpetual twilight. In fact, it lights up the room so well that the first order of business was to put in a dimmer switch!

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Here it is off, on low, and turned way up high. I love the way light makes the porcelain cubes glow when it's on.

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And one last one just because I like the effect.