Capt Mondo's Photo Blog

A trio of dandelions on the verge of flowering

Close-up of a closed-up dandelion

Found this little guy lurking on the side of a tulip in our back garden. He crawled inside the closed flower soon after, settling in for the night.

Small fly on the underside of a leaf

A trio of dandelions on the verge of flowering

Close-up of a closed-up dandelion

Found this little guy lurking on the side of a tulip in our back garden. He crawled inside the closed flower soon after, settling in for the night.

Small fly on the underside of a leaf

Labels: Dandelion, fly, garden, spider

After visiting Michael’s gallery showing on Saturday, I still had time left over and decided to head up-town to check out/reconnoiter the Toronto Comic Arts Festival which was happening at the Toronto Reference Library on Yonge just above Bloor. I was planning on talking my daughters to it the next day (which I did) but I thought I’d scout things out first.

Glad I did because I knew what might interest the girls and what might not. I also found the place to be pretty crowded, so I vowed to take the girls here early On Sunday in an effort to avoid the crowds.

On the first run-through I discovered that David Malaki, who is the artist for one of my favourite online cartoons (Wondermark), was there. I ended up buying all three of his comic strip compilations from him directly, along with his autograph.

I brought the girls on the second day and they had fun making their own comic strips, and enjoying a lot of the freebie comic books stuff that was being handed out. They both ended up buying posters from Imaginism Studios, Annie bought a book from Matt Forsythe (which was signed by him), and I bought a signed illustration from him.

Annie and Vanessa creating their own comics during the second day of the event

Annie explaining her “Super-Budgie” comic strip to Vanessa

Annie and Vanessa having fun with a cut-out

Comic artist Matt Forsythe adding a dedication in one of his books for Annie, drawing one of his trademark squid characters on the frontispiece.

Graphic novel artist Seth

She knitting “Plushtaches” for sale. $8 apiece.

It hailed this morning and during a lull in the storm I went out and took a few shots of some of the pea-sized stones that fell on our deck.

Everything melted/dissolved in the rain about 5 minutes later.

Hailstones piling up on the deck

Inside the planter

I had the chance to get out sans kids to see friend and former work-colleague Michael Willems’ photography exhibit Intravenous gallery showing at the New Gallery at New Gallery in Parkdale.

Labels: Michael Willems

Purple and white Bleeding Heart (Dicentra) flowers. Can’t help but think of the logo for “Hairspray” when I see these.

Fern “fiddlehead” unfurling.

White Bleeding Heart flowers close-up.

Labels: Bleeding Heart, Fern, fiddlehead, garden

I picked up a netbook today: an Acer Aspire One. I felt a little bit guilty about buying something which is powered by our main CPU rival, but I haven’t been able to find one made by AMD as yet and, well, this was on sale.

My plan is to use it for writing while commuting. You will likely will see more written blog entries as a result.

One word of warning for those contemplating getting one of these: it takes a good half-hour or more for it to set itself up with Windows XP before you can actually do anything with it. Didn’t get a lot of time to spend with it, though I did manage to install a few programs I expect to want, such as OpenOffice, Winamp, a movie codec pack and Stellarium to start.

Thought about going with a Linux-based version, but in the end I like convenience, and venerable Windows XP still delivers. (I have two machines that came with Vista, and much prefer the older OS, if only because it doesn’t get in my way and is as top-heavy as the new OS).

A couple of other observations: I hate the fact that somebody decided that it would be a good idea to sacrifice a double-width Shift key for a single-key sized version adjacent to the little-used pipette/forward-slash key (I wonder if I can easily remap it?). Also, am amazed that Microsoft or Acer didn’t reduce the multi-level nav-bar for Internet Explorer, as the default config takes up well over a third of the display. I ditched that almost immediately for a lightly customized Firefox browser.

Needing to take a picture of the day, I chose my new “toy”.

Here’s a close-up of its vast keyboard. 😉

QA

Close-up of the screen (displaying Stellarium) using the macro lens.

Labels: Acer Aspire, macro, netbook, Stellarium

The trilliums (trillia?) in our front garden have finally bloomed. Here’s a close-up of one of them using the macro lens.

Being squawked at by a red-winged blackbird down at Woodbine Park. Unfortunately the bird is not in as sharp a focus as I would have liked, but the expressions is great.

It’s warm enough now that our dog Yo-Bob can go fetch balls thrown into the pond by Woodbine Park. I bought a throwing-stick for dog-balls today and we got him good and tired having him chase the ball all over the park.

Labels: red-winged blackbird, trillium, woodbine park, Yo-Bob

Another pic from Annie’s soccer class. Best pic of the bunch, where unfortunately she gets faked-out by the boy beside her, while another boy in goal looks on.

Labels: Annie. soccer

Some minnows swimming above a lost license plate in a small creek.

Playing with the macro lens again: a close-up of a small centipede (maybe a couple of centimeters in length) who stayed still long enough for the shot.

More macro fun: small bleeding-heart buds against the stony face of our garden gnome-guy.

I thought I was done for the day, and then I heard this Cardinal chirp away in our backyard tree. He posed for this shot and then flitted away.

Labels: cardinal, centipede, garden gnome, minnows