It’s a rainy day in Colorado

That would make a catchy title for a song . . . except, maybe, Colorado should be changed to something evoking peaches.

Oh, before I continue, this is a long post. Many pictures, a few links, and the usual witty prose will make it seem as it’s just long, but trust me . . . it’s looong. Here be some estimates for interacting with this post:

Skimming – 1 minute
Reading – 7 minute
Looking (really looking) at pictures: 13 minutes
Reading and looking at pictures: 3 hours, seven minutes, and 23 seconds
Just clicking on ‘Like’ after looking at one photo: 3 seconds

Right! On with the show.

Rain, and I mean constant rain, has been falling since yesterday evening. It started as a downpour, changed to a steady rain, and settled into a drizzle that gets everything soaking wet. And I mean everything. The ground is soaked – it actually squishes when I walk in the backyard. That’s something I’ve not experiences here since . . . well, never.

Did I mention the temperature is in the low 50’s? That’s US units, not that funky decimal system.

These last few days have been good for baking. To be clear, I’m not the baker . . . I’m the person benefitting from the baking.

That’s the prep work for Pinza (actually Pinze, plural). Read one description of the bread – with recipe – HERE. I’m not endorsing that recipe, and I’m especially not endorsing what they say about eating Pinza. There are only two accepted ways of eating Pinza (three if you count eating it plain). Suggesting there are more Is. Simply. Wrong.

Suggesting it goes well with ham is  . . .  excuse me, I must compose myself  . . . well, I can’t say what I think because I’d have to go out and learn some new swear words, or even resort to swearing in Croatian.

The two, and only two, ways to eat Pinza is to either dunk it in tea, or use it to make a Nutella sandwich with it. The dunking is dependent on the consistency of the bread. Light and fluffy won’t work. Cut back on the lievito a bit, use one less egg yolk, do whatever bakers do to make heavier breads. To be sure, you can still make Nutella sandwiches with the heavier Pinza (some even prefer that).

That’s from yesterday, and half is already gone, along with a fair amount of Nutella.

The other baking effort involved Apricot-Walnut Strudels . . .

Those two were made yesterday (one half of one was gone by last night), and two more were baked today (a third of one has already disappeared). Our preferred way of eating it is with powdered sugar . . .

The photos above were taken with the Samsung Note II, so are not optimal , but they give the idea of what I’ve been eating (am eating as I write this).

BUT . . . eating is not the only thing I’m doing. I’m also taking a day (maybe two) off from the chores associated with owning a home. I was going to write, but instead decided to shoot some photographs. I mean, how often am I going to have a chance to shoot in this kind of weather?

Now, anyone who knows me knows I would not want to get my camera and lenses wet. But my only potential assistant was baking, and umbrellas don’t hold themselves up on their own. However, I am an engineer by trade . . . that didn’t help me much, but I have a belt. I hooked the handle of the umbrella under my belt, and used my left arm to both support the camera and keep the umbrella upright. It worked like a charm . . . despite neighbors coming out of their homes to point and laugh.

Anyway, a number of posts ago I wanted to show the homestead; the place where some of my photography takes place. The problem? Bright day, hard sun, difficult to make anything look nice. Not so today.

Astute readers might note something . . . this is a different process than what I’ve been using for the better part of two+ months.

You see, I usually pick a few photos, run my usual processing, run a few alternatives (including playing with new settings), and then decide which to use. I picked the above based on a few photos, and ran all 97 photos through the same process in batch mode.

Unfortunately, that process did not work for some photos, especially the macros. I ended up rerunning all the photos using my standard post-processing. For them interested, here’s the comparison between the two, the next one being how I would have normally processed it.

It gets worse . . . I went out, shot a bunch of photos in Aperture mode, came in, checked them out, was not sure I liked them, and went out again to shoot in manual mode. Then I changed lenses, and went out again to shoot the macros.

Yes, this qualifies as a WPLongform post. Don’t worry, I will not be posting all 194 photos here . . . but they are all in the SmugMug Gallery HERE.

Some shots are obviously duplicates, one shot in Aperture mode, and one shot in Manual mode. The composition might be different, too . . . here, let me show you a couple to illustrate what I mean . . .

First, in Aperture mode . . .

Similar photos shot in Manual mode . . .

And just to complete the circle of (comparison) life . . . the last two with standard Disperser processing . . .

Confusing? That’s OK; I have a hard time keeping track of stuff as well . . . yesterday I misplaced one of my machetes.

Anyway, having gotten all that out of the way, let me walk you through the progression of photos I took in the rain . . .

You already saw the first few, so here are the others from the front of the house and looking toward the street.

Notice I am indiscriminately switching between processes . . . as I said, the SmugMug gallery has both versions of each shot. I’m just saying it for the one person that will go there.

I then wanted to show a few shots of the yard as it looks from the road, and of the house as it looks from the yard. A few of the shoots are already used in the examples above, and are not repeated here.

Then I wanted to showcase the flowerbeds.

. . . and the clematis plants in bloom . . .

I then decided it’s high time my readers see the back of the house . . . see if you can spot the gargoyle.

The hummingbird photos from the previous post were shot from the brown chairs between the umbrella and the house.

Oh, by the way . . . the daisies are in bloom.

Here’s what the house looks like from the daisy’s point of view.

 You can see a few hummers flying around . . . there be more.

There be seven in that photo . . . could be more, I did not check too closely.

This is what they look like from inside . . .

About then I decided to shoot some macros, but not before snapping a fee more photos on the way to getting my macro lens.

That’s Snoopy on the last photo. That rock came with us from our cabin in the UP. I know it looks more like Yoda than Snoopy, but there’s a view where the shape of the rock looks like Snoopy atop his doghouse. It’s hard to show it now because in the original setting it was angled downward, and we could see it plainly from the cabin’s porch.

Anyway, on to the macros . . . I decided to shoot macros because every surface had impossibly balanced drops (beads?) of water on them.

They don’t look real  . . . and they don’t look real in person, especially considering there was a slight breeze. I kept wondering how those did not roll off the surface (Answer: surface tension). The above is a perpendicular view from above the flower.

Did I mention everything is super-saturated? That water is everywhere? That everything is soaked? Well, it is.

The balloon flowers are probably my favorite captures . . .

And cobwebs! You don’t notice them much on the rocks . . . but they are there, and all you need is a little water to bring them out.

That’s worth clicking on, or even going to the SmugMug gallery.

It need not be flowers or cobwebs to look interesting . . . any ole branch would do.

. . . or even lilies . . .

The Stella D’Oro wanted in on the action . . .

Oh, look! . . . another cobweb.

These flowers looked great in person, but also shine in these next photos.

I was hoping for more out of the clematis . . .

. . . but the daisies did not disappoint.

Here’s a plant that is growing at the edge of my patio . . . I like how it looks, so I’m sparing it from weeding.

OK, I need to wind this down so I can go eat some Pinza with Nutella (ham . . . bejeezeus H. Christopher!).

Here be some zinnias . . .

Notice there is no beading of the water on them . . . slick!

. . . maybe; I don’t know why they don’t bead.

OK, we’re on the home stretch; just a few more . . . first, a random leaf I thought looked nice.

Then moss growing at the edge of my patio . . . 

And finally, another daylily.

It’s now been raining more than 24 hours . . . we love it. Probably because we know at any time we may go a couple of months without any rain. Today, and at least for a week or two, there’s little danger of fires popping up all over the place.

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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Astute persons might have noticed these doodles, and correctly surmised they hold some significance for me, and perhaps for humanity at large.  

If you click on the doodle, and nothing happens, this is the link it’s supposed to go to: https://disperser.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/palm-vx-and-i/.

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Note: if you are not reading this blog post at Disperser.Wordpress.com, know that it has been copied without permission, and likely is being used by someone with nefarious intention, like attracting you to a malware-infested website.  Could be they also torture small mammals.

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. . .  my FP ward  . . . chieken shit.