Best of Twain

 In conjunction with the reading program sponsored by the Ada County Library, a group of actors under the direction of Kim Sherman-Labrum put on a scripted reading of some excerpts from the writings of Mark Twain.  The actors selected the pieces and then Kim helped them shape the pieces and add some dramatic movements.  This resulted in a delightful and hilarious evening of entertainment.

Vintage Steam Shovel

 Sitting in from of what started out at the Morrison-Knudsen engineering and construction company headquarters is an old steam shovel that dates back to the 1920s.  It's a fascinating monster with cast iron tracks for transporting itself, wooden planks for the sides of the cab and a very intricate series of cables, pulleys, and gears for manipulating its dinosaur mouth-like bucket.  I read in the paper recently that they would be moving it to the front of the DMV and I feared that they would probably put a chain link fence around it once they did.  So if I ever wanted to do a photo study of this impressive piece of historic machinery, now was the time.

And it was a lot of fun to do.  I spent about an hour, walking around the steam shovel, looking at its parts from as many perspective as I could manage.  The only thing I didn't do was climb up on it since I'm sure someone would have objected to that.  Still, I think I managed to do a fair job of capturing its "steam shovel-ness."

White Moutain Panoramas

 It's been a weird winter in Boise.  Normally Bogus Basin, the ski resort above town, opens around Thanksgiving.  However this year we didn't get the usual snowy peaks above Boise until after New Years.  Then we had a beautiful sunny day and it looked like the perfect opportunity to capture them.  So I made three very large panorama pictures.  The bad news is that the results were far too long to load up into blogger so I had to cut them up again to get them in here.  You'll have to use a little imagination to see the whole picture.  Also be sure to click on the image to see them full sized.

The first panorama, cut in three parts, was shot from Crest Line Drive.

 This next series was shot from the top of Camel's Back Park.

 And finally I compiled this panorama from a hilltop near Table Rock.