Tis cold

Been a pretty busy couple of weeks on the work front. On Tuesday one of my latest sites, www.elizabethharveyphotography.com went live. Liz is a fellow Maine Flickrer and she takes fantastic shots of the local scenery and puts them to music. I went to Portland to show her the ropes on updating it with WordPress and afterwards had a wander round the freezing streets with me camera before picking DrSita up from the airport (email if you’re interested in details on that particular point)

I’m awaiting the arrival of a Bokehnator kit, which will change the circles in unfocussed shots like this:

…to all kinds of other shapes. Yep, it’ll be tacky but I’m all about experimentation in photography.

It’s hard not to mention the weather at the moment. Look at the weather thingy in the left hand sidebar…

I know that a fair amount of the UK got snow today and, as you know, I’m all about the frozen water crystals; However I’ve never experienced cold like we’re having right now. Yesterday 16 degrees C below zero was the ambient temperature. That’s before factoring in windchill. I was wearing at least 6 layers plus my favourite furry hat but as I was dragged around Bowdoin campus by Atticus it felt like I was wearing shorts.  Today if I venture out, I’ll be wearing pajama bottoms underneath me trousers. Wonder if it’ll get to -40° which will spare me having to specify centigrade or Fahrenheit….

Talking of Bowdoin, the maintenance peeps are building an ice rink in the middle of it. They cleared the snow off a patch of the grass and are spraying it with water on a daily basis. Might have to see if Goodwill has any cheap size 12 skates, though it’s been a good few years since I did any skating and I’d be very cautious given that there aren’t any rails around the edge to slam into when it all goes pear-shaped.

My favourite bit about going ice skating when I were a lad (f’rinstance, James Healy’s birthday in 1985ish in Bristol) were the arcade machines. They had my all-time favourites Mr.Do!, Defender… and with Bananarama, The Bangles, & Blondie blasting on the speakers…good times…

Apparently the Androscoggin river down the road is going to freeze over more or less completely. It had ice floating down it t’other day and at the bend half of it had a good couple of inches of ice over it. According to one of my local Flickr friends there’ll be a ‘Fishing shanty town’ on it in the new year so that’ll be worth a photo or three.

After you’ve checked out Liz’s site another recommendation is Mario’s latest Circulo Vicioso podcast. This month the theme is Los Angeles, cos that’s the guest city of this year’s Guadalajara International Book Festival (FIL). He’s picked some great choons. I listened to it the first time on a long walk with ‘Cus round the snowy woods, and it was a tad incongruous, but no less pleasurable, listening to the likes of Los Lobos and Lalo Guerrero as my extremities slowly froze. If your Spanish is a bit rusty, skip to the songs.

Here endeth the blog post. See yous soon  😉

I try not to blog about travel plans because of the security implications. So email for that ‘n’all.