Wordless Wednesday ... "Billy"

for more info on WORDLESS WEDNESDAY, go to

http://www.wordlesswednesday.com/

Monday Madness (001)

Here are some weather-related questions ... Thank you for playing and have an awesome week! =)

1. Where you live, what kind of weather (or weather-related tragedy) do you fear the most?

I live on top of a hill, and there are almost no trees of any size on our property. This is in the Upper Midwest. And being a flat-lander from the eat coast, I am not familiar with cloud formations or the weather patterns of this part of the country. So, the scariest weather is tornado or flat-line wind (tornadic-speed wind without the spin).

2. What kind of weather do you MOST enjoy?

Having said that, as long as I am inside, it is going north or south of us but is visible, and I am not out driving in it, I actually enjoy thunder storms. The lightening is amazing as it arcs across the expanse of sky and zaps the ground.

Otherwise, I also enjoy snow as long as I am not out in it or have to go out in it soon. The silence that seems to surround the falling of snow, or the muffling of sounds, is comfortable like a favorite old quilt to sleep under.

3. What kind of weather do you LEAST like to drive in?

Anything that makes it hard to see: rain, snow, sleet, or even the normal everyday weather of dusk!

4. What is the scariest weather-related experience you've had in your lifetime?

While I was a student at the University of Minnesota, I had to take classes during the summer to be able to graduate when I wanted to. So, I took a course in my major, studio ceramics, as a night class. It was during my first six months in Minnesota after moving from New Jersey. I'm used to fire sirens at noon as a daily system test because we still had volunteer fire companies that respond to the "fire whistles." Well, that night, July 1, the sirens went off around 8 PM -- meaning a tornado had been sighted within x-number of miles.

We were in the basement already so there was no where else to go. Then the rain started and well, we ended up with 8-10 inches of water on the floor of the studio (huge double room) where extension cords were under water. When the water first started coming in we ran around and unplugged all the cords we saw. Missed one. (The water would have been deeper but students up the ramp from us in the metal studio filled sandbags and blocked the doors to keep more water from running in.)

One very brave student waded over to the outlet and yanked out the cord.

There were reports of water geysering out of storm drains, cars in water up to their windows, cars floating away.

By the time I left the studio that night around 10:30, other than a puddle here and there, you wouldn't have known the storm had been so bad. There were some homes flooded by a flash flood in one of the Twin Cities' northern suburbs. And on July 3, the Twin Cities outer Metro area had FROST!

The guy I am now married to, lived along a street in residential St. Paul, where flat-line, during that storm, winds hit and took out most of the huge trees that had once lined the street a couple of blocks away. A huge limb landed on his car and crushed it.

5. Share a "weather picture" with us!

Mute Monday has a Theme and I didn't know it ...

HPIM0581, originally uploaded by Suse B.

The theme is "The City" and here's my idea of a crowded place to be -- as far away from the city as possible.

Mute Monday -- Rubber Stamped Greeting Card

0004, originally uploaded by Suse B.

Something To Ponder

I received this in an e-mail today and thought it was worth sharing:

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171.

Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health Human Services.

Now think about this:

Guns:

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000.
(Yes, that's 80 million...)

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .000188

Statistics courtesy of the FBI

So, statistically, doctors are approximately

9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Remember, "Guns don't kill people, doctors do."

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN,

BUT

ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.


Please alert your friends to this alarming threat

We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!

Out of concern for the public at large,

I have withheld the statistics on

lawyers

for fear the shock would cause people to panic

and seek medical attention!

It's not a Photo this week ...

(c)2007 Susan D. Berg All Rights Reserved (but ...
seriously, who'd want to steal THAT?)

A "Mute Monday"

And you thought summer was bad where you are ...

Over at author, Angela Hunt's, blog -- there is this post about how hot it gets in Florida. A "way cool" (oops, sorry about that bad pun) laugh:

http://alifeinpages.blogspot.com/2007/08/its-hot-how-hot-well.html

A Late Entry to Wordless Wednesday because I forgot, fell asleep and thought I didn't have anything as good as last week ... but really this is better

Origami to WOW You!

PAINTED THREADS is listed on the Blogs of Note list at the Blogger Dashboard. WOW! You really need to check out this blog, and especially this post about an origami show that her son's work is part of.

Painted Threads: Ty's Big Night- The Origami Opening

My European City:

You Belong in Amsterdam

A little old fashioned, a little modern - you're the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam.Whether you want to be a squatter graffiti artist or a great novelist, Amsterdam has all that you want in Europe (in one small city).

href=http://www.blogthings.com/whateuropeancitydoyoubelonginquiz/
What European City Do You Belong In?

Wordless Wednesday

I thought I was shooting a Lily Bud -- I got more ...

Haven't added to flickr lately

It's kind of a bummer, really.

I spent an afternoon and probably into the night going through the recent downloads from my camera and my husband's. I crop, rotate, etc. to get the shots ready to upload to the flickr albums.

Notice how blotchy the shots of the dragonfly are down a couple posts ago? Well, ijit here forgot I had been using the graphics program to build a small animated movie. I forgot I had changed the save compression to deliberately degrade the image resolution while working on the animation. And I saved those hours of work on the photos at a 61% quality instead of the 100% quality .jpg setting.

Now I need to go back, delete all the edited shots, retrieve the originals and do all the editing all over again. :-b

So ... when I get up the energy to go back through all those photos, I will upload a brand new set of photos to flickr. More herons. More sandhill cranes. More hummingbirds. New bitterns and tricolored herons. Lots of sunflowers and lilies. And the dragonflies.

In the meantime, enjoy a respite here or one of my other blogs for a spell.

Why the 4-Way Flashers Were On

Notes on "Scene at the Pond"

I had to admit to my husband that -- well, I'm not actually surprised, but -- I am pleaseantly pleased with something that happened this week.

I was heading home from the dentist. He finally put in the final bridgework and took out the awful temporary bridgework that had kept my gums sore and raw for five or six weeks. And it seemed like a good idea to take a different route home than I would usually take. I'm not sure which is the quicker route. Probably the usual route because the route I took offers too many opportunities to observe the Remnants of Nature in Our Midst.

I do live in farm country. Quickly, though, the fields are waking up one fine sunrise to find a "for sale" sign dangling out by the road. The corn, hay or soybeans groan and the ground just wants to crack up and crawl away at the thought of being turned into one more housing plan or gotta-look-like-a-golf-course lawn.

Knowing I would be driving very slowly past the little ponds and marshy areas, looking for turtles and heron, for trumpeter swans floating in the ponds, for sandhill cranes in the fields, and tricolor herons or bitterns in the trees, I turned on the four-way flashers instead of just my blinker light. As I was shooting a heron in one of the larger ponds, the cardinal flew over the hood of my minivan and landed in the tangle of tree and weed next to me. I tried to shoot him but wasn't sure what I got. Was happy when I got home and downloaded the pictures to see that he turned out so well.

As I crawled along about four miles of road, stopping often to shoot through the open windows of the minivan, I actually had three different people stop to make sure everything was okay and that I wasn't broken down.

It's nice to know there are people out there who aren't afraid to stop to help a neighbor in need. Thanks.

Scene at the Pond