Balloons sell cars

Everyone knows that nothing sells cars quite as well as colorful balloons. The more the better. 

Masonic Temple

What are the mysteries held there? Guess I will never know.

Village Vet

Powerline

Delivering hydropower from Niagara to Buffalo and points south.

Strange light

Dark overhead sky, but strong western backlight, makes me want to capture pictures.

A lonely duck

The Sam Patch

A replica of an early Erie Canal packet boat that plies the waters for tourist excursions. This gray day it is carrying a load of seniors, and I wonder how long it will be before I join the group.

Sam Patch was a daredevil who jumped Niagara Falls, then set his sights on Rochester's 99 foot High Falls. His first attempt went well but the encore did not.

The updated canal joins the Genesee River near the High Falls, but in Sam's day it crossed the river on a aqueduct.

The lobby

I recently traveled to the Washington DC area for work. Some of our company offices are located in the Gannett/USA Today building in McLean, Virginia. The building can only be described as spectacular, built about ten years ago when the publishing business was booming. The lobby is large enough to be an airline hanger, and the use of glass and marble is everywhere. For some reason this young girl was skipping though the lobby which kind of makes the picture I think.

The news business today is not so rosy. With several rounds of layoffs, many employees have skipped out the door, leaving excess office available for sublet.

Mr. Punkin

A sure sign that autumn is with is.

I've been to the future

Not really... but it seemed that way.

Washington DC's Dulles International Airport has always been unique. The main terminal building is relatively small for a large airport. Travelers are shuttled to their departure gates out on the field in "mobile lounges"... large bus-like vehicles that not only travel horizontally but also vertically. At least that is the way it used to be.

Not having been in this here for a few years I was surprised to see that most of the mobile lounges have been retired and replaced by automated underground subway trains. Apparently the designers of these new conveyances decided to utilize lighting to minimize the feeling of being below ground. The end result is very science fiction... at least to me.

Kind of like what I think the future could be.

Who stole the house?

Gee, I thought I had trouble.

Artist alley

Busy street in old town

Street walkers

No, not that kind of streetwalker. 

Fountain in the square

Au Petit Hotel

Windows and doors

Street scene, frozen in time. Quebec City.

Down a blind alley

Perhaps this post is not about a blind alley, but at the moment that is about all I can think of.

The few of you that follow my blog (thanks!) may be wondering why I have not posted for over three weeks now. 

Well, the story is that upon returning home a few weeks ago I discovered that my home had been broken into, and my iMac computer, HDTV and a few other items were gone. We could not find any obvious means of breaking in which has made it all the more disturbing to deal with. Loosing valuable possessions is not pleasant, but even worse is the creepiness of strangers being in your house.

This of course has made me realize that what I though of as adequate home protection was not adequate at all, a situation that we have now rectified, perhaps to the point of being overly prepared. But experiencing a situation like is a wake-up call that has to be addressed.

The only good news is my perpetrator was kind enough to leave behind my back-up hard drive that contains all of my photos in RAW as well as processed versions.

I have tried to process and post some images on my iPad while waiting for the replacement iMac, but I found the available photo applications not totally up to the task. I had high hopes and some success with Photoshop Touch but finally came to realize it does not process RAW. Photogene is quite good, but lacks some key functions that I like to use.

I am now back in business with a higher powered iMac, and I have a backlog of images to post from my recent time in Canada... the photos above were taken in Montreal. I will be putting up those images over the next week or so, once again breaking my rule of keeping them fresh (a concept that no one else seems to care much about anyway).

So perhpas the tile for the post should not be "blind alley" it should be "robbed blind".