Friday morning report

I noticed my cell phone battery was almost flat as I left home this morning, so that meant I’d go to Barnes & Noble.

Huh?

Barnes & Noble does not have free Wifi, but they do have convenient electrical outlets, which means I can use my Sprint cell phone for a modem and in doing so, let it charge through my Mini 9 being plugged into AC.

The wallpaper on my Mini 9, BTW, is a photo I shot about 6 years ago at Arches National Park. They call that part of the park Park Avenue because of the rock formations’ resemblance to a New York City skyline.

I’ve been recruited to shoot a local home next week for a home design/furnishings magazine. This month’s issue is emphasizing kitchens, but the home selected is in the middle of a kitchen faucet/tile backsplash project, so I’ve been instructed to work around the sink problems. And the shoot is scheduled the day after the stated deadline. Strikes me as a very odd choice, but I’m just getting paid to do the shoot and fire the images off by FedEx to the publisher asap. Whatever.

One of the sunflower seeds from our back yard birdfeeder has taken root and the flower opened up yesterday morning. It was even fuller this morning, so I set my Olympus point-and-shoot for macro and captured its sunny radiance before I left home for town.

It was 82 degrees and impossibly humid at the time and my glasses and camera immediately fogged up, having just come from a dry, air conditioned house.

(The air conditioning at Barnes & Noble is about to freeze me out. I don’t much care for their musical choices, either.)

Austin’s birthday present for his mother arrived yesterday afternoon in a big Lowe’s box truck – a replacement for our present screened patio door with a dog door in the bottom panel. Maria has wanted one of these since we moved in nearly two years ago.

We’ve kept the original screen door propped open so the dogs can to and fro at will. But the consequence is that mosquitoes, wasps, flies, birds, raccoons and God knows what else can also find their way onto the porch. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you’ll remember the ShopVac Mosquito War of 2008. The dog door should make those daily mosquito massacres unnecessary.