·:[ Stream of Consciousness… ]:·
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I’m still very much alive.

Since last we spoke dear reader I’ve been to Spain for 3 weeks, Los Angeles for 5 days and buried under snow.  Now, the ‘holidays’ are upon us and things get even more harried.

I have a ton of pics to share from my trip and tips about what to do when you are stuck in traffic during a snow storm (hint: bring water and a cup to pee into).

More later…

The lobby of the Belagio Hotel in Las Vegas has a HUGE glass flower sculpture on its ceiling. This installation includes over 2000 individually blown pieces by artist Dale Chihuly.

To take this shot I had to lay on my back and shoot straight up; I got lots of weird looks.

The Belagio site has some more info. and the artist can be found here.

I’ve posted several other shots from that trip, the first with the new camera, on Flickr.

Along with about a third of the population of North America we planned to travel this holiday season. In our case it meant a trip to Kalamazoo MI for a gathering of the clan, the first in over 2 years. We booked the flights several weeks ago optimizing for cost over schedule. As a result we were booked on a 6AM flight.

I’ve been traveling a fair bit recently, Chicago and LA this month alone, so when the time came to drive to the airport, 3:30AM thank you very much, I was on auto-pilot. Of course, we scheduled this flight long before we knew my company party would be happening the night before, nor that L’s company party would be the night before that. Needless to say we were zombies.

We make great time; arrive at the off-airport parking lot, hop in the shuttle, bounce our way to the terminal and queue up with the other zombies waiting to check in. We pounce on a ‘self check-in kiosk’ and jam the credit card in to get our reservation. Hmm… nothing found. No worries, I’ll just enter in the destination airport code, AZO. Double-Hmm… nothing found. I enter the confirmation number – bzzzt! No check in for you! Now, I’m worried. (more…)

We shot over 1520 images during our trip to India! We’ve spent the last 3 weekends reviewing them, tossing the obviously ‘bad’ ones and tweaking some of our faves.

Now comes the hard part… carving that list down to a management number that I can post to my Flickr account.  In the mean time I’m going to return the photo stream link on the left to point back to my camphone pics.

Tonight we give our good-byes to our new friends and leave for home. I’ve posted a few more shots on the photo stream but this will be it until we return.

After the food we’ve had the last 10 days I’m sure the food back home will be very bland. But I am looking forward to sleeping in the same bed for more than 2 nights in a row.

See ya when we get home!

Extraordinary! Everywhere we look is a perfect picture. I have no clue how I’m going to edit down the massive number of photos we’ve taken. I have no idea how I would have done this with a film camera.

The highlight of the last few days, and for me the highlight of the trip, was a visit to the Ranthambore Nature Park. Of course the main goal was to see a tiger, but the park has a large number of other indigenous animals. We saw sambar deer, spotted dear, macaque monkeys, mongoose, tree pies, green parrots to name just a few. It wasn’t until the second of two trips through the park, bouncing furiously on the two-track trail, when the spotter indicated that we should all be quiet. He then after a few tense seconds, pointed into the woods and uttered the word I had been hoping to hear… TIGER!

We lingered for almost an hour as she rolled around under the shade, played in a small pond, and then trotted off. It was amazing!

I’ve uploaded a few new pics to the Flickr photostream. As always, you can see them on the left, just click on them to see bigger versions.

There is PLENTY of other stuff to share, but connection time is precious. More later…

We arrived in Delhi a few days ago, safe and sound, albeit a bit tired. It has been a non-stop sensory assault ever since! I only have a few minutes to send this update so I have to be brief.

In these last few days we’ve see the the Tomb of Akbar the Great, the Taj Mahal, the Agra fort, the ‘Baby Taj’, large extents of the Indian countryside and tons more. Everywhere you look there is a photograph. After only a few days here it has really struck home to me that we in the ‘States really have almost nothing when it comes to great monuments of historic human construction.

I’ve upload a few highlights from the last few days into my Flickr account. You can get there by clicking on any of the pics on the left side.

More later!

One of the nice things about being pseud-anonymous is that I can talk about real-life events without much chance of a stalker showing up at my door.

I’m preparing for a vacation trip to India.

We have joined a tour sponsored by WGBH that will take us across the northern areas of the sub-continent and include visits to the Taj Mahal, a tiger preserve, ancient cities, grand temples and more. I am very excited; India has been on my list of places to visit before I die for a long time and the opportunity made it very easy. India is the type of place that I would not consider going on my own so a tour was a perfect choice.

I’ve already stocked up on memory cards for my digital camera and will be bringing along a laptop as a backup mechanism. I hope to be able to post along the way via Internet cafes or hotel broadband connections. I’ll also be posting highlight pics to my Flickr photostream so that the folks at home can follow along.

So get comfy, pass the naan and prepare to share a trip of a lifetime!

I’m still trying to digest all the info I gathered at CES. I have a ton of pics to post including some fab-damn-tabulous shots of George Thorogood. Yes, that George Thorogood.

Gibson had a huge tent in the parking lot with a stage. George played Thursday and Friday nights (I went to both) for about 2hrs each night. There were only about 100 people in the crowd so I was able to get very close to the stage.

I’ll post the pics as soon as I figure out how to make WordPress create thumbnails.

Did I mention that they also had an open bar?

What do you get when you dump 150,000 people into Vegas (bhaybee, VEGAS!) for the weekend? You get 1.25hr wait times for a taxi. For those of you keeping track at home this queue folds back on itself 6 times and each ‘leg’ was approx. 50m long.