It was bad enough that there was a wasp in the house, and that wasp was HUGE, but it had to land in just the place where I couldn’t swat it effectively without damaging the things I love. With my back to the wall leading into my bedroom, I sidled as silently as I could around and into the room where I hoped to find something large enough and light enough to flip the beast aside.

Watching the fiend from the corner of my eye through the door, I noticed that it was having trouble flying, flapping its wings but not taking off. Being silent, the wasp did not strike the maximum amount of fear into my heart as it could, so it opted to buzz its wings and make a raucous, like a rattle snake about to pounce.

In the bedroom I hunted but found only an old envelope to use for the flipping, the eight and a half inches of safety it provided between me and über-demon. It would be like putting my hand to a fire and hoping the flames don’t jump out and burn. Steeling my resolve, I crept back towards the door opening, the incessant buzzing growing louder and angrier.

Crossing the threshold, the buzzing stopped. The beast turned towards my direction and raised itself up defensively on its legs, focusing as much of its multi-faceted compound eye as it could at what approached. I sneaked up slowly, but not as elegantly as I could have; the king wasp began to shuffle impatiently.

With a quick launch my arm I scooped with the envelop. Paper met thorax, and in a flash the wasp left its perch on my laptop and introduced itself to the wall. The angry buzzing immediately continued as it tried to orient its body. Long seconds passed as I hurriedly searched for a shoe to commit the finishing blow. Returning within two shakes, I found the wasp charging across the desk towards me. I raised the heal of the shoe, and struck.

The hit and ensuing shockwave launched the corpse into the air, it landing a few inches away from its origin. The fight had left the beast, but not the specter: its body twitches as I write this.

Seriously, it’s nasty.

Now to have nightmares forever because there could be a nest of these guys inside the house!

I took this from a speeding car, too, so that’s fun. Not that the car was going faster than the allotted speed limits of the road, but that’s just what people say when they do something non vehicle related on a vehicle. “Look, he jumped from his horse on to that speeding train!” Was the train really speeding? THEY DIDN’T HAVE RULES IN THE OLD WEST.

To be perfectly honest, I am not the hugest fan of these images. They turned out ok, and as a means of showing some things about the island I guess they work, but I am not in love with them. I nearly did not upload them at all, hoping to sell them for scrap or whatever you do with images you are not wholly fold of, but I decided that I shouldn’t take these things so seriously because the island is really cool.

Beyond the memorial, you get trees and forest animals (I saw a snake!). The memorial is pretty much the only thing on the island beyond some dirt trails. You can walk right up to the water is many places if you so choose; some folks had actually landed canoes and kayaks on the banks. It was pretty cool.

From one end of the island, you can look across the river to see Georgetown, where all of the rich people live. There you are, sitting on a rock, looking at rich people drive their rich cars in rich town. “Oh yeah? Well you don’t have dirt in your shoe from walking these dirt paths! AWW YEAH, NATURE!” you think while mentally shaking your fist at people you can hardly see.

So to sum up the experience: if you have the time, go pay the old bull moose a visit. It’s pretty great.

The Flickr set for these images (with more descriptions!) is here.

Although the otters were nowhere to be found, the existence of two red pandas made up for that. The zoo also has a couple of regular, big, white and black pandas, but all they did was lay around and eat bamboo. I suppose that is about all they ever do, but they were really no that photogenic. The zoo also has amphibians, gorillas, zebras, and many other animals, but we got to the park a bit late and could not make it to much. I look forward to going back.

The Flickr set can be found here.

The weather turned out to be just about perfect save for a grey overcast sky that created some intense contrast between it and the ground, making shooting a little more difficult than it probably should have been. I had to push the exposure up a couple of stops many of the times to get any color from the grass, but that resulted in blowing out the sky more than I wanted in many of the shots. Oh well.

The Flickr set where these images come from can be found here.

The Reason Rally is a movement-wide event sponsored by the country’s major secular organizations. The intent is to unify, energize, and embolden secular people nationwide, while dispelling the negative opinions held by so much of American society… and having a damn good time doing it!

Unfortunately, the weather proved to be rather nasty, so I didn’t stay long, but I was able to take a few photos of the event.

The speakers I was able to see were Adam Savage from Mythbusters, a few people I haven’t really ever heard of, and Eddie Izzard. When it wasn’t raining, it was a pretty good time. I wish I could have been around for the whole day.

1. People aren’t terrifying. They are just people. Although from what I hear, there is quite a bit of crime in “the area” (which I don’t dispute), everyone seems to just want to get to the thing they want to get to. And that makes sense. The conception from the place I left was that if you walk anywhere in town you will get shot in the face, and while I am not going to go walk around more seedy areas, I haven’t had any unsettling encounters with the locals so far on trains and buses. Every day going forward probably increases the probability that something might happen, but the same can be said for…

2. Driving. Never mind the fact that you might want want to drive nicely, you can’t. Just stop thinking you will have a chance. There are too many people, and they have no remorse. While you might have someone on the train offer you a seat every once in a while, that will never happen on the road. I suppose that this is simply a big city thing, where “big city” is not necessarily the nomenclature one would ascribe to Oklahoma City, even given its size.

   Plus, there are some crazy road signs here in crazy town. Normally, flashing red lights – where I come from – mean something is broken, but they are par for the course around these parts. There are left hand red flashing lights that apparently mean “stop, and go when you can.” That’s easy enough, but having never seen that in favor of more simple methods (say, understanding what a left hand turn is without signs), is jarring at first.

   Today, I cut off a poor dude that probably had the right of way, but I needed to make a turn. For some people that has always been par for the course, but I would normally have just slowed a bit to pull in behind him rather than downshifting and power jamming the car in front. I guess I am slowly being infected.

3. Trains are fun. I might still be in the honeymoon phase with trains, as I see quite a few unhappy faces on the trains, but so far I really enjoy riding them. Chalk it up to another “thing thing doesn’t exist where I come from,” but considering driving right now for me is a method of last resorts, the trains provide an easy way to get here and there. And while you see all of these unhappy faces on the train, most of them generally have the right idea and they are unhappy behind books and magazines. If you have a bit of a train ride, why not knock out a chapter or two in your book? Then you won’t feel bad about not reading it before bed.

   Today I experienced a broken train, whose doors wouldn’t close properly. For those familiar with the Metro, it sounded like this: *blingoblingo* “Step back, doors closing.” *blingoblingo* … *blingoblingo* “Step back, doors opening” *blingoblingo* There is more to what the little computer woman says, but this sequence repeated over and over for about five minutes with the doors stuttering open and closed as if possessed. This was during rush hour, so you can assume there were quite a few sighs and harumphs. I just smiled. It was funny. All told it added about ten minutes to everyone’s commute, and surely that screwed up someone’s schedule, but that’s life, folks. You aren’t driving through terrible rush hour, just riding around and reading your book. It’s not that big of a deal. We shall see if my tune changes when something like this makes me late for something.



4. Very little wind. There really is something to be said for not having wind gusts so hard you just don’t want to go outside. Unlike OKC, where it’s either 40mph gusts every day for a month or 0mph wind on 100+ degree days, around here the wind seems to get up to a whopping 15mph. Granted, I am no expert on the weather around here, and I haven’t seen any snow yet, but for this spring so far, the weather has been brilliant. We’ll see if that lasts.

Those are just a few things that have crossed my mind while milling about town. I still am enjoying the area even though I haven’t seen much of it, and I enjoy the prospect of having things to do. Sure, there were things in OKC. Stuff happened. But does OKC have The Art of Video Games opening this week? Nope.

For reference, the video playing is this, and it lasts for an hour long.