It was another crazy work day on the 28th as it has been a crazy work week. I’m saying this on a Sunday morning as I contemplate going downstairs and binding one policy and sending out temporary 30 day pink cards for another policy that renews at 12:01 am in the morning. That means the client’s current full-term cards are expired as his fleet heads out to work tomorrow. I could not send them out before as I was only able to establish with Nordic Insurance that his policy was indeed renewing at 4:40 pm on Friday, while I was trying to get pinks out for a new truck someone else bought. It has been that kind of week.
Despite what can only been described as a rolling clusterfuck of a week, I did find the time for a lunch break on Tuesday and I got some images I rather liked. I could have sworn I set the card aside to dump them to storage.
Strathmore, AB, 2024-05-30
Strathmore, AB, 2024-05-30
Nope. Big fat nope. I have images in my immediate converted files folder on my laptop from May 24th through June 1st, excepting My 28th. That one day is conspicuous by its absensce. It this point I can only assume that some asshat* overwrote the card before the files were saved from it. I would be that asshat. As for May 28th’s images, they are missing in action.
That is why every single image you see on this page has May 30th in the caption. I eventually went out and retook most of the images I could remember. And I do think I got most of them. The one I could not was what I thought was the best one as it was a long exposure of willow leaves being slapped around by the wind.
And it has been windy this past week. The Callery Pear tree had most of the petals on its blossoms still when I took my images on Tuesday. You can tell that by Thursday (the 30th), more than half the petals are missing on the top image. As of this morning they are all gone. Every blossom has been completely denuded. This is probably a good thing.
I did learn something new this week. What we thought was a Mayday Tree is a Callary Pear tree. It is an invasive species that was once used for greening areas in North America. I say once because the Callary Pear fell out of favour after folks discovered it produces a rotting meat stench when it is blossoming. It a makes sitting out in your yard … interesting … when the wind blows the wrong way. We tracked down the smell to the Mayday Tree. I asked Co-pilot AI if Mayday Trees smell when they blossom and discovered we had been calling it the wrong name for years. Whoops and also yuck.
Strathmore, AB, 2024-05-30
Strathmore, AB, 2024-05-30
Strathmore, AB, 2024-05-30
The flowering crab is also starting to look midly decrepit. The colours have been fading from the flowers and it is dropping petals with each wind gust as well. It will be bare by the middle of next week.
I am pleased to report that the Mountain Ash is sort of healthy so far this year. The ongoing drought kept it from fruiting berries at all last year. It also killed off about a third of the tree. We are not sure how to deal with that as we live in a rented home. We’ll have to ask the landlords about it.
Strathmore, AB, 2024-05-30
AB, 2024-05-30
I am down to the blossoms on the Mountain Ash and the lilacs blooming in various stages around town right now. The lilacs will be good for another week and then it will be down to scoping out local parks for flowers I guess. I have had a good flower season so far this year so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much.
I am still really pissed at myself for deleting some top shelf camera images, especially as I had made them with Ray’s Canon EOS 7D. The replacements were made with my Canon EOS 50D I picked up cheap off eBay. That is 18 MP vs 15 MP images. That part isn’t a big deal to me, it’s that the 7D belonged to Ray, so holding a camera he held means a lot to me. I grabbed the 50D by accident as it’s bag looks the same as the 7D’s in the dark and I didn’t feel like swapping it back after discovering the error. The 50D isn’t in the same league as the 7D, which was a step up, but it is still a solid camera that produces a good image.
It is what it is as the saying goes. I replaced the missing images once the error was discovered and life goes on, at least for most of us.
The images were made using a Canon EOS 50D, a Canon 70-300mm EF IS USM f4.5-5.6 lens, and an *asshat. Ray called me that a lot and I miss it.
