365 / 14: Bur acorns

Fall continues to offer an abundance of nature scenes to shoot for this 365 photo challenge. Today, we have bur oak acorns. I love acorns, the very concept of them. I like the massive, oversized bur acorns the most, particularly those with hairy acorn cups that look like birds' nests. They just sing "autumn" to me.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm 2.8

Lisa On Location Photography

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365 / 13: Primary mirror!

To pretty much everyone reading this, my photo today is going to be exceedingly boring. For me, however, it is a thing of beauty. What you are looking at is a 6" f/5 parabolic primary mirror for a Newtonian telescope. My telescope. I've been without since March, when I sent my original primary mirror off to be resurfaced. It came back badly chipped and unusable. I've finally gotten a replacement, and this makes me happy. As soon as I post this, I'm installing it in my telescope. Naturally, it's cloudy tonight so I won't be able to test it out. Such is life.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 50mm 1.8 mark I

Lisa On Location Photography

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My luck is EPIC!

Unfortunately, that epic luck is all bad, at least where it comes to astronomy. The rest of my life, I figure I'm at worst break even, if not somewhat ahead overall. But when it comes to astronomy? Forget it. I'm like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football.

A telescope mirror was delivered by FedEx today, a replacement for my old 6" f/5 mirror that was badly chipped and rendered useless back in April. I've gone the whole summer observing season without a working telescope, a painful ordeal I will expand on more fully in a future post. But today I was getting a replacement, perhaps not as good as the mirror I lost, but one that will allow me to resume backyard astronomy. Yay!

Except said package was not on the front porch as had been indicated. The Wife looked all around the front of our house where it might've been left. Nothing. Then she checked the neighbors'. Again, nothing. Seriously verging on a personal meltdown over the senseless unfairness of the universe, I called in a missing package report to FedEx.

FedEx wanted me to check again. Particularly around the car washing supplies, because the delivery driver made sure to leave it with the car washing supplies.

Which is very interesting, because we have no car-washing supplies at our house, outside, inside or otherwise. If you've seen my car, you would understand this.

So, The Wife set out into the neighborhood again, looking for homes with car washing supplies out front. And she found one, down the street. The house didn't look like ours. The address wasn't similar to ours. Yet this is the house the driver decided to leave the package at. The Wife retrieved it, and I let FedEx know we've located their lost delivery.

The Wife hasn't opened it, though. The last time I opened a shipping container with a telescope mirror in it, little broken pieces of shattered glass came out. At this point, I'm conditioned to expect the worst. Will find out this evening when I get home if my (bad) luck holds.

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Meadmaking redux

So, yeah. Despite having a grand old time at the inaugural Texas Mead Festival, I haven't actually made any mead in more than a year. In fact, the only homebrew I've done in quite a while is a dark ale about 8 months ago (which is aging quite nicely, thankyouverymuch). Overall, not a great track record when I'm trying to refine my skills to make libations that taste more like the professional beverages I sampled at the Mead Fest and less like rocket fuel or sour mash.

So anyway, I started a new batch of mead on Sunday. I took 11 pounds of clover/wildflower honey (pretty generic stuff) and dissolved it in hot water on the stove (never actually bringing it to boiling, mind you). I added two teaspoons of yeast nutrient, then poured the honey and enough cold water to make five total gallons in my 6-gallon fermentation vessel.

While that was going on, I had my yeast starter warming up. The yeast I pitched is Lalvin D47, also known as the wine yeast Cotes du Rhone. I've never tried this strain before, but it's supposedly good for medium and dry meads, and as I'm shooting for a semi-dry/demi-sweet batch this time out, it will hopefully fit the bill. I started it in a glass of apple juice with an extra spoonful of sugar, and it took off very quickly. By the time the must in the vessel had cooled enough to pitch the yeast, I had a very active glass of yeast. I stirred the must vigorously to oxygenate it, then let the yeasts do their thing.

After taking a sample of the must and running it through my hydrometer, I got a specific gravity reading of 1.085, which should give me a final alcohol content of approximately 11.1 percent. Of course, that's going to change slightly, because I'm not making a traditional mead. Once the primary fermentation tapers off, I'll rack the mead and separate into smaller containers. I've got about 15 pounds of pears from my moonglow pear tree in the back yard that are ripened and frozen in the deep freeze. I plan on crushing them and adding the nectar to make a type of perry/cyser. The moonglow are considered a dessert pear, but the do have a stronger flavor than any store-bought pear I've ever tasted, so we'll see how they work. I also still have some frozen plums from earlier in the year for one of the smaller batches, and plum mead has traditionally been one of my more successful meads (even if I've failed miserably at plum wine every time I've attempted it).

Right now it's a case of hurry up and wait for the yeast to finish it's job. Since this is Texas and it's relative warm even in the fall and winter, I've got the fermentation vessel in a shallow tub filled with two inches of water. I keep the vessel wrapped with moist towels and the ceiling fan blowing to cool the must and reduce the amount of undesirable fusel alcohols generated. I also agitate the vessel regularly, to release dissolved CO2 (there's a lot of it!) that builds up in the liquid and can contribute to stressed fermentation. So yeah, I know enough about this stuff to be dangerous, but not enough to actually produce an unequivocally "good" vintage of mead. Maybe this time...

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365 / 12: Hint of autumn

It's cold, cloudy and dreary out now, but this morning we had a bit of sun. Just enough to illuminate a hint of autumn.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

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Farscape: I, E.T.

My Farscape re-watch continues with the second episode, "I, E.T." Although it is officially the second episode, it didn't originally air until after "Thank God It's Friday, Again." It really makes the viewer wonder why networks and/or cable channels insist on airing episodes out of order. I can't discern any valid purpose in doing so (in this instance at least).

A Peacekeeper beacon booby-trap hidden aboard Moya abruptly begins transmitting a homing signal, one certain to bring Crais and the Peacekeeper Command Carrier running right to Moya's location in the Uncharted Territories. Not to mention the piercing audio component causes Crichton to suffer uncontrolled facial tics. To muffle the signal while the crew devises a way to silence it for good, they attempt the risky move of actually landing Moya on a nearby watery planet. Leviathans live their entire lives in space, but legends of Leviathans touching a planet's surface and living to tell about it convince the reluctant Moya. They land, and Moya submerges into the mud of a swamp. Crichton, Aeryn and D'Argo leave the ship to look for a particular type of naturally-occurring anesthetic effective on Leviathans, while the diminutive Rygel squeezes into the space behind the bulkhead and begins the process of cutting the homing beacon out of Moya's neural net. Zhaan, the Delvian priestess, uses her abilities to absorb some of the intense pain away from Moya.

Before long, Crichton, D'Argo and Aeryn get separated when a search party of natives--generally human-looking with the exception of odd ears--attempt to capture them. Crichton hides in a barn adjacent to a radio telescope, and is subsequently knocked out by a young boy packing some sort of taser wand. The boy's mother--who initially called in the report of a UFO to the authorities--holds Crichton captive, but eventually comes to realize how lost and unthreatening he is. She lets him go, Crichton rescues D'Argo--who'd managed to get captured--and they escape back to Moya just in time to throw the numbing chemical on Rygel's surgery and effective an escape back into space.

Commentary: Weak episode, I'm sorry to say. As much as Farscape distinguished itself with originality, this plot comes off as a tired re-tread of a basic premise used for at least one episode of every Star Trek series, plus the original Battlestar Galactica and quite possibly Buck Rogers and Babylon 5, although I can't quite recall specific episodes. The military's interest in capturing the aliens is perfunctory, with no socio-political commentary developed to any real extent. The entire plot consists of a by-the-numbers series of events without depth. Huge hints are given out that the "anesthetic" Crichton and friends are out looking for is actually salt, which isn't really clever and has no payoff. In fact, the "quest for salt" has no real payoff as the surgery on Moya is completed without it (yes, the salt numbs her pain enough to launch off the planet, but come on, the whole wrap-up is entirely anti-climactic). The best thing to be said about the episode is that the slower pace of the plot allowed for some much-needed character development. D'Argo is still a one-note "Fight first, ask questions later" dope, but Rygel gets a little depth, showing that underneath his pompous self-importance lies a core that will come through when it counts the most. Aeryn remains angry about her circumstances and Zhaan is the compassionate caregiver. Pilot is still something of a mystery, but his uncertainty and far-from-omniscient knowledge of Moya are interesting touches that hint at interesting backstory to come. Also, we get to see commlink badges used by Moya's crew, which are never used again as far as I can recall. Farscape was great at introducing little bits of detail that were ultimately discarded as not worth the effort.

Crichton Quote of the Episode: "Kinda like Louisiana... or Dagobah. Dagobah. Where Yoda lives."

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365 / 11: Ladybug

I set out to take an entirely different photo today, but just happened to come across this little ladybug resting on an acorn. I hadn't expected to see any insects about because of the chilly weather, but it didn't seem to bother this little fellow much.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 100mm 2.8 macro

Lisa On Location Photography

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