By request. Let me know if you want this lj-cut; I figured it was small enough that wasn’t necessary.

So there’s this wonderful family photo of me at around two years old playing in Hyde Park. My mother made a copy for me, which I have somewhere very safe, I’m sure. But my sister also has a copy, and while we were down there last weekend I scanned it in. So here I am:

Me as a toddler 'dowsing' in Hyde Park, London, summer 1968. My parents spent three years in England for my father’s graduate work. This picture of me was taken by a family friend while we were in Hyde Park in London sometime in summer of 1968. My parents always called this my dowsing picture, although I sort of think it looks more like I’m ploughing. I was a cutie, wasn’t I?

plumtreeblossom with wildflowers, from September. Two beauties of nature captured in one shot! More flower pics (and one more plumtreeblossom pic are here.

It’s now the beginning of November in Massachusetts, and the flowers show no signs of slowing down. They’re still covered with new blossoms and lots and lots of buds. And they’re a lot taller than they were when this picture were taken; a few plants are taller than I am, standing. (Unfortunately a few of the taller ones were knocked over wind storms last month, or there would be a lot taller than me.)

I also need to organize and post pictures from our DC trip last month.

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately; I’ve been too busy living life to write about it. I will mention last Thursday, though — darxus and cathijosephine and devoken came over to watch Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart is Crazy, I think), which is pretty much the quintessential Bollywood movie and was (as my delightful plumtreeblossom, who sadly couldn’t make it, would say) made of awesome. The costumes and dance numbers were particularly impressive even for Bollywood. And today plumtreeblossom and I are driving out to Western Mass to go to the housewarming of a couple friends and former housemates of mine. And basically life is going well, except I need to get more sleep and not decide two hours after I should have been in bed that it’s really time to organize some pictures. :-)

So before I met her, plumtreeblossom sang in a band. She recently lent me a videotape of a performance her band did at the Kendall in 2002. Wow, it’s neat to have a window into this part of her world! I hadn’t even heard her sing until the End of Summer party!

To re-use a venerable phrase: Hallelujah, I love her so!

Here she is, my rockstar girlfriend:

( Three more pictures. )
There are a few more in my ScrapBook gallery. Sorry for the low resolution; I didn’t realize until after I was done that I was capturing at 320x240.

My delightful friend golux_org, among his other excellent qualities, is an astronomy buff and a photographer. He posts a daily photo at http://photo.bluebrook.com/potd.html, which I read through its LJ feed, bluebrook_potd. Usually he posts (gorgeous) nature scenes, but today’s photo is of the ISS, with the shuttle docked, passing overhead on Saturday. As it happens, I was there when he took that photo, and it was pretty impressive. To my eyes, it looked about as bright as Venus, and it crossed about three quarters of the sky before rapidly dimming and disappearing as it entered Earth’s shadow. It was visible to us (given that trees and buildings blocked our view as it rose) for a minute or so.

On a related subject golux_org reminded me that our mutual friend dalek (a/k/a Marek), who works with the Clay Center Observatory, was one of the people who took this impressively detailed ground-based photo of the ISS and Atlantis during the previous shuttle mission to the ISS. Atlantis is docked to the bottom-left of the main space station body, between the two large groups of solar panels, mostly in shadow and pointed away (with the main engines pointed towards earth), so we’re looking at the rear of the shuttle. The ISS is well-lit. It’s worth clicking through the picture on that page to the higher-resolution version; you can see considerably more detail.

(BTW, my userpic for this post is the Hubble Space Telescope; nothing to do with the ISS.)

Had a fabulous, fabulous time last night at sunspiral and roozle’s amazing party.

darxus was there with cathijosephine’s DSLR camera (and cathijosephine), and he got some great pictures. They start here, and the first bunch are of firespinning (and firejuggling). He camera-geeks about how he took them in this entry. After the firespinning, there are some great indoor pictures (after plumtreeblossom and I had left), including a few lovely pictures of cathijosephine. And fans of cathijosephine, of buxom_bey, of gorgeous women kissing in general, or of fire will be interested in this shot.

[EDIT: Oops; I had linked to somebody else’s pictures too, but they’re in a locked post. Sorry!]

(I took some video of the firespinning; my little digicam does better at that than at still shots in low-light conditions for some reason. I haven’t looked to see whether any of it turned out yet.)

I also call your attention to this gorgeous sunset picture.

In other photo-related news, I got plumtreeblossom a camera yesterday, and from a purely selfish perspective it was a really wise investment on my part. This post of hers made me extremely happy. Awwww...

Well, in the mail today there came photographic evidence that I do in fact have a brain. I’ll probably post more of these when I get a chance to look through them all, but for now, here’s one picture.

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I’ve added pictures from my recent trip with plumtreeblossom to meet sionnagh in Las Vegas to my photo gallery:

• My photo gallery (recent photos at the top)
• Direct link to Vegas pictures

Unfortunately, I seem not to have taken any of sionnagh, but there are some nice ones of plumtreeblossom.

So, it has occurred to me that now that I’m growing my hair out (albeit frustratingly slowly), none of my userpics looks like me any more. So, here’s a new userpic, and at least one of my userpics looks like me now.

Also:

(1) I just got home from hearing (and watching) the first concert of Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band. It was fabulous! I haven’t got the energy to write how fabulous it was, but it was exceptionally fabulous. Besides the awesome tide of music, there were circus-style performances: stilts, clowns, aerial silks, poi, hula hoops, belly dancing, and a couple of human marionettes. I was really tired, but I’m so glad I got myself there.

[EDIT: siderea has a great review here.]

(2) A couple weeks ago when I was over at plumtreeblossom’s, her cats were being especially cute and photogenic curled up on the bed, and so I recorded them for posterity.

And speaking of plumtreeblossom, we had a lovely time together this weekend. She came over on Saturday and made us yummy shepherd’s pie (leftovers of which I am having as I type), we watched The Forgotten, which was very interesting and sophisticated in some ways, and very cheesy in others, but was quite fun.

This morning we had brunch at a local diner, spent a little time along the Quincy shoreline, and then spent quite a lot of time at the huge Chinese grocery near my house that cathijosephine introduced me to. (And of course this means that we both came home with shocking quantities of interesting food.)

All in all, it’s been an excellent weekend.