PBW: The Long Christmas

And so, another Christmas has gone by and soon, another year. Time is a strange and accelerating concept, but I've spent nearly six days in a void of time. Without work, and a daily routine, it's just been one long blur of a weekend. Normally, days of the week have a feel, and anything from what I'm having for dinner to what's on television to whether or not I went to work can define a day for me. I've been in a long Sunday, which suddenly is going to give way to a Thursday, which is going to feel like a Monday because it's my first day working, and I'll no doubt be scrambling to get caught up. Time makes my head hurt, especially when I break from routine.

For Photo Blog Wednesday, I certainly didn't spend six days in my room, and I managed to venture out one day, albeit a bleak one, to get some shots, including some desktop sized images as presents for my readers. The camera came out again on Christmas day, with more photographic gifts.




I've seen those “candy cane” smokestacks from everywhere on the North Shore of Long Island from Target Rock to Sunken Meadow, and from Crab Meadow Park near Northport I finally got the closest. As it turns out, I'd inadvertently visited those towers at night several years ago. Driving around after taking my girlfriend to a nearby vintage movie theater, a dark road that I thought might lead to a beach, pier, or other scenic romantic setting led me to a very industrial fence with these ominous towers blotting out the moonlight. I didn't know where we were, only that I had a sudden urge to get back to civilization and roads with street lights. During the day, they weren't as intimidating, but I found there was no shoulder on any of the surrounding roads and short of pulling in to the facility and explaining to security that I wanted pictures for my blog, I opted not to visit this time around. Instead, after getting these shots, I checked out what Crab Meadow had to offer



Click the previous image for a desktop sized version.




The previous three images are ready for your desktop. That last one, which I thought were some kind of “beach tomatoes”, turned out to be Rose hips, which my mom identified when I showed her the photo.


Since I was in the area, and I remembered Northport had a great park on the water with a pier and other attractions, that was my next destination. I drove past the towers first, checking again for any vantage points, and ended up taking a long and scenic drive to a private community known as Asharoken, which turned out to be a giant dead end when I discovered it to be a peninsula. Local police eyed my beat-up jalopy with suspicion, but I maintained the 30 MPH limit conspicuously posted everywhere and didn't linger longer than I had to. Once back on the mainland, I found the park in Northport I was looking for. Everything from a tree to a manger scene set the seasonal tone perfectly, and even a crane and a boat threw some red and green into the mix.




It's a desktop slide! Wheee!




Now you can have a manger scene on your desktop by clicking the above image.




And before I knew it, days of doing nothing or going on photo excursions were done, and Christmas day was here! My mom made a great pasta dinner, my uncle joined us, and a good day was had by all. My parents didn't freak out about the DVD player I bought them, although I later discovered my mom's older television didn't have the same RCA cables. It had a coaxial antenna wire running to the VCR, which connected to a cable running to our outside antenna. The VCR had the traditional red, white, and yellow ports, but I couldn't get the DVD player to run through it. I sort of had a ghost image on a blue screen, and I think it's because of encoding. They obviously don't want people to tape DVDs. The television did have RCA ports, but only a yellow video and a white audio, lacking the red. Hooking two out of three wires to these ports did nothing, and after further research I discovered I need to pick up an “RF modulator”, a hub that should allow all the devices to work by converting the DVD signal to something their television would understand. I tested the player on our big television in the living room, which does have the three RCA ports, and it works fine. Technical tangents aside, here are the photos of my Christmas:







I also experimented with my digital camera, which has no problem plugging in to the three ports on our big television, after unsuccessful attempts to capture the infinite image of the camera looking at the television displaying the camera looking at the television, I settled for video. The still is just a screen capture from one of the videos I shot.




With a flash, the screen was black. Without a flash, it was too dark and grainy to make anything out. I fiddled with shutter speed and flash intensity, but couldn't get anything to work. Video was the best I could do. Second technical tangent aside, I'll leave you all with one final desktop image: