morning photomelange

This is the only chance I'll have all day to post here, and right now I only have time for this "misc. photos" post. I'll be spending nearly all of today holed up in a stuffy conference room with a few other geeks, grinding out an endless series of UML diagrams, plus a few UI mockups just to change things up a little. Even though I'm not a UI guy and have nothing useful to contribute on that point, I'll dutifully be in the room anyway. But hey, that's why I make the big bucks, I guess.

Anyway, this post is my one bit of escapism for the day, so I'm done with the RL whining now. Here are the rest of the photos:



A wet maple seed "helicopter" on the sidewalk, a few days ago.



Mt. St. Helens from Kelly Butte, taken way back in the summer when I was out exploring that neck of the woods. I had to do a bit of GIMP-fu on the pic to get the mountain to stand out in all the summer haze and smog, which is why I didn't post it until now.



Yet another photo of autumn leaves. This hasn't quite gotten old yet. Possibly we'll run out of autumn leaves before I get bored taking pictures of them. Either way, this is going to stop eventually.



A seagull in Waterfront Park. I took this on Halloween while walking through Waterfront Park looking for anything remotely spooky to mark the occasion. I ended up going with a couple b+w photos of crows, since that's all I could find at the time. Seagulls aren't scary unless you're a chunk of dead fish, in which case the worst is already over.



Looking east from Mt. Tabor, taken back in September. I don't know if that's smoke or just steam you see off in the distance. We actually do have a fair amount of heavy industry in this city, but nobody talks about it. I guess the thinking is that it's somehow disreputable. The city likes to think of itself as a purely "creative class" kind of place, where either A.) You spend your days kludging up annoying Flash dreck for someone's new ad campaign, and your evenings sucking down $12 designer cocktails and wondering what to do when your chihuahua goes out of style; or B.) You make lattes for the city's many Flash designers, while imagining that you're a "creative type" too. You spend your evenings practicing with a shoegazing indierock band nobody's ever heard of. Turns out there's actually a lot more to the city than this silly and shallow image, but you'd never know it from the way people talk, including the local media. Sooner or later I'm going to post about the city's industrial side, once I have some good photos, and time to write the thing properly. Right now I have neither.