Perry Found

Day 358 – July 14, 2012

Tying together previous posts of mine concerning a visit to the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (see here) and my fascination with the animated television show Phineas and Ferb (see here), I give you this visual gem from my July visit to that wondeful museum that sits on the National Mall.

If you are familiar with the show Phineas and Ferb then please join with me and say together, “Oh, there you are, Perry!”

He’s a semi-aquatic mammal of action

Museum Photography: Natural History

Day 358 – July 14, 2012

Following on the heels of a post I did concerning a series of photographs at Perufloral 2012, I wanted to share this other exercise in street photography that I created while I was on vacation back in the United States.

Our location today is the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History located on the National Mall. Yes, I understand that, technically, I am not engaging in street photography as I used my camera in a museum, but I hope that you will grant me some leeway.

Rather than walk around the museum snapping photos as I moved (which I did do, but that’s a post for another time), I stayed in one spot to see what would come into my viewfinder. To make it even more interesting to me, I decided to use one of the artifacts as a frame. Let’s meet our frame, a rai stone located on the lowest floor of the museum.

Our subject

And now, the photos…

Finally, just in case you wanted to know what a rai actually is…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far

Day 242 – March 20, 2012

WordPress, the wonderful organization that hosts this blog, announced the theme for their Weekly Photo Challenge and it is “near and far“.

I have been waiting for a theme just like this one so that I can highlight this photo that I have been holding on to.

I would love to take credit for this photo, but, alas, I cannot.

This snapshot was taken by my wonderful mother-in-law to let our family know what we were missing back in the United States. As we moved to Peru from the hinterlands of Virginia, one of our annual springtime activities was to travel down to the Tidal Basin and view the cherry blossoms. This year, the first year we have missed in a dozen years, was the 100th anniversary of this event.

Sigh!

We missed it this year, but my mother-in-law did send this picture to let us know what springtime in the nation’s capital looked like.

Thanks, Japan

Once again, a big tip-o-the-hat of gratitude to my wonderful mother-in-law for this picture.

The Joys of Moving

Day 000 – July 22, 2011

The short reply to my choice of title is that there are no joys of moving. Moving can only be described as one of four settings: “Hell”, “quasi-Hell”, “Purgatory”, and “southern Utah” (Mental Note: Share that story for another post).

Your mileage may differ, but my recent moving experiences have all been complicated by “The Last Five Percent”. The last few weeks have seen this phenomenon come to bite me in the tuchus yet again. Here’s how it works…

When we first received the schedule from our moving company for when they would come to pack all our belongings for our sojourn to Peru, we found out we would have to sort our stuff into four piles:

1) Items to be stored in a warehouse in the States. These are items that we would not need for the next ### years we are in Lima. This was known as Storage.
2) Items that we would like in Lima, but did not need for 2-3 months. This was known as the Boat Shipment (BoSh).
3) Items that we would like in Lima and would need in 2-3 weeks. This was known as the Air Shipment (AiSh)
4) Items that we would like in Lima and that we would need upon arrival. This was known as Luggage.

During sorting, we quickly saw the rise of a fifth pile: CWNLN, which is not a very handy acronym for Crap We No Longer Needed, so we shortened our word for it and simply called it “Trash”.

After piles were made, yard sales were had, donations were given to charity, and boxes were readied, Day One (of three) of the Pack-Out arrived and 70% of our belongings went into either the Storage pile or the Trash pile.

(Aside: It was astounding to me to see just HOW MUCH stuff one can accumulate and how much of it, when push comes to shove, can be so casually tossed out.)

Days Two and Three saw the packing and carting away of the AiSh and BoSh piles which constituted 20% of our belongings.

The day before our flight left was spent packing away our Luggage pile into ten suitcases and five carry-on pieces of luggage. That accounted for 5% of the stuff we owned.

For those of you who have been playing along with a calculator realize that I have only accounted for 95% of the stuff in our house. As my wife and I surveyed our home, there was a variety of items strewn about the rooms, closets, drawers, nooks, and crannies of our abode that we had forgotten to pack in Storage, BoSh, AiSh, but these were items that could not be thrown away.

Since we were renting out our house, we couldn’t leave the items there so we had 24 hours to remove that Last Five Percent. Not the way I wanted to spend my last days in the States.

In the end, it was done through a variety of means including having my wife’s sister come and take all the cleaning supplies away, storing items with my wife’s parents, giving items away to neighbors, and decided (reluctantly) that some items just needed to be thrown out. All in all, and like I said, dealing with the stress of the Last Five Percent was a pain in the nalgitas (Spanish for tuchus).

We also reserved a small corner of our unfinished basement for a few items that fit none of the above categories in the paragraph above and we told our tenants about it. Hope they understand, but I simply could not part with my framed Seurat poster from the Art Institute of Chicago which I had forgotten was in the garage.

With our life in (not-so-) tiny little boxes, we boarded a plane to Newark and then to Lima.