David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Scutigera Coleoptrata (House Centipede) — Not a Silverfish, one of my creepy crawly house pets appeared again this afternoon. Still waiting on the Drobo upgrade to complete, so spent some time taking macro images — until it got tired of the flash and went away.
Before the power can be restored, there is a lot of cleanup work that needs to be done. One of the transformers that went down has been leaking oil for several days. It is not known if the oil contained PCBs. A PSE&G truck was sent out to put absorbent down to clean up the oil. Unfortunately, at least one driver (in the last image) had been giving the PSE&G worker a hard time because he wasn’t being allowed to drive through the oil and under the downed power lines. The PSE&G folks are working 16 hour days to restore power and need to be acknowledged – not hassled.
The Quiet Before the Storm.
I am home in NJ after 3 weeks on the road, including a week in New Mexico with the Nikonians on ANPAT 12 and 40 days at sea on the M/V Explorer for the fall 2012 Semeseter at Sea Voyage. I got home just in time to experience Hurricane Sandy. So far, only clouds. The strange thing about this storm is that is is cold out, not tropical temperatures. This becomes the problem where we will get a lot of rain as the hurricane hits the cold front and stalls in place.
Before the storm, I am trying to backup all the images from the Semester at Sea voyage and the ANPAT 12 road trip. Some how during these two trips I took over 100K images. My main Drobo server (8 x 2 TB drives) is flashing a yellow light. I am at 85% of the disk array capacity, and the Drobo is wanting some bigger drives.
When I got home, the RV wouldn’t start. Apparently, I left the inverter on so the battery was dead. I charged the battery last night and then moved the RV next to the house before the storm. The propane tank is 3/4 full so should provide power to the generator for some time if the power goes out. Before going on the ANPAT 12 road trip, I winterized the RV. I’m reversing this for the storm by filling the water tanks and charging the batteries. During the last storm, I didn’t have power for 3 days.
As long as I do have power, I can start to process and upload the best images from the SAS and ANPAT trips.
Monarch Butterfly. Five-years ago while driving home from work I saw purple wild flowers on the side of the road at an abandoned golf course in Hillsborough. I pulled over to see if there was a picture. The purple wildflowers attracted dozens of Monarch butterflies providing more colors. I took this image with my favorite 80-400 mm telephoto zoom lens. The hard part was working at the minimum focus distance for the lens (~ 7 feet). I needed to keep stepping back to get the image in focus. One more reason I always have a camera with me.
Fungus Among Us!! Since I got back from the Fall Semester at Sea Voyage, everything has been damp and wet. The last two mornings there was a thick fog until late morning. Mildew everywhere – including the seat belt straps in my car. I’ve never seen a blue mushroom before. The images in this post are all from my driveway where mushrooms are abundant.
