View allAll Photos Tagged flappy
Ooow peeps .. this is probably the most hideous thing I've ever made... I'm so proud!
This is the new 'invite icon' for "The Pretty brOken bOys Orchestra" and it's made to produce at least a little smile. (sights happily).
So Flappy my beagle hurt his back and cannot go on stairs. So we setup a barricade on the stairs to keep him from heading upstairs. As Pam put it - we need to build a wall to keep him downstairs - and we will make Flappy pay for it! OK...he did not pay for it - but hopefully his back will mend soon.
Flapjack spent all day just looking for a nice place to sleep on one of the first really cold days in Saline, Michigan.
I enjoy finding these flexible people and have always called them "flappy men." Fayette County, Georgia
Leica IIIf, Nikon 35mm f/3.5 lens with Catlabs 320 Pro film.
Holga 120N. Kodak E100VS, cross-processed.
Taken in Dubai, back in March, moments after I lost my pinhole camera over the side of this boat....
Really noisy this one as I had to dig it out of the shadows quite a bit in LR but I loved the flappy ears!
Mallards take flight in from pool in Holly Hayes Wood, Whitwick, England.
(Wish I could say this effect was intentional, but it's just a happy accident of selecting the wrong setting on my new camera!)
In the 1980s much weird folk roamed the streets of the USA, but some stood out even in that candy-colored time. Those were the heroes and villains known as the Mighty Misfits!
Beakon
Did you ever hear a pecking noise on your roof at night? It might be a giant yellow bird-ish man, known as Beakon! Aspiring to be a signal of hope for men and birds alike, Beakon hops from roof to roof to catch burglars, cats and other scum before they can hurt one more feathery friend!
Which part of him is man and which is bird could not yet be determined, however.
Cabbage Man
One day, Cabbage Man was sick of the food culture he saw around him. Everyone was turning vegetarian! No one, except Cabbage Man, seemed to understand that vegetables are so much more suited for fighting crime than eating them! So he geared up, packed his greens, and went out on the streets, always equipped with the freshest, healthiest food - to throw it at the bad guys!
Sometimes, it was debated whether he should rather be called Lettuce Man, and due to his philosophy of never giving interviews, the matter could never be settled, leaving the newspapers in despair.
Wicked Wingspan
Not your usual crazy scientist with the awesome tech, Wicked Wingspan is not actually able to fly. His suit is just that fancy - and includes invisible stilts (he found at a dumpster one day). Also, his master plan to spray everyone around with bronzer never quite works out, because he can’t seem to figure out how to get it under people’s clothes. But he really believes in it, and one day he will find the actual scientist with the knowledge to help him get it done!
The Moist Menace
Breaking onto the crime fighting scene as a three-eyed fish with dangerous … water guns, I guess? …, The Moist Menace fights crime not out of moral conviction, but because he wants to be the only villain in town! That’s right, the guy is part of the team of heroes only as long as the crazy dude with the flappy wings is history. Everybody knows that for he never tires to claim superiority of his evil creativity over Wicked Wingspan’s. However, no one quite beliefs it or simply doesn’t care. Once, it was rumored that Menace’s secret identity was an actual person, but it seems pretty obvious that he is just a fish with the usual two eyes.
Princess Candypop
Nobody ever looked that sweet when fighting crime! Princess Candypop may strike some as just a usual young woman, but with a piece of her special cherry gummy candy, she develops super human strength and shining purple eyes in an instant! And what better to do with this power than make the world a happier place! Ironically, the crime rate apparently has risen since Princess Candypop appeared on the streets, because many young men yearn for a chance to meet this lovely young lady, even if that means breaking the law.
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Here are my 80s-inspired Heroes and Villains for the third round of the figbarfcentral tournament! These figures were a lot of fun to make! Also big thanks to my friend Mr. Grievous for writing part of the story!
I am starting to feel better - but I have not done much photography these two days being laid up with a bad back. With Flappy no longer with us :( - Luckily Cosmo and Wanda were doing good cat things. Taken on April 24th and 25th.
At 8 months old, 60 odd kgs heavy, and as tall as a shetland, my beautiful blonde bombshell Kestrel is a bit scary when she comes at you at a run. :)
5/11/09
Ahhhh, Meggy Moo. I can't tell whether this is a good picture or whether I just can't see past her cuteness.
We walked out at the university to get some shots of the cathedral on what was a hazy, sunny day. I got some decent ones, but she then upstaged it by being all flappy eared and generally adorable. Some nice autumn leaf bokeh too.
I snagged up a nice used Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III this weekend. Is it still relevant in 2023 with only 21 megapixels and a flappy mirror?
Zac is a little poorly with a strained joint but carries his tennis ball in the hope that I'll throw it for him to chase. With his history of being grossly overweight before I rescued him I daren't until he's better, which is frustrating for both of us!
There's surprisingly little on the internets about minimal change disease and nephrotic syndrome in adults, from a patient perspective. Less still about what happens to your body. I'm writing this to explain, practically, realistically and hopefully with a sense of perspective, what happened to me - for anyone else diagnosed with it.
Apologies friends, who may know all of the below, and Tom, who's heard it all twice, thrice and more :) I rarely use my blog, and this is the next best place.
The photos above are from 20 May and 12 June.
What a difference a shitload of steroids makes.
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GP visit - 8 May, to discuss my slightly swollen feet and ankles, which I put down to a new Power Plate exercise at the gym. He thought I seemed very confident that's what the problem was, and gave me some very low dose diuretics, and off I went, clutching my prescription.
Symptoms - 8 May - 14 May, the swelling in my feet (actually first noticed 25 April), worsened, from my feet, up my ankles, then up my legs, tummy, lower back and finally, face and around my eyes, especially in the mornings.
What kind of swelling? So bad it was impossible to bend at the knees, I had to roll sideways out of bed, couldn't bend backwards, had numb toes, pins and needles. Old scars bulged and re-appeared - I guess due to the swollen cell changes. Kind of amusingly, if I slept on my side, one side would be bigger, and I had to wait for gravity to pull all the fluid downwards.
In total, I put on 15kg of water in about three/four weeks. It's called 'pitting edema', and feels and looks like memory foam, when you press the skin in.
Nausea and bloating (no room for things to move around). Couldn't eat (because of the big bloat). Breathlessness (all that new weight). Foamy wee, if it happened at all. Kind of a tinnitus / spacey feeling. Feeling 'not right'.
GP again, hospital, diagnostic tests - 14 May, initially with the same GP for an emergency appointment after waking up just knowing something was really quite wrong. He ran a urine test on seeing my alarming weight change, then packed me off to the truly wonderful Royal London Hospital for blood tests, consultation, medical history and so on. Within an hour or two of me being there, they pretty confidently said that they believed it to be minimal change disease, which is one of the most common causes of nephrotic syndrome (when large amounts of protein leak into the urine). Update: oh, I also had an ultrasound to rule out changes identifiable by eye, eg, lumps, and to check that both kidneys were present and correct.
It's common in children, less common in adults. They don't know what causes it, it's often idiopathic. Four theories are: use of ibuprofen (in the past I've taken maybe 800mg a month), or a cold / sore throat (strep) virus, that doesn't go and instead, moves to the kidneys, or an allergy or an insect bite / sting. No family history in my case.
I learn it's not life-threatening and I'm not likely to get whipped in for a transplant, and nor is this likely to happen in the long-term.
Most people should have less than 20mg of protein in their urine. I had 1,345mg. It's no wonder I went pear-shaped.
Kidney (renal) biopsy - 19 May, back to the hospital at 7.30am as a day in-patient for a pretty yukky kidney biopsy.
This is done under local anaesthetic because you need to do things when asked, and they'll generally pick the left kidney (if you've got two normal-sized ones), to avoid the one by your liver.
It was done right there on the small ward, with a portable ultrasound, some anaesthetic and a loooong needle. You lie on your front, they go in from the back. Your kidneys move from side-to-side when you breathe, so you hold your breath, then breathe in and hold, when told, to take the sample (at least, that's how I understood it). They took two cores, about half as long and wide as a matchstick - here's mine - to make sure they got a broad selection of glomeruli for the electron microscopy. No need for stitches.
Then, you lie flat on your back for six hours, to kind of seal things up. It just feels odd afterwards - you can feel where the kidney has 'popped'. I was told that I'd feel like I'd been kicked in the back, but barely any pain at all - more general nervousness at popping myself open and dying in a pool of blood in a corner of an old Victorian hospital.
You have to wee whilst at the hospital, to make sure there's no serious bleeding. I doubt they'd let you home without this check, so drink the tea, even if you are horizontal most of the day. Went home around 10pm, with a big bag o' drugs and an order to not lift anything heavy for two weeks, being particularly careful for the first 48 hours.
20 May - started treatment. Per day:
-- 60mg prednisolone (to stop the protein leak from my kidneys)
-- 80mg furosemide (or frusemide, a diuretic, to make me wee like a racehorse. I took 160mg some days, as it didn't really work to start with - previously okayed with the consultant).
-- Calcichew D3 Forte (calcium, the steroids thin your bones)
-- 20mg omeprazole, a kind of stomach liner, as the steroids can irritate your stomach lining.
-- 10mg atorvastatin, for my temporarily sky-high cholesterol levels, as a result of the changes in my blood / the protein leak / steroids - I don't know which.
I chose to stop the furosemide as soon as my weight was back to normal.
24 May - consultant. More weeing in pots, and a good chance to chat to the consultant. There's a possibility he thinks, that I may have FSGS, which is a similar condition. I'll hear later. Either way, it doesn't matter now, as the initial treatment is the same. His wise words: be patient. He says the prednisolone is generally 100% effective, then quickly revises this down a bit :)
25 May - 1 June. Holiday! To France! To the middle of France! The land that fashion forgot! I could be huge and wear maxi-dresses to my heart's content. Of the litany of steroid side-effects, I had some weird flappy whites-of-eye thing going on (could've been cholesterol, I'm not sure), chronic sleeplessness (curiously not irritating, I just lay there thinking, oh well, here I am awake again), very buzzy in the day, never tired, ever. Extraordinarily lucid. I can see how they can be addictive.
I scratched myself on a thistle or something, and the wound watered, gently and consistently, for about 3 days. Better than a tap on the knee - ba-dum tish. (There's a photo of this in this set.)
Pretty hard to walk very far, just too breathless and uncomfortable. Hard to eat much too, no room, with all that bloating.
I had some wine - maybe up to 175ml a day. The consultant said it would be OK to have one or two glasses, and I omitted to ask if this was per day, or per week... As I understand it, it's best not to mix steroids and alcohol as it can irritate your stomach lining. I imagine that will be very different in different people, particularly if you have more mental / physical side-effects from the drug, than I had / have. (So don't drink alcohol just because I chose to.)
Round about 30/31 May - whilst trying to walk around Paris - terrible, and I mean really horrible, leg pains - behind my knees, in my calves and ankles. I guess all the water was starting to shift around. My legs felt very 'brittle', ready to snap.
1 June - 4 June - the week of weeing. A lot. About two weeks into the steroid treatment, and everything suddenly started moving. I guess the protein leak was stopping, and I was losing up to 2.5kg of fluid a day. That's a bit too much really, and 1kg a day is what you're supposed to aim for. Back to more or less normal size in about a week.
7 June - consultant. More weeing in pots. Protein now trace. Which means the steroids have stopped the leak - hurrah! Now, we start to taper the steroids - very slowly, about 10mg each time. I need to see the consultant less during this time, and more later - as the chance of relapse is higher as the prednisolone drops. I should never get so big again, as all the bio-chemistry should clock a relapse well before it becomes symptomatic.
Today. You'd never know to look at me. The biopsy 'scar' looks like a little red dot. The thistle scratch has healed, but in an unusual way, and very slowly. My face has changed shape (hamster-cheeks, from the steroids). And the skin on my feet looks wrinkled and old from being so stretched. Otherwise. Fine. Somewhat ironically, my legs have never looked better, after that extended work-out.
I think I've been lucky, so far.
The lesson: if your feet and legs swell and you're not weeing, get thee to a doctor.
Update - April 2011 - gave birth to a daughter! I remained on 10mg of pred during my pregnancy, and tapered it until I finally came off them in August 2011. I was under the excellent care of an obgyn and renal consultant for the duration, too - they shared the same office, as both had an interest in the other's speciality. A very lucky bounce for me, and others like me with kidney problems and a bump to worry about.
This young parrot was a little excited and made lots of noises with flapping action as he climbed around the branches following me in the Adelaide Zoo's tropical bird aviary.
Is there another art form that is so reliant on the elements and weather conditions? Probably. But this one is always giving me a schooling in all things climate related.
These leaves and light things are so often very challenging. Making the sculpture is the easy bit, nursing it through its life until I get to take its bloody photo is a whole other level of blinkin' flip.
Not least the plague of flies that descended on me like a scene from the Amityville Horror when I arrived in the woods to attempt some photography.
These leaves and light things on sticks I make are a bit different to the pure land art schtick. The purest version is to only use what you find where you are, everything happens there from collection to creation to photos. Instead I often collect stuff from whereever, possibly make it somewhere else then take it somewhere suitable to capture the image. Fortunately they're portable as it would be nigh on impossible to get them backlit by the sun without being able to move them around. I expect eventutally the sun would shine through if left in one spot but the leaves would have long since dried out, the thorns fallen out and the wind ripped the whole thing to bits.
And therein lies the challenge, chasing the sun to get the shot before those things happen and they happen more quickly than you might think. So these style of sculpture really are a lesson in land art just like making something only in one place. You become acutely aware of the wind or even a light breeze, what the clouds are doing and how the sun moves and also how fresh materials dry out, contract and tear, after a while thorns fall out and things just can't be prepared anymore. Some leaves are very delicate and you have to be fast and accurate and have the perfect weather conditions. And those perfect days are few and far between where I live. To combine it all and feel inspired and make something that works is a real challenge.
This summer has been a bit crap. It's been weeks since we've had a nice still and sunny day, it's been dull or raining or windy. I've been wanting to do the leaf on a stick thing for ages but it's just not been possible but today the weather was set fair. Tomorrow it's going to piss down, so there you go.
(I wrote this yesterday but it was 10.30pm before I finished so have posted it today instead and yes it is raining right now).
Straight after breakfast I got on and made the thing, I have to go with the energy and just get on with it because just as soon as it arrives it can disappear again. And so it did, my head caved in around lunchtime and my energy levels went south such is the life of a variable introvert and in the meantime the wind had increased for the last few hours. Not good for a flappy, flimsy fing on a stick.
Speaking of introverts I was at Introverts Club the other day. Do you know the first rule of Introverts Club? The first rule of Introverts Club is well, we haven't really got any rules as no-one was assertive enough to agree any.
When we were sitting there a lightbulb blew. How many introverts does it take to change a lightbulb I asked? -One person puts their-hand up- 'I don't mind sitting in the dark?', then another says 'I'm happy to change the bulb if you want?', 'I don't mind really, you can change it if it isn't any trouble.', 'it's no trouble, but if you want to sit in the dark I could change it and leave it switched off if you like?' And so it went on...
This time of year the sun doesn't set until gone 10pm. Backlighting leaf sculptures need a low sun so once I'd made it I had some lunch and headed out on my bike instead and then hoped the sun remains and the wind drops as it often does in the hour before sunset.
Living on the north west coast of England next to the Irish Sea and then the Atlantic, the prevailing wind is west, the weather comes from the west and the sun sets in the west. In order to photograph these things I have to put them on the edge of a wood towards the sun so west, west, west, with the sun comes exposure to the wind. On the first day of decent weather for ages the wind had increased all day and now wasn't diminishing in the evening. The air was filling with moisture and was becoming hazier and hazier and the clouds were beginning to build.
I would normally spend a few hours repositioning and chasing the moving sun to get the perfect shot but the window was shutting on me fast. I got two shots before finally the sun's light was too milky to create enough contrast.
And that was it. The sun had gone, wind was still strengthening and the grass strands had torn along their length as the air buffeted it meaning the sculpture was long past its best.
I'd been very aware of the conditions all day and at its mercy being bumped along, a passenger hoping that after my efforts I might at least grab something with my camera.
It's disappointing when conditions mean I can't get a decent picture of a leaf sculpture with the light how I like it, I rarely remake something for another day or repeat a design as they are intuitive and I always move onto something new, so if the chance has gone that's it, it will never see the light of day literally and figuratively.
But when it works perfectly there's often a moment when the sculpture perfectly lights up like a switch has been flicked, and it is quite a thrill.
This one is somewhere in between but just tips over the line into acceptable. All I can do is pray that we get a few more still sunny days this summer so I get another chance.
Drainage channels and flappy thing on the procelain slab at The Miads Morgue.
View more on my website -
www.bcd-urbex.com/the-maids-morgue-abandoned-decaying-mor...
Female Hooded Merganser (a.k.a. Lophodytes cucullatus) - Ritch Grissom Memorial Wetlands (a.k.a. Viera Wetlands), Melbourne, Florida
What's not to be flappy about?!
Not to mention, there's nothing like a nice bath
after the deed is done.
Independently Designed by David Donahue
Flapping Ear Elephant =
Flapping+Happy+Elephant= Flappyphant
www.flickr.com/photos/origamivisionz/19294629900/in/datep...
Once in a lifetime........
The past few days I've been out photographing a lot of wildlife. I spent time in the mountains and foothills of northern Colorado. One morning we went to a local lake where we were staying just to enjoy whatever showed up in front of the lens. There was one particular male Broad-tailed hummingbird that kept landing on a tree branch every ten minutes or so. I was eagerly waiting for his arrival, when I heard some hummingbird commotion in the air. I could clearly hear two hummingbirds. I watched one come down and land on a reed in the marsh in front of me. It was a lovely little female that I had not yet seen. I took a few shots of her, and then she flew off to another perch. I turned my attention back to where the male might land, but he changed his mind. Once again, I heard a commotion and turned just in time to see the female land, quickly followed by something else. I didn't even have time to understand what I was seeing. I heard my mouth open and say" There are TWO of them.........MATING!!" I lifted my camera up to my eye as quickly as humanly possible and prayed I could get focus. I literally had 2 seconds to get any shots. They were not particularly close to me and they are tiny little beings. I shot at my highest frame rate of 20 frames per second. I actually think I had one second of shooting. I caught a number of frames of the mating sequence. I am still in shock that I saw this. I doubt I will ever see this again......
Loose as a goose and flappy as a flappy thing, just throw that paint on the wall, see what sticks. For some reason most of it ended up looking like old car paint colours with lens flare sparkles on top. Sometimes I swear I only paint so I can put sparkles on at the end.
Playing with my new Canon Lens (10-18mm for AP-C sensors) on my 70D. Flappy was a good subject today!
Flappy bird! Many hate it, many love it! (I love it, and my mom hates me cause I'm good at it). With all of the talk about it getting taken down and everything, I thought it would be a perfect mosaic!
So far my high score is 61.
Happy Valentines Day! I hope this didn't instill to much hate in your day!