In Estes Park, Colorado, there is a river walk that includes a tunnel. The entrance and exit of this tunnel are lined with ceramic tiles decorated by local school children.  This one is particularly amusing:

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As you can see, the kid in the middle just wants ‘Whirled Peas’.

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No, sorry – that’s not Treebeard.  What that is, I can’t say.  Other than weird.  Pucker up?

I snapped this photo at a tourist attraction in Manitou Springs, Colorado – the Cliff Dwellings.  Cool place.  Weird tree.

The sign hanging from it reads as:

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The Ponderosa Pine!

…with Mister Potato Head features…

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This photo was taken with the same point and click camera I mentioned in last week’s Photo Friday.

In this case, I was further south near Colorado Springs.  Yes, I was on a mountain, and I was looking down from a decent overhang when I decided to snap this shot.

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I keep trying to take this shots, but they don’t give the right sense of scale that I’m looking for.  I still like it, though.

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This is an oldie but a goodie.  I took this photo years ago using a point and click camera that I can’t find today.  No idea what happened to it after we moved into the house.  It’s just gone.  I suppose it could be in a box that I marked ‘storage’ or something.  Oh well.

Anyway, a large group of friends had descended on Denver for a little R&R and one of our day trips was up I-70 past the Eisenhower Tunnel, up near the Vail / Breckenridge area.  We saw this little body of water that looked unusual, like it was either human made or the result of a sudden snow melt.  We pulled off to investigate and I kept trying to take a photo, but my point and shoot camera couldn’t adjust for the brightness of the sun.  The results was this photo:

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A very small @Tybarbary can just be made out in the lower left corner of the photo.  Yes, it was beginning to rain.

This accidental photo remains one of my favorites.

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Okay, so, maybe not really under the sea seeing as how this was taken at a lake up in the Rocky Mountains – but with all that seaweed, how could I not go there?

As always, click to see a MUCH BIGGER VERSION of this photo

I did not get wet trying to take this photo.

Okay, I did not get much wet trying to get this photo.

So, yeah, I got a little wet trying to get this photo.  And it was cold.

I SUFFERED FOR MY ART!

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Mom likes to have a real angel on the top of the tree each year.  Here she is:

Mom's Angel

I shot this up close.  I wanted to get her when she was lit up.  Kinda ended up with a creepy effect.

Anyway, Merry Christmas!

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I like to play with my camera.  Really, it’s the only way to learn how to do stuff with it.

There was a cool photo that I really liked, of the lights hanging in downtown Littleton.  It was done by playing with exposure times while moving the camera forward slowly.  Got me thinking.

My Christmas Tree

This isn’t anywhere near the quality of the streaky-light photo from downtown Littleton that I loved so much, but hey – it’s a start, right?

I accomplished this effect by opening up the exposure time and then slowly zooming the lens out.  Or was it in?  D’oh.

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“…my name…is…UNICRON!”

Dakota the Cat

Okay, his name is NOT Unicron.  It’s Dakota.  I tend to call him ‘Bud’.

It took me several tries to get this shot, because I really wanted the red-eye effect.  What I got was an orangey-eye effect and a cat that was ready for me to stop shoving the camera in his face.

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You’re sitting at your desk trying to – what?  Write?  Make a podcast?  Something like that?  And your mind just isn’t focused on the task at hand.

If you’re like me, this means that you start to doodle.

Cleaning my desk this weekend, I realized I had accumulated quite the collection of little drawings and decided to share them with you today.

(see what I’ll do just to get a blog post up?!)

These are in no particular order and are offered up for your amusement:

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As you can see, I doodle a lot…

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Cats have one major weakness: The Sunbeam.

Nothing like a morning cat face, am I right?

Shadow the Cat

I joke about how he wakes me up every morning, which he does.  But his motivation is always to get me out of the bed so he can have it to himself.  Along with the sunbeam…

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