Texas Bluebonnets to Brighten a Tennessee Winter

I shot this springtime view near Victoria, Texas, several years ago, looking up a roadside slope towards a rancher's field.

The camera was a Minolta SR-T 101* and the image is from a somewhat faded Kodak print that I scanned to my hard drive with my HP Scanjet 7400c. Afterwards, I enhanced the colors to suit my memory of them, using the image processor Irfanview.

This picture brings back one of my favorite memories. I was with one of my younger sisters at the time, and, if you look closely, you can see her little dog, Happy2, in the upper right-hand corner.

*See a description and picture of the camera here.

Remembering John Lennon

On the 30th anniversary of his death, the official website.

Pearl Harbor Day

On December 7, 1941, the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor preempted a live radio broadcast by my high school band. Completely unaware of this, in the soundproofed studio, we played blissfully on for the allotted hour. I was playing second horn, and my younger sister -- who always excelled me, especially at practicing -- was in first chair.

After we finished playing, our band director told us about the radio announcement. We still had a long time to wait before we could get on our school buses to go back home. The powers that be were, justifiably so, afraid of an attack on the nearby Corpus Christi Naval Air Station.

Just my own memory of that time. I hope my fellow U.S. citizens and I have not survived WWII, and so much else -- including the murder of John Lennon exactly 30 years ago tomorrow, on our soil -- only to lose our freedoms to the fear of "terrorists" now so rampant across our land.

For St. Nicholas Day,

December 6, 2010,

Have a look at Dierk Haasis's slideshow at Picasa.

And there are more delightful images for December on his own website's home page.