Education Vacation

     My day job requires me to complete 20 hours of professional continuing education each year. Since I have to go anyway, I try to pick seminars in locations that are fun to visit. We are just back from a combination of education and vacation on the East Coast. The convention center was very nice. So nice, in fact, that I felt a little out of place there. This place was so rich that there was a vending machine in the lobby with $350 Bose Headphones for sale. Where I come from, vending machines are for crackers.
    Here is a view across the hotel atrium and out to the yacht club on the river. The atrium was set up like a little town with shops and restaurants in little buildings like the one you see on the lower right.

    This rocky stream courses through the atrium.

Outdoors, a wild Mallard Duck stops briefly at the hotel's  landscaped waterfall before flying on downriver.

    In front of the hotel, the limo drivers prepare for a busy day.

                           

     One morning we discovered a dirt road near our hotel that curved around a bend in the river. We were quite close to the convention center, restaurants, and shopping, and still we saw Mallard ducks with their babies, diving ducks, Canada Geese, and a Red-winged Blackbird. On the ground we saw deer tracks. Honey Bunny walked out there with me the following night so that I could get this shot, otherwise I would not have felt comfortable there alone. The convention center is on the far right. The purple lights are from the sixteenth floor night club.

                             

    Here are two more photos of the river. The bridge you see in the distance is a drawbridge. I always get the creeps driving over those. It is  1 and 1/4 miles long and carries twelve lanes of traffic. There is a concrete barrier to protect pedestrians who have their own lane. We saw people jogging there, but were told that noise from the traffic is deafening.

                        

                            

    This is part of a 70 foot sculpture that depicts a giant trying to free himself from the sand.

    That's okay. I don't want to get on your dumb old boat anyway!

                    

    The seminar we attended offered full time learning. Night classes, lunch-and-learns, and wet labs were all a part of the package. One morning I took advantage of the free continental breakfast in the exhibit hall, only to be bombarded by big screen TVs with advertisements from some of the vendors. None of this surprised me until I saw these signs paired together. I then had to wonder if the "full time learning" thing was getting a bit out of hand.

              

Posted with Blogsy

The Shotgun Versus the Binoculars

"I consider myself to have been the bridge between the shotgun and the binoculars in bird watching. Before I came along, the primary way to observe birds was to shoot them and stuff them."

Roger Tory Peterson

    "Look at the photo I got today!" I practically shouted. I put this close-up on the big screen of our desktop for Honey Bunny, certain that he would be impressed at my skills as a nature photographer.

    The phone rang just then. It was Lovely Daughter. I couldn't get any verbal feedback from Honey about the photo so I glanced over at him. He was definitely not giving me a thumbs up. When my telephone conversation ended I got an earful.

    "You should have killed it! You are going to get hurt doing such things!" H.B. never shouts. But he was uncharacteristically loud. Very stern. I was disappointed. My most stalwart supporter was definitely in unsupportive mode.  

    This is a Redbelly Watersnake. She is not poisonous, but if I had crowded her too much she would have bitten me and sprayed me with a skunk like musk for me to bring home to my dog for sniffing. However, since I was using a telephoto lens I was never very close. My biggest concern was that she would retreat into her hollow log and I would not be able to take her portrait. Try telling this to Honey Bunny.

    While surfing for snakes on the internet I learned a fun fact. The Brown Watersnake, a relative of the the Redbellly, feeds on catfish and is sometimes observed with the bones of catfish sticking out of its body walls. The bones will fall out over time and no harm is done to the snake. 

    If you are interested in snakes Davidson College has a great herpetology web site. Just don't tell your Honey Bunny if you see one outdoors!