Tall blondes

It is no secret that Cynthia’s absolute favorite creature on the entire planet is the giraffe.

The first time I ever visited Cynthia’s apartment when we were first dating it was hard to miss the life-size giraffe sculpture in the living room, a sculpture Cynthia had made from scratch using dowels, chicken wire, paper mache and finished in polymers and which, to this day, dominates our dining room.

For Cynthia’s birthday this year I arranged a behind the scenes tour of the Houston Zoo’s giraffe exhibit. Our tour was this past Saturday and it was a blast!

It was a chance to get up close and personal with these magnificent creatures


Cynthia gets a nuzzle from Kiva


Cynthia joins the herd


Nigel likes the carrots

It was incredible being so close to these animals.
Cynthia claims it was the best birthday present EVER!

So now I guess I have my work cut out for me for next year….

You can see many more pictures from the encounter here.

Say I’m the only bee in your bonnet

For the last several months Cynthia has been working on a quilt as a Christmas present for her mother. It was originally going to be a green and white traditional birdhouse style quilt.

Before Cynthia got started on it we went to the Gee’s Bend show and it inspired her to do something a little less conventional.

Cynthia decided to design her own non-traditional pattern and ended with this spectacular original creation:

Quilt
click image for larger view

The pieces are all machine sewn together, but all of the quilting is meticulously and painstakingly done by hand. All in all it took Cynthia about 4 1/2 months to complete this project.

We shipped it last week and Cynthia’s mother received it on Friday.
She was very excited and says she loves it!

Hello, Hola, Bonjour, Willkommen!

Awhile back I was utilizing a nifty plugin that would translate my blog into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Chinese and Portuguese. Sadly, the plugin stopped working when the creater of the code released his fully functional and quite commercial version called Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro.

This meant that if I wanted to use the plugin I would have to buy it.

After much hemming and hawing I finally broke down and bought the plugin and have now re-installed it.

If you look in the right hand sidebar of baldheretic.com you will see a series of flags. Just click on the flag to see this site in the corresponding language.

The plugin utilizes Google Translate to reformat the blog and it’s pretty slick.

I’m now watching as the search engine spiders re-crawl my web site in order to index it in the various languages.

You can already find references in some search engines to “El Heretic Calvo”….

Apronicity

Cynthia and I met up with Allen “King of the Oldies” Hill and his lovely lady, Andrea, for dinner last night. We dined at BYOB Lebanese restaurant called Cafe Mezza. It was our first time to eat there and it was quite good.

Cynthia wanted to make an apron for Allen and personalize it. Since Allen’s primary marketing trademark is a wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes Cynthia came up with the perfect thing:

It’s called the “Allen Hillpron”

Still singing where the weeping willows wave

Acquired a Tamron 18 – 200mm f/3.5-6.3 XR DI-II LD lens for my Sony.
Extremely versatile lens. It allows me to go from a nice wide angle to a reasonable zoom without changing lenses. This will be the perfect travel lens.

Took it out to Terry Hershey Park over off the Beltway. It was just too nice a day to spend indoors. The hike and bike trail extends all the way to Highway 6 and is very pleasant.
Cynthia and I saw many Warblers, a few Woodpeckers and this Mockingbird:

Mockingbird
Click image for full size

Aperture: f/6.3
ISO: 400
Focal length: 200mm

The image stabilization in this camera is very helpful at these extended focal lengths.

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