Catching Up

Highlights from the past week:

The clouds right outside my place, taken last Friday morning:


Cora, John, and I tied for third (but lost the tiebreaker) at trivia. Not bad, shorthanded (and we still won a prize for 4th place)!


Tonight, Rich, Sara, Joe, and I went to the University of Denver campus to see a Punch Brothers concert.


The Punch Brothers are a modern bluegrass band, led by mandolin player Chris Thile (center).

Steeple on campus:


Rich, Joe, and Sara:

More Sunset Pictures

I was amazed by yet another sunset tonight, so I might as well post some pictures of it! This one was from when I had just left work:


These were taken during my walk to trivia:




As usual, the pictures don't capture the bright oranges as well as my eye...

I also recommend the latest video from OK Go, White Knuckles.

UPDATE: I tried to tweak that last picture so it was more realistic. I gave it a gamma correction of 0.7 and a saturation of 70, whatever that means.


Heck, that was fun. I'll do it again for another one.

Various Pictures

Today I finally amassed enough pictures since my last post to post again!

Last Thursday morning, I took a closer picture of my honeysuckle bush (this one's for you, Mom!):


As I was leaving work last Thursday evening, the sunset gave everything a warm, orange-yellow tint, which complemented the warm late evening wind.



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This morning at the bus stop, I noticed yellow leaves on the tree across the street. Fall is right around the corner!


Then tonight, as I was leaving work and heading toward the bus stop, two deer crossed my path:



Once they crossed the drive in front of me, they met up with the rest of their herd.


Here they are again, with some neat looking clouds from nearby thunderstorms:


These neat looking clouds made for another interesting sunset. Once I was off the bus, I took this picture,


which looks like the remains of a picture Rich took of the same sunset.

Pictures I took from other websites

Tuesday night, we placed third at trivia:


(picture courtesy of Geeks Who Drink).

Yesterday, I saw this picture on the NASA Earth Observatory website:


This was the first day of the Fourmile fire, when the plume stretched off to the east (which I blogged about). For scale, Denver is the city just to the south of the plume.

New Fire

The good news is that the Fourmile Fire is almost fully contained now. Looking west from the north side of Davidson Mesa, you can see the charred northern side of Sugarloaf Mountain behind Boulder.


Sugarloaf Mountain doesn't have any trees growing on it, so the dark color is all from burnt grass.

A panorama of the Front Range north of Boulder shows the bad news:


A new fire has sprung up in the mountains west of Loveland.


It's ironic, because when I got back from California, I couldn't believe how wet and green the mountains were.

Saturday

I went to the farmers' market again this morning, where I met Rich and Sara, had a breakfast of blackberry pie and lemonade, and watched Pete Kartsounes perform.


He was quite good, with a nice soulful, slightly-gravelly voice.

I noticed an old picture of John Steinbaugh's blacksmith shop on the wall behind the stage.


I thought that was kind of neat, because all the music during the farmers' market and the Sreet Faire take place in the Steinbaugh Pavilion.

Later in the day, I pulled weeds (mostly this creeper/vine thing)


from around my plant out front.


After searching the internet, I think it is some sort of honeysuckle.

Rain

The good news is that the fire has appeared to be getting smaller each day. This afternoon, we had some local rainstorms, which hopefully helped douse some fires. The rain at least made for an intense double rainbow on my way out from work. It was one of the brightest rainbows I've ever seen.


The rainbow was too big to take with one picture, and my photo-stitching software didn't do a very good job. Here's one I took through my polarized sunglasses, which better represents how bright the rainbow seemed to me.


Now imagine that with a deeper, brighter, purple band, and that's what it looked like!

Fire Still Burning

The fire continued to burn today.


Later in the day, I caught a helicopter going to dump water on the flames, and a bird flying in the foreground:


The NOAA building is also directly between the fire and the airport the airtankers use for refilling (the same airport the P-3 uses when it's in town), so they were constantly flying overhead today.


Finally, a coworker of mine, Dan Lack, took this amazing picture last night:


This is actually a small version of it. It is such a nice picture, I don't want to mess with its copyright protections by posting the original version here.

Another Wildfire

The Fourmile Fire started this morning in Fourmile Canyon northwest of Boulder. Unfortunately, this one is closer to populated areas than last winter's fire I blogged about.

I went to the open space atop Davidson Mesa to take these pictures:



Longs Peak:


A panoramic view of the smoke plume looking from WNW to ENE:


I went to a slightly different spot tonight to take these pictures:

Trivia

We came in second place at trivia Tuesday night. (L to R, Cora, me, Jason, Tara, Anne, John):


I also won a random drawing for bacon air freshener, the fumes from which I pretended to be inhaling deeply in this picture:


Thanks, as always, to Geeks Who Drink for the pictures...