Photo 365 Project - Buffalo Wild Wings

A nice place to hang out. Buffalo Wild Wings is in an area called The Promenade, a collection of shops that includes a few that have made it into the Photo 365 Project (Panera and Panda Express most recently).

Photo 365 Project - US Flag

A quick stop for gas on a sunny day with a little wind and the flag caught my eye. Independence day is coming up soon here in the states, so flag- consider yourself posted.

Photo 365 Project - MN Canoe

This was dinner. It is called a Minnesota Canoe; a flank steak wrapped around mushrooms, onions and swiss.

Photo 365 Project - Carriage Hills

It doesn't look like a six year court battle, but it is (or was). The lawyers have all gone home, now the bulldozers take over. This chunk of land was a golf course called Carriage Hills and will soon be transformed into a housing development called Stone Haven. I may catch more pictures here as things develop.

Photo 365 Project - Stormy Panera

Shortly after the latest storm blew through we stopped by a food place near Panera. I noticed the outside seating at Panera had gotten caught up in the wind, and am getting a little better at catching these moments with my camera. When we left the area a little while later the tables and chairs had been cleaned up.

Photo 365 Project - Lawn Mowing

About 1/3 of an acre to go...

Photo 365 Project - Panda Express

A new restaurant in town.

Photo 365 Project - Robo Stash

The Robotics team got kicked out of their storage room. Who knew building robots could generate such a mound of...treasure?

Photo 365 Project - Impaired Pedestrian

I've never seen a vision impaired pedestrian in this area, and I suspect they haven't seen me either (groan).

Alternate caption: Nary a bar in sight, not sure what this is about.

Photo 365 Project - Leaning Lamp

Another desparation photo. The day was slipping away with no photo logged. My iPhone doesn't deal well with photos having a dark foreground/light background (not good for most cameras, the iPhone doubly so). Regardless this leaning lamp caught my eye as I walked up to a bookstore.

Photo 365 Project - Pizza Oven

A coworker decided to build a dry-fit pizza oven. Dry-fit means it isn't permanent, just a proof-of-concept that will be used for about a year then replaced with a more durable design. In the meantime, pizza, pastries, breads and perhaps roasts will get their turn inside the wood fired oven.

Photo 365 Project - Road Stripping

The long running joke here (and probably everywhere else with similar climate) is "We have two seasons, winter and road construction".

I snapped this after grabbing coffee on the way to work. I'm amazed at how quickly these machines can strip an asphalt road. The ground up bits are taken to a local company called Bituminous Roadways where the asphalt is recycled into new asphalt.

Photo 365 Project - Something Wicked This Way Came

It's tornado season in the Midwest, but usually they don't all come at once. Before today, the most tornadoes confirmed in Minnesota in a single day was 26, that was in 1992. Normally, there are less than that in an entire year. On this day, that record is expected to be broken as dozens of tornadoes sprouted from a line of storms that raced from southwest Minnesota and off to the northeast and into Wisconsin.

It was getting late in the day and the sun had been hidden behind clouds since about 4 in the afternoon. It was storm building weather with a cool morning, lots of heat building during the day (what we call 'adding energy' to the atmosphere). If the sun gets down soon enough this stuff will dissipate, but these are the longest days of the year in this part of the country with over 15 hours of sunlight. There were storm warnings with dire predictions of hail and wicked weather so I ran some quick errands then tucked my car in the garage and waited for the drama. After much wind and gloominess, the light outside turned a very green (seriously, when the sunlight turns green nothing good comes from it) an hour later it shifted to an odd yellow color. I grabbed the camera and went out hoping to capture the odd color. Epic fail, the camera seems to have 'corrected' the color.

This storm continued to the northwest through the Twin Cities and ended up killing three people. An older couple fled their farmhouse and hunkered down in a ditch, only to get hit by some debris; the elderly gentleman was wounded and his wife was killed. In northwestern Minnesota a 58 year old man (on his birthday none-the-less) checked in at the convenience store where his daughter was working; he also worked there but was off that evening. A tornado whipped into town and the man covered his daughter as they ducked into the corner and the tornado hit the store. He was killed but his daughter survived. Also in north western Minnesota a woman was killed, details are sketchy as places hardest hit are cleaning up.

Photo 365 Project - Planted Field

This field has been left fallow for the last couple years. This year some cars showed up and people stood around looking very serious for a while. Later the field was plowed. Then more cars showed up. Then plants started to grow.

They've done a very good job creating these little plots of various plants. The current theory is the field workers leased the field and plan to sell the produce at a farmer's market later in the year.

Photo 365 Project - Kindle

This is what happens when you forget to take a picture of the day. I was lying in bed reading a book, dozing off, when it occurred to me I had no photo! I berrated myself for a while, considered taking a picture of the ceiling of my bedroom, then decided the kindle in front of me was a better candidate. I spend a fair amount of time looking at this kindle, might as well memorialize it in a photo.

Photo 365 Project - Gas Pump

A little pic for our friends overseas. A truely american gas pump. Note the color television at the top (it starts a little newscast, weather report, and advertisement when the pump is activated), the digital display and pay-at-the-pump card slot (these particular pumps are open 24 hours, the gas station/convenience store closes, but people can still drive up and buy gas).

Not very photo worthy? Consider the oddity of it. Gas stations claim they make very little money on gas, the real profit is in the store. The gas is a "loss leader" that gets people to the store. Yet the gas stations provide these monoliths and make it very easy to bypass the store.

Photo 365 Project - Mushroom Lawn

Along with many days of rain comes mushrooms. These little guys pop up fast and in quantity. Fresh ones appear daily as the rain continues, and often in clumps like this.

Photo 365 Project - Bike Wash

It's been raining for several days here. When a break appeared and some errands needed to be done, I took my bike for a wash, I mean ride. Minutes after I got home (and snapped this picture for the Photo 365 project) the light rain turned into a down pour.

Photo 365 Project - Ditto Face

Wanna get your camera licked? Stick it in the face of a black lab. They'll eat (or at least tongue swipe) anything. Note: Dog slime is not a cleaning fluid, quite the opposite.

Photo 365 Project - Half Tree

Walking the dog in my neighboorhood I'm always struck by this sight. It's like the roadway has projected itself up and sliced off half of the tree. Everywhere else in the neighborhood the trees flow over the roadway, so odd tree-consider yourself photographed!

Photo 365 Project - Wednesday Comics

I didn't become aware of the concept of "Wednesday Comics" until last year, so I suspect it is worth a couple words worth of description.

On Wednesday's, new comics are put up for sale at comic book retailers across the country. As a matter of fact, last year a limited series called 'Wednesday Comics' was produced, the title acknowledging this weekly phenomena. At about the same time, my wife and I started taking Wednesday nights as a time to go out on 'date night'. The two became linked for a while and we made a regular run to the local comic book store.

We're not huge comic book collectors, but the people and atmosphere appeal to our casual taste. Wednesday trips to the comics store have since become a less regular stop for us, but this week we went and I thought I'd take a snapshot of the day.

Photo 365 Project - Ditto's Window Shopping

I planned better than the previous day for this picture. The idea was to take Ditto to the pet store with me to do some shopping for cat litter and food. While there I'd get a picture of the dog picking out cat food or litter. I had a nagging thought "how exactly am I going to frame a photo with a dog in the picture, while holding said dog's leash AND a camera, AND somehow capture the fact that this dog is in a store?"

Details be damned, just taking the dog shopping for cat supplies had enough going for it to make this plan worth executing.

The attempts at pictures with the dog sniffing at the cat litter, "making her selection" didn't turn out very well. The cat food was on too high of a shelf for the dog to really get involved (yes, there was other cat food on a low shelf, but there has to be some integrity in these photos and this one was already slipping into 'staged' territory).

Finally, the birds caught my eye. To be honest, and in the interest of full disclosure, Ditto didn't really care about the birds. She's not much of a shopper either, she was actually eying the exit as this photo was snapped.

Photo 365 Project - Sunset Clouds

The light of another day almost slipped away without getting captured on camera. This required a quick run out to the deck and a snapshot with a Nikon 3000s, something capable of dealing with the low light better than the iPhone that has taken most of the Photo 365 project pictures you see on this blog. That also introduced an unexpected delay in posting.

With the iPhone I can e-mail the photos to wherever I need them then post the pictures here. With the Nikon I have to find the sync cable, connect the camera to a computer, and upload the pictures. The sync cable was an issue in this case; I had tucked it away in a non-standard place, resulting in the aforementioned 'delay' as I hunted for it.

Problem solved, cable found, picture posted.

Photo 365 Project - Grand Old Day

Each year on the first Sunday in June, A long section of Grand Avenue in St. Paul is blocked off, vendors set up food, drink, and random merchandise carts, and a few thousand people wander up and down the road. After a cold winter, this is serious entertainment.

Photo 365 Project - Calypso Drink

The sunlight was fading and I realized I hadn't taken a picture for the day yet. So this is what a lack of prior planning will get you. This drink caught my eye in the cooler at the gas station when I stopped for some cash (yes, I went to a gas station and didn't buy gas; I got a crazy looking drink and some money instead).

Photo 365 Project - BuzzTime Trivia

A trip to Buffalo Wild Wings yielded today's picture of the day. Again, not exactly expert photography, just a snapshot to show something that I saw or did that day.

Photo 365 Project - Ditto in the Yard

Ah, summer. And lawn mowing. Ditto seems to approve of the cut grass, it seems to make it easier for her to pick up tennis balls. She's an 85 pound 3 year old black lab, mixed with an unknown donor.

Ditto came to us from an animal rescue organization. She and her siblings, along with her mom, had been dumped in a ditch; we were told they were found when the puppies were about four days old. How do they know how old she was you ask? I did too. It seems puppies senses develop at a pretty consistent rate, and based on their development the vet hazard a guess at a number less than a week old. Puppies are born without a sense of smell, sight, or hearing (they do have a sense of touch and taste, smell and vision coming in at about 2 weeks for many breeds). Since she was 'rescued' before those other senses developed, we like to think she avoided detecting the oddness associated with such a rough entry into the world.

Regardless, we thought we could do better than a ditch, and gave her a home. Now she lives the sissified suburban life, with a (nicely mowed) lawn to play in and family to amuse her.

Photo 365 Project - Diffley Road

After the previous day's near failure to grab a picture and then resorting to a picture of grout work, I figured I'd take an "emergency backup picture" early in the day. The rest of the day came and went and the backup picture has been pressed into service. This was taken on my commute to work. Rather than the usual highway views found on a city commute, this section is rolling hills and a nice view with everything green. I've biked up and down these hills, not nearly as serene as cruising through in a car while sipping a mocha.

Photo 365 Project - Grout Repair

I almost went the whole day without taking a picture. I had spent the day at work and the evening at home scraping grout for a 'quick' repair job at the house. Not very photogenic stuff, but that's life. Some days the pictures are pretty plain when doing the routine things that keep a household going.