View allAll Photos Tagged Constant
This aptly named species is singing constantly in the spring. Its usually lofty location means that it is likely more often heard than seen at this time. It's one of the most vocal birds of the forest. This one has dropped down to drink at our created bird oasis... it's a real bird magnet, and regularly allows for close shots like this of normally difficult to view birds! (Build it and they will come!)
IMG_1933; Warbling Vireo
View large.
Special NOTE: On Feb. 8, 2012 I attached a comment, readable & easily discoverable on Page 2 of the comments below, that details the vast corporatist scheme, fronted by Jeb Bush, financed in part with hundreds of millions from Rupert Murdoch (FOX nooze), to privatize American public education & reduce it to 'virtual' schools - not to improve anything (as national & international educational research studies clearly show), but rather to become the final recipients of the taxes people pay so that they can skim huge profits off of the top while providing grotesquely inferior services & lots of lying propaganda to keep the public bamboozled. I beg everyone to read the report.
The McGuffey's Ecclectic Spelling Book was published in 1879.
Raymond Cyrus Hoiles (1878-1970) founded Freedom Communications, a newspaper publishing & broadcasting company that has never hesitated to shape the news to fit right wing ideology. When Hoiles was alive & roaring I lived in Orange County, California, home of the equally right wing Walt Disney & Walter Knott, & was frequently compelled to suffer people who agreed with Hoiles' constantly editorialized insistence that public education was a form of theft & communism that must at once be got rid of. Hoiles was motivated by his fundamentalist Christian persuasions, & quite serious. We should restrain our laughter at the abysmal stupidity of his example, because in many ways he & people like him won & are still winning control of public education. - To introduce the article below, I'll say a little about the Christian strategy.
For many years Orange County's teachers worked under a Draconian ruling that forbade the teaching of values. There is no way around the fact, however, that the statement, "Values may not be taught," is itself a value statement belonging to a class of propositions known as Epimenidean Paradoxes. A comparably illustrative sentence would be, "This is not a sentence." Or, a favorite of the best hypnotists, used when addressing a resistant subject, "Do not obey any instruction which I give you."
What, then, was intended by those who created the paradoxical Orange County law? Well, if any teacher dared to say or imply something that would be disagreeable to any person whose beliefs began & ended with church, flag & free-for-all capitalism, then that teacher could be charged with teaching values & be suspended. One family friend, a young man teaching at an elementary school in Anaheim, was charged, hounded, publicly disgraced, threatened with death & discharged from his post, immediately after which he died from a heart attack. The case was depicted in Life Magazine. His only crime was that he was Jewish. His wife, also a teacher, remained bereft & embittered the rest of her long life.
These people became increasingly invisible over time, largely by devising ever more clever ways for gaining control of both education policy & the public dialogue about education.
Ralph Reed, working for Pat Robertson & the Christian Coalition, devised the "stealth agenda" to place fundamentalists in every local school board in America. The plan helped select & fund candidates, who in accord with Reed's instructions never mentioned their religion or religious connections when campaigning for office. In 1983 Reed rigged an election at his university - he got started early, in other words. Recently we learned that Mr. Reed & Jack Abramoff were associate crooks. The revelation forced Reed to abandon his run to become the lieutenant governor of Georgia. Mr. Reed will not disappear, however. He remains a darling of the far Christian right, & owns Century Strategies, a dirty-tricks political consulting & lobbying organization. In 1999 Karl Rove got reed a nice contract with Enron, which was paying Reed $30,000 per month. And guess who recently went to Georgia to try to save poor Reed? Rudy Giuliani, who has the hots to be the next U.S. president & is pandering to the Christians so he can be their new burning Bush.
Stealthiness did not go away when the Christian Coalition folded & Reed went off on his own to rig elections for big bucks. Rather, the stealth moved into policy matters. For instance, all the phony propaganda claiming religious & private education is more successful, creating the excuse to promote vouchers (for which the motives are both religious & racist). Or, most recently, Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which was sought by the Christians not because they believed all the testing of students would lead to improved education, but rather because they wanted teachers to be made too busy preparing students for endless tests about facts to find time to do the great evil thing, which is the teaching of concepts. Teaching concepts leads to teaching logic, scientific & other academic methodologies which by their nature instill respect for critical - read, skeptical - thinking. Dogmatists, advertisers & con men have equal cause to fear skepticism.
-------------------------
From: Truthdig.com
Taking Back Our Schools--and Fixing Them
Full text with links: www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060425_taking_back_our_sch...
Posted on Apr. 25, 2006
By Wellford Wilms
The recent news reported in The New York Times that schools are throwing out science, social studies and art to make time for drilling students in remedial math and reading is a sign of things gone terribly wrong. Former New York State Commissioner of Education Thomas Sobol told the Times that narrowing education to just math and reading would be akin to restricting violin students to playing scales day after day. “They’d lose their zest for music.” But most schools that serve poor populations, like those in Cuero, Texas, are squeezed to meet federal math and reading standards. Cuero Superintendent Henry Lind told the paper, “When you have so many hours per day and you’re behind in some area that’s being hammered on, you have to work on that.”
But by the looks of things, hammering students for higher test scores isn’t making much of a difference. Most students have already lost their zest for learning. How do we know? In Los Angeles, upwards of 50% of Latino and African American students never finish high school. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve been a professor of education at UCLA for more than 25 years and am convinced that despite the fads that come and go, nothing has put a dent in the public schools’ failure to educate inner-city children. In fact, things are getting worse. But I am also convinced that we’ve been looking in the wrong places for solutions. My own research across a wide array of organizations—corporations, trade unions, public schools, colleges, teacher unions and police agencies—suggests another way of looking at the problem and that solutions will come from a new direction.
This essay is a proposition—one that I hope will spark a lively debate among Truthdig readers and inform policy leaders. Future essays will examine Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s campaign to take over the public schools, analyze whether teacher unions can be a force for productive change, and expose promising ways to rebuild public investment in the schools.
Let’s start with Jonathan Kozol’s new book, “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.” It is a scathing indictment of American social policy that banned racial segregation in public schools in 1955 and then turned a blind eye to its implementation. Today, Kozol says, schools are more segregated than ever. But he fails to explain why resegregation has occurred. Because Kozol overlooks the root causes of the problem, his solutions—spending more money on dysfunctional schools and wishing for a social mandate to desegregate the schools—miss the point.
To be sure the problems are undeniable. Kozol examines the appalling condition of big-city schools. In school after school we see children who are brimming with potential but who are walled off from the larger society and abandoned by the schools. Most middle-class white Americans simply cannot comprehend the horrid schools that Kozol describes. Ceilings fall in, toilets are filthy, libraries, music and arts have been stripped away. Teachers in these schools, who are paid 40% less than teachers in the suburbs, are forced to teach “scripted” lessons that are written for children who are deemed incapable of learning.
It is all part of the latest reform pushed by the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind initiative, a reform aimed at the singular pursuit of increasing test scores. Learning has been stripped of its intrinsic meaning and reduced to simplistic steps—“Authentic Writing,” “Active Listening,” “Accountable Talk”—that hamper teachers in teaching anything but how to take a test. Behind it all is an attempt to impose control, much as mass production techniques were used a century ago, to standardize instruction to fit new immigrants to the system.
Meanwhile, millions of children are failing. In nearly half of the high schools in America’s 100 largest districts, fewer than 50% of students graduate in four years. Most of these students are from poor Latino and African-American families. And from 1993 to 2000 the number of failing schools has mushroomed by 75%. Mayor Villaraigosa calls Los Angeles’ high dropout rates “numbers that should put a chill down your spine.”
The reasons, Kozol argues, are lack of money and racial discrimination that produce inferior and segregated schools. No doubt this is partly true. We have tried to desegregate the schools for a half-century and failed. Middle-class white parents have voted for individual freedom with their feet, enrolling their children in private schools, leaving the public schools more segregated than ever. The same is true for middle-class black families. Gail Foster, an educator who has studied black independent schools, was quoted in 2004 in The New York Times as saying: “Many of the most empowered parents and families are removing their children. What’s left, in even working-class communities, are schools filled with the least empowered families. Families with the least parent involvement to offer, families with the least help with homework to offer. There’s been a continual outflow for at least 10 years, and it isn’t stopping now.”
More money is not the answer either. Kozol points to wide disparities in educational expenditures ranging from $11,700 per student in New York City to $22,000 in suburban Manhasset. Disturbing as that is, study after study shows that equalizing money does not necessarily equalize learning.
In 1966, sociologist James Coleman conducted the most extensive study ever made of desegregating education and found that what mattered most in students’ learning was the economic status of their peers rather than the racial makeup of the school. He also found that school funding was not closely related to students’ achievement—their families’ economic status was far more predictive. Coleman’s findings were controversial and led to a bitter debate, but they have been replicated many times. Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed it up best when he commented shortly after Coleman’s groundbreaking study, “We should begin to see that the underlying reality is not race but social class.”
Since social class matters because money follows privilege, and since desegregation will take generations to eradicate, what can be done now? Are poor children doomed to attend grossly inadequate schools? Surely not. We must find ways to remove the influences that have crippled the schools. Money must be diverted from bloated bureaucracies that snuff out innovation. Instead it must go directly to schools where principals and teachers can influence what is taught and what children learn, and help bring parents back into the fold. Otherwise, it is going down a rat hole.
Parents have a significant role to play in their children’s education, but their voices have been largely silenced. Over the last 40 years, we have witnessed the decline of civic involvement and the growing dominance of self-interest over the greater good, a social deterioration that sociologist Robert Putnam calls “hollowing out” in his 2000 book “Bowling Alone.” One result, as the old saying goes, is that “the rich get richer” and the poor fall ever further behind in crumbling schools.
Over the last 25 years, education in general has been taken from ordinary citizens and teachers by politicians, administrators, union leaders, publishers, test makers, consultants, university professors, hardware and software developers and the media, each playing its part in keeping alive the illusion of reform. All in all, this $1-trillion industry has replaced the common interest, and no one, it seems, can muster the will to rein it in.
Local control is only a dim memory. Decisions now come from the top—from the federal and state governments, school boards and high-level administrators who have little knowledge of what goes on in the classroom. Teachers are left out of these decisions, carrying on the best they can, safe in the assumption that the newest fad, like those before it, will blow over. Parents are all but forgotten.
While command-and-control management may seem to produce results in the short run, it strips schools of the capacity to develop the stable leadership that is necessary to sustain success. Principals are besieged with demands from district offices and from the educational fads that emanate from publishers and university researchers. Many principals know that they put their careers in peril unless they do what their bosses want. One elementary school principal told me, “District directives undermine our own abilities to think for ourselves, to believe in what we see and know.” When schools discover something that works, it is rarely sustained because they lack authority or stable leadership.
In 1969 when I worked for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, I monitored the schools in impoverished Ocean Hill-Brownsville in New York City. The local school board hired a charismatic superintendent, who fired incompetent teachers and hired young and idealistic ones. The firings set the local board at odds with the huge teachers’ union, which demanded due process for the fired teachers. The superintendent, Rhody McCoy, was convinced that good teachers had to respect the children they taught. He put it in plain words: “If you’re convinced that this kid is doomed by nature or by something else to lead a shrunken and curtailed life, then you’re basically incompetent to teach that child.” The experiment worked. Observing classrooms left no doubt in my mind that students were learning. Eager first-graders sat attentively on the floor in semicircles shouting out answers to fraction problems and reading aloud. The schools buzzed with excitement as parent helpers streamed in and out of classrooms. But in a bitter power struggle the board seized authority and the experiment ended.
Years later, in 1985, Deborah Meier, a passionate educator who founded Harlem’s Central Park East Secondary School, achieved stunning successes that led the school to be celebrated as a model alternative school in Time magazine. But it could not be sustained beyond Meier’s unique leadership. Today, 10 years after Meier left, a respected children’s advocacy group, Insideschools and Advocates for Children, reports that the Harlem school “…has fallen on hard times in recent years with rapid staff turnover, low staff morale and uneven discipline.”
In risk-averse environments like public schools, few principals will stick out their necks, because they don’t want to buck the bosses downtown. Courageous and visionary principals like Rhody McCoy and Deborah Meier keep coming. But charismatic leadership is no match for heavy-handed district management, which always wins out.
Take Foshay Learning Center in Los Angeles, for example. In 1989, Howard Lappin took over a failing middle school. With the help of teachers and an infusion of money, Lappin wrested control from the district and transformed Foshay. The school expanded into a K-12 “learning center” and became largely autonomous of the district’s bureaucratic requirements. Teachers and administrators decided who would be hired and what would be taught. Foshay succeeded, and in 2000 its high school was selected by Newsweek as one of the 100 best in America. But in 2001 Lappin retired, and his unique leadership was lost. Today Foshay is being threatened with sanctions by the district and the county because gains in students’ test scores have stalled. As the school has fallen under the district’s “one-size-fits all” bureaucratic requirements, the impact has been to undermine the once vibrant teacher leadership that made the school so enviable.
The problem with public education is not with the teachers, or with the children, but the way we organize the schools. Probably the greatest casualties are teachers themselves, who are forced to accept decisions by authorities about teaching that they know to be nonsense. One professor interviewed by Kozol said that forcing an absurdity on teachers teaches something: acquiescence. For example, in study after study, teachers report that relying on test scores as sole marks of student achievement and teaching scripted lessons destroy students’ natural love of learning. And such practices also erode teachers’ professional authority, which is fundamental to student learning.
Why is it so hard to foster the only kind of reform that really works, which is right in the schoolhouse? Because politicians, school board members and administrators are under intense pressure to produce immediate results, i.e., higher and higher test scores—a goal that is pursued through directives from districts with little input of principals, teachers and parents. Superintendents serve at the pleasure of school boards, and most board members are elected or appointed and have limited terms of office. As test scores have become the measure of educational quality, everyone is under immense pressure to show fast results or be turned out.
No wonder that school boards hire superintendents who promise to deliver quick results. But few do. Superintendents last on average only three or four years. Many are thwarted by outmoded bureaucracies that were designed a century ago using top-down control practiced in American industry to mass-produce learning. Within these organizations, power has quietly accumulated, making them all but impervious to outside influence. Sid Thompson, former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, told me: “Trying to change the district is like trying to change the direction of a fast-moving freight train. You might knock it off course for a moment, but before you know it it’s rattling right down the tracks again.”
Frustration and suspicion about who might emerge from the shadows to sabotage their plans often lead superintendents to jealously guard their power. In 2002, Day Higuchi, then president of United Teachers Los Angeles, the Los Angeles teacher union, had high hopes for working with the school district’s new “can-do” superintendent, Roy Romer. Higuchi hoped that Romer would endorse a new union initiative called Lesson Study, a plan to help teachers work collectively to improve classroom lessons. At a breakfast meeting that I attended, Higuchi presented Romer with an invitation to work with the union to develop and spread Lesson Study across the district. When Higuchi finished, Romer flipped over his paper placemat and with a red felt pen drew a box with an S in it. “That’s me,” he said. Beneath he drew 11 boxes with smaller s’s in them, representing the 11 local superintendents, and below that, a number of small boxes with roofs, representing schools and teachers. Then, pulling his face near to Higuchi’s, he drew bold red arrows pointing downward from the top. Romer jabbed his pen in the air to accentuate each word: “You cannot usurp my authority to manage this district!” It was a dumbfounding moment, one that revealed the true underside of the use of power. Here was a chance for a new superintendent to forge a small but significant step with the union, but Romer, who recently announced his resignation, explained that he was “in a hurry.” He clearly had little time for ideas that were at odds with his own. In the end his refusal to work with the union undermined the possibility of creating a broader base of power that could transcend self-interest.
Nor are the unions exempt from self-interest. A few years ago I helped establish a national group of union presidents called TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network) who were dedicated to remaking their unions as forces to improve education. One way was to cooperate with administrators and encourage teachers to use their classroom know-how to redesign teaching at the schoolhouse. But hostility and mistrust run deep. The union leaders became nervous, fearing that fellow unionists would attack them for “collaborating” with the enemy and that if the effort to collaborate failed they would share the blame. Don Watley, president of the New Mexico Federation of Educational Employees, commented: “It’s like the Normandy landing. We’ve got the best troops in the world. We’ve got the best officers in the world. And we’ve got the best equipment in the world. But at 0800 when we hit the beach half of us are going to get killed!” Sadly, in the years to come, the ingrained mistrust, and the unpredictable dance of union politics, prevented these unionists from becoming a positive force in educational reform. Instead, they have been reduced to stockpiling power, much as the Soviets and Americans stockpiled nuclear weapons during the Cold War, to oppose any hostile moves the other side might make.
So what can be done to break the standoff between teacher unions and districts? How can teachers’ professional authority be restored? How can parents be awakened and brought back into the fold? Experience shows that it can be done. Schools such as Harlem’s Central Park East Secondary, Los Angeles’ Foshay Learning Center, those in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and many others attest to the fact that schools can be made into safe places where children learn. Sustaining them is the hard part.
There is little doubt that trying to build good schools with command-and-control management doesn’t work. School boards, superintendents and union officials need to clear the obstacles—unnecessary bureaucratic requirements and outmoded work rules—to make innovation at the schoolhouse possible. These top-level educational leaders also must make resources available to support new ways of teaching. Jonathan Kozol has it right. Teaching is the only reform that counts and it can be done only at the schoolhouse by teachers, principals, parents and students working together.
Turning school districts upside down will also mean turning a century of top-down management on its head. But where is such bold leadership to be found? One promising place is among big-city mayors. But they must resist trying to take over the schools, as they did in New York, Chicago and Boston with mixed results at best. Instead, popular mayors could use their influence and visibility to tell the truth about the condition of education and to build a popular consensus about how change must occur.
In the next essay I am going to examine what mayors can do. Waiting for the schools to be saved by someone else is nonsense. Only concerted local action offers a chance. Doubters should recall Margaret Mead’s observation: “Never doubt that a small group of concerned people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
###
A constant presence in our gardens and local green spaces, adult robins are instantly recognisable by their red breast with many tales from folklore of how they acquired their colourful feathers. The red colour features in its scientific name, Erithacus rubecula, and in many languages such as robin goch in Welsh, rouge-gorge in French, and el petirrojo in Spanish.They are a member of the chat family, which also includes species such as stonechat and nightingale.
I've just spent the last few days at Yuntaishan UNESCO Geopark in Henan, welcomed as VIP foreign photographers for the opening of a year-long photo competition in the park organised by China Photo Press. Constant banquets, baijiu, bus-tours and of course photos of ourselves (for in-house leaflets, and probably the local newspapers), but also an introduction to some of the most dramatic mountain scenery near the North China Plain. One of the Yuntaishan organisers said (after 10 glasses of baijiu...and without yet seeing any of our photos) that he thought we would ALL win prizes. Great !! Sounds like my kind of competition. I now also need to go jogging twice a day for the next month to work off all the calories consumed.
Yuntaishan, Jiaozuo, Henan, Oct 2010
we spend more time together than i do with anyone else, which is funny because when we adopted her 3 1/2 years ago, she was SO aloof. she must have had it pretty good with her old family because ours (with a 4 year old) was not looking so good to her.
my, how times have changed! she follows me from room to room all day long. and when my hubby hugs or kisses me, she comes running right up and stares us down...doesn't want to be left out, i guess.
Last shot for 'Roid Week, and I gotta stick with what I love. No matter what else I might try, what new idea I have, I will always get close and take a portrait like this. I'm always trying to capture the color in a woman's eyes, the way her hair falls, every feature of her face. All of the personality that drew me in in the first place for all to see. I will always do this as long as I have access to cameras, forever and ever.
You can find a link to my website and information about what I do as a professional photographer on my Flickr profile page.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogger and on my iTunes Podcast.
| Instagram | Facebook | YouPic |
Don't Use Without Permission. All Rights Reserved by © Tanjil Rahman
For Commercial use or others purposes
Contact : tanjilphotographybd@gmail.com
In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends. Flowers are the music of the ground. From earth's lips spoken without sound. Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature. Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.
Surrounded by northern Michigan's dense Taiga/boreal forest, Kitch-iti-kipi is the State's largest freshwater spring. Known as the "Mirror of Heaven" by early Native Americans, Kitch-iti-kipi was considered a sacred place.
At over two hundred feet across, with 40 feet deep of incredibly clear emerald-colored water (see lower left of image - that light sand is roughly 40 feet down), more than 10,000 gallons a minute gush from fissures in the underlying limestone at a constant temperature of 45 degrees Fahrenheit year around.
Measuring the Hubble constant, the rate at which the Universe is expanding, is an active area of research among astronomers around the world who analyze data from both ground- and space-based observatories. The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has already contributed to this ongoing discussion. Earlier this year, astronomers used Webb data containing Cepheid variables and Type Ia supernovae, reliable distance markers to measure the Universe’s expansion rate, to confirm the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s previous measurements.
Now, researchers are using an independent method of measurement to further improve the precision of the Hubble constant — gravitationally lensed supernovae. Researchers from different institutions around the world are leading this effort after Webb’s discovery of three points of light in the direction of a distant and densely populated cluster of galaxies.
This is an image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) of the galaxy cluster PLCK G165.7+67.0, also known as G165, on the left shows the magnifying effect a foreground cluster can have on the distant Universe beyond. The foreground cluster is 3.6 billion light-years away from Earth. The zoomed region on the right shows the supernova H0pe triply imaged (labeled with white dashed circles) due to gravitational lensing.
This field was selected for observation due to its high rate of star formation of more than 300 solar masses per year, an attribute that correlates with higher supernova rates. SN H0pe is one of the most distant Type Ia supernovae observed to date. The measured Hubble constant value matches other measurements in the local Universe, and is somewhat in tension with values obtained when the Universe was young. Future Webb observations in Cycle 3 will improve on the uncertainties.
In this image blue represents light at 0.9, 1.15, and 1.5 microns (F090W + F115W + F150W), green is 2.0 and 2.77 microns (F200W + F277W), and red is 3.56, 4.1, and 4.44 microns (F356W + F410M + F444W).
Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.
[Image description: A two-panel image. In the left panel, dozens of small galaxies are scattered on the black background of space. Just to the left of the center, there is a long, red arc. At its left is a cluster of a few white galaxies that look like a glowing orb. To the right of the center, the red arc and glowing orb of galaxies at the left appear to be mirrored. The curved and distorted galaxy image on the right side is highlighted with a white box. Lines extend from the box’s corners to the right panel, which shows an enlarged view of the curved galaxy. Three faint points of light are circled.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, B. Frye (University of Arizona), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), S. Cohen (Arizona State University), J. D’Silva (University of Western Australia, Perth), A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute), J. Summers (Arizona State University).
61-2667, the sole operational WC-135W Constant Phoenix is a "nuke sniffer," whose role is to sample and analyze the air for traces radioactive material. It will soon be replaced by a trio of new WC-135R aircraft, which are in the process of being converted from KC-135R tankers.
My constant view .. you'd think with all the playing out he does he'd have a rest .. but oh no it doesn't work like that lol!
He'll do that all evening and nothing will distract him ..... border collies, you've just got to love them!!
A historic harbor warehouse from 1923, once this was the largest storage and transfer shed in the world, designed by architect Cornelis van Goor and built by order of the Holland-America Line. The warehouse is then still called Shed San Francisco and is 360 meters long.
Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
RIP
Unfortunately, after 9 years of constant companionship and dedicated loyalty I had to put Bailey to sleep last month due to his allergies. He suffered from them on and off in small ways over the years but back in the summer they struck him again and just didn`t let go and his whole quality of life and health was shot. All the medical treatments tried were to no avail in addition to what previously worked in the past in helping to clear up his outbreaks.
Bailey was originally purchased by me at 3 months old and was supposed to be a Jack Russel Terrier, but grew a little bigger and a little different in shape and size and judging by the pics i looked at over time I came to the conclusion that he was a Rat Terrier and my lesson was learned when purchasing dogs from a pet shop, even being given "authentic" AKC paperwork. That`s all irrelevant though now but at the time i was a little peeved about this.
He was my pal and my buddy and i miss him everyday when i come home and he`s not at the door to greet me...
No questions please, thanks.
Shooting the lava ocean entry was no easy task. It was a constant battle with steam, timing the shutter, and hoping for a clearing to see the lava. For this shot I wanted a close up crop of the lava making its way into the ocean. Zooming all the way in I focused solely on the edge of the bench where the lava rolled into the ocean. I did not get to see the dripping lava action that I really wanted but this rolling action was quite eventful as well. I took many shots trying to get the timing right and hoping for a clear scene. Eventually the steam cleared for a short span and the red lava glowed intensely against the blue backdrop of twilight. Thanks again to Lava Light for taking us out and showing us an amazing time!
Se siente libre, se siente fuerte. Siente que nada es imposible, siente que el cielo es alcanzable y que la luna es cama de princesas. Sabe que con solo mirar al cielo puede encontrar a su principe azul, volando a través de las nubes. Y no en un corcel blanco como en los cuentos de siempre. Su cuento era diferente. Su historia era diferente.
Le gusta cerrar los ojos, sentir el aire pasar por entre su cabello. Notar como el sol juega con sus dedos, con sus mejillas, con sus hombros. Apreciar como las gaviotas surcan los inmensos cielos, en busca de algo que ella desconocía.
Quiere ser pájaro. Volar lejos. Volar y encontrar aquello que ansia. Aquello que la hiciera feliz, alguien que la amara.
Y se pregunta constantemente si de verdad existía su príncipe. Y no el azul. Ni la rana que después del beso de la doncella se convertía en el príncipe apuesto que todas deseaban. Su príncipe es único. Ella lo sabe. Aunque sea naranja, marrón, verde, amarillo... Lo especial estaba en lo único. Lo bello estaba en lo diferente.
Ella es diferente.
Y sonrie sabiendo que ahí afuera, en algún lugar, encontrará lo que busca. Surcando las tierras, observando el cielo y soñando.
Whether it was the C&NW, DM&E, CP or RCP&E, this station sign at St. Onge has been through it all. The railroad may change, but some things don't.
The congregation of Knox United Church in Ayr traces itself to three congregations, two Presbyterian churches formed in 1843 and a Wesleyan Methodist congregation. The current building was completed in 1888. Both Presbyterian congregations united under one congregation in 1914 and voted to join the United Church in 1925 with the Methodists joining in their current building.
Rolleiflex 2.8F - Carl Zeiss Planar 80mm 1:2.8 (Green-11) - Ilford SFX 200 @ ASA-200
Tetenal Neofin Blue (1+9) 13:30 @ 20C (Constant Rotation)
Scanner: Epson V700 + Silverfast 9 SE
Editor: Adobe Photoshop CC
The Individual Research and Combat Device is designed to help the operator get the most from the environment serving not only as a weapon but as an extension of the user's own body.
The IRCD features the J-Tac's TAT-5 (Telemetry Aiming Tool). Inspired by technology made for space probes, this small computer makes readings of the surrounding area, indicating levels of H2O, O2, C and other elements. This way, the operators can find not only hostile individuals but important resources for the exploration mission. The readings are constantly updated and the data is sent to the main research center, contributing for further reconnaissance of the ambient. The TAT-5 also works as a red dot sight unit and has a built in compass.
Due to concerns with ammo, J-Tac installed an ultra sonic repellent in the stock, similar to the one used against bats but with more efficiency. It's able to stun the creatures living in the forest due to their enhanced hearing, allowing an emergency escape if ammo runs out. It's battery lasts for 2 hours, leaving the soldiers with plenty of time for a back-up plan.
The IRCD can be used for a great number of roles from Assault Squads to Security Teams due to its folding and collapsible stock and barrel extension.
Sorry for any mistakes. I'm not used to a more formal and technical language.
A causa de las fuertes lluvias en la zona de Alpera, el 87152 pasó con un buen retraso considerable por Valencia, con lo cual era factible el poderle cazar.
En la foto vemos al 87152 con la 335.007 al frente.
Horno de Alcedo (Valencia)
3.7.14
Small shorebird. Constantly bobs its tail while working edges of streams, ponds, and lakes for invertebrates. Several individuals may be found at the same body of water, but never forms tight flocks. Underparts spotted in summer; plain in winter. This bird is starting its molt into summer plumage. Note that bill is also changing colour.
San Diego, California, USA. January 2012.