I Love a Nice Panorama

Today’s cameras and computers make taking a panorama picture relatively easy.  It is actually a series of pictures taken side by side and then stitched together.  As evidence of how nice they can be, I offer you two that I took on our New Zealand trip and stitched together at home.

The first is from an observation deck at Queenstown.  The rainbow over the lake was nice enough to oblige Flash and Lafawnda as they looked out across Lake Wakatipu:

 

The second is from the world renowned Milford Sound centered on Mitre Peak.  The “snow” on the mountains on the right is actually a glacier:

Now it is even easier with an iPhone.  It will take the panorama on the spot and coach you on your sweep from left to right.

Technology definitely has its advantages in some areas of life!

Frugality

Frugal: Sparing or economical with regard to money or food.

Some don’t choose it, necessity does.  When I was in college, I had not spent my money with care at one point and left myself with only $30 to live on for a month.  I went to the store, bought a very large bag of brown rice and a very large container of raisins and powdered milk for my meals at home.  At the student union, there was hot water for tea, ketchup in a very large pump container and crackers, so I would make myself a cup of tomato soup with pepper every so often.  I spent $15 on rent (it was 1970 after all and five of us shared a house) and at the end of the month, I was none the worse for wear having neither gained nor lost weight and felt just fine.  I was just ready for some variety!

That isn’t how I recommend anyone live, but it isn’t the worst thing.  I proved to myself what I could do with little if the need arose and that is a lesson all young people should learn one way or another.  As my wife and I have faced tighter times, we are a good team when it comes to living frugally.  For example, it was necessary when I was laid off the very day the mortgage on our house went through.  We, as in my college days, haven’t felt – nor are we – deprived, but we look forward to more variety when our personal economy frees back up.  We are creative with inexpensive pleasures in tighter times.

Why is it good to be frugal other than to just meet necessity?  Because it reminds a person of the difference between want and need, for most of the time we acquire things we want but don’t necessarily need and we can lose focus on those things that are essential and important.  Many youth too rich too young fall into grievous traps very difficult to escape.  Many rich adults end up trying to buy happiness and forget the beauty of simplicity, as well as losing compassion.  Acquisition becomes an end in itself and true happiness wanes.  That is part of what the Hippie Revolution, silly and misguided as it sometimes could be, was all about, freeing ourselves from these traps.

I have no objection to the occasional splurge and I’m no longer a Hippie.  Our best friends are coming from their home in the mountains to visit this weekend and we will eat all we desire and party over by the ocean.  Personally, I think that qualifies as an occasional need!  Don’t you?

See what the other members of the LBC (with a clickable listing on the right side of this page), a loose collection of bloggers both interesting and good of heart whose read on a shared Friday topic is always worth it.  I know I’ll be making the rounds and rewarding them with comments, which by the way are rewarding to bloggers at very low cost to the reader.  Please let them know what you think.

Super Fly!

When I got home from a brief outing today, I noticed that my fly was unzipped.  I am at the age and the pants were of a design where it caused me virtually no distress at all.  Then the universe threw in some synchronicity to keep Ramana reading.  I just ran across this headline for NBCNews.com:

An estimated 17,616 people wound up in U.S. emergency rooms between 2002 and 2012 because they caught their genitals, almost always penises, in zippers, according to a new study.

So, I wasn’t being careless when I didn’t pull up the zipper.  I was being careful.  And where do I get one of those lungis?

Where I’ve been lately

Sometimes, life washes over the top of me and I don’t object.  It is a mixture of difficult and delight, the former a necessary duty, the latter the recharging antidote.  I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and we are blessed with beauty abundant if a person will go out into it or stop to look.

It is a good thing, for so many around me have been suffering the ravages of mental illness – not Lafawnda, who is doing great! – and the fallout is a terrible and expensive thing indeed.  The Lady F and I have realized there is only so much we can do to save the world and we have definitely been doing our share.  Then we take off into the beauty that surrounds us so our souls and our psyches can recover.  All the pictures I am going to put in this post are from within 15 miles of our house (except for the Napa Valley, which is 60 miles away) and all were taken within the last two weeks.

The Lady F and I have joined the Regional Parks Foundation Trails Challenge 2013 program in which we will hike 5 parks or 26.2 miles minimum this year.  The parks are part of the largest urban park system in America.  We’ve already hiked 3 and are hoping to hike as many more this summer as we can fit into our schedule.  Our kids are catching the fever, too!

Trails Challenge Website

Only about 30 of the 65 East Bay parks are part of the challenge this year, but we have hiked some that are not on the list, too.  We also hike further than the minimum even though we don’t get “credit,” because it is for the beauty, the fresh air and the exercise that we are doing it.

These images were from our hike of the Coyote Hills Park.  We hiked a bit more than 3.5 miles through marshland, hills and bayside.  We saw a fox up close, egrets and a muskrat along the way along with a wide variety of plants:

In between, we went to Napa to help Lady F’s mother, 87 but doing really well.  While there, the three of us took off to enjoy some of the valley.  Oh, and then do some cleanup of yard and windows although one of the workers seemed decidedly hostile!  LOL

Wednesday, while driving home, I turned the corner two blocks from our house and ran right into a gorgeous sunset!  I pulled off the side of the street and took this photo.  The photo is unretouched and all these photos in the post are from a Canon Powershot ELPH that I carry in my pocket at all times.

This past weekend, we took the kids to Tilden Park sitting in the hills right above Berkeley, part of the Trails Challenge.  The first view is over the Bay and we were all looking at San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.  The rest were inland on our 7.1 mile hike!

Life can be very challenging and is often busy.  But when we head back into these beautiful park lands, it is like leaving civilization behind.  Ah, sweet nurturance!

Music that changed my life

Maria, the Silver Fox brought this to the Loose Blogger Consortium for our Friday writing.  I’m late (unavoidably), but I wanted you to see how Les Misèrables was not just a movie or another movie or musical to me.  It really did change my life, for the lead, Jean Valjean was my newly minted son-in-law and this was my daughter’s first musical as a freshman.  I even had a part, building major portions of the set from scratch, so it truly was a family affair.

Now, I present to you some highlights and I remind you that every bit of singing you hear is live singing by kids of one of the top choirs every year in the country.  This was created by me taking the VHS tape I made of it, playing it on the TV and recording it with my iPhone.  You can imagine the loss of quality and you can imagine what it was like live.

I present to you the marvelous Mt. Eden High School Choir of Hayward performing the musical Les Misèrables!

Friday LBC Topic Delay 3/15/2013

As W.C. Fields once said in explanation of being late and quite bedraggled, “Things happened.”   Perfect explanation for why I don’t have my entry yet.

I’ll get there, but not for about another 12 hours or so.  In the meantime, make the rounds of the folks listed on the right hand side of this page and I’ll be seeing you soon.

My childhood goals for my life

This topic was brought to the LBC by Delirious and I find it fascinating in that my early goals were very clear … and very relevant to my life.  Kind of something a person might not expect.

When I was five years old, I told my folks that I was going to be a scientist in the winter:

and a Major League Baseball player in the summer:

Well, I did start college as a Physics Major and I taught science on graduation.  Now, I make my living as a computer scientist and I think that isn’t too bad for the first part of my proclamation.

Baseball?  It was always and by far my favorite sport.  I had a talent for it, too, but I doubt you ever heard of my Major League career.

You know how five year-olds exaggerate!