Happy Chanukah!

Sky
Candles

Hello all and good morrow!

Model Train Fun
Assassin Bug with Dead Fly
Diesel Engine
Daddy-Longlegs on flower

Here are some pictures. (Click to make bigger.) As I continue to read the Idiot's Guide to Photography like a Pro, my pictures improve. Winter break is restful, and I'm doing a lot of catch-up reading, and doing math problems to correct my math score on the PSAT, which was 53 out of 80. However, I still managed to get a 205, equivalent to a 2050 on the SAT.

One year anniversary!

This Saturday, December 16, presenting: One year of a "window into my life" provided at no cost whatsover!

I.E. This blog has been up for one year.

What I said: Hello everybody!

This is so cool!
I just set up my blog. What surprised me is that I made my own link. Right now the name is a bit lame, but most likely I'll change it later.

What my mom said: piony said...
Privet! I wish you lots of fun blogging.

Just remember the books!!

Hello and welcome back!

Much has happened during the retreat. (I'm sorry I posted so few pictures, but it's becasue their size, at 3.5-4.5 megabytes each, made it hard to upload them to blogger. I will post them on my dad's website, shmsoft.com/yosef. The videos that I took then are also located there.) The research paper is in full swing, and we just had to hand in 150 notecards. Sadly, I had only 80, so a full grade is not forthcoming. (Maybe I should have written less on each notecard.) Today was my physics final, and though I should not have remained in school afterwards, I decided that I would study better here. Right now I'm taking some rest on the computer. Somre cool links follow:
http://www.google.com/patents
http://wikisummaries.org/Main_Page
http://www.expresspdf.com/
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/disk-space/geek-to-live--visualize-your-hard-drive-usage-219058.php
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

I'm back from the high school retreat.

My Bunk (I'm on left)

We arrive

On the way there

We Begin
From Sunday the 19th to Tuesday the 21st, I was at Camp Cho-Yeh , located in Livingston, TX. It was awesome. We had color war, green vs. brown, and I was green, which lost. With the brand new digital camera I took many photos, and here follow some of them. If not all are here at first, they will follow later.

I'm so excited!

I just bought a new camera. It will arrive in two days. Some stats along with a link follow. It has 8 megapixels, is a Canon camera, and flips out 180 degrees and so forth. The links shows the A620; I'm receiving an A630, the newer model, but virtually the same.

• Camera

Mother's photos of pretty snails

Snail
Snail
Snail

Sunday at the Japanese Garden

'Twas a delighful day, with the koi fish swimming everywhere and purple dragonflies flitting around, mating, and some good photos came out. The turtles are especially Zen-like.

A Dragonfly
Purple Dragonfly
Two Turtles on a Rock
A Duck

Victory is ours!!!

A federal judge has blocked the Bush Administration from proceeding with oil
and gas development in the famed Teshekpuk Lake region and its world-class
wildlife nurseries.

The Western Arctic Reserve may be less well-known than the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge but its wildlife populations are every bit as unique,
spectacular and endangered.

It is home to the 45,000-member Teshekpuk Lake caribou herd. Tens of thousands
of migratory birds come here from as far away as Antarctica to nest without
disturbance.

Even Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary James Watt -- no friend of the
environment -- recognized Teshekpuk's great importance and granted it federal
protection in the 1980s.

But the Bush Administration was preparing to strip this wildlife treasure of
its protections, sell it to the highest bidder, and create a sprawling
industrial zone of pipelines, rigs and waste sites.

NRDC and our partner groups went to court to stop this unconscionable giveaway
to Big Oil. And now that court has ruled that the Interior Department failed to
consider the cumulative environmental impacts of oil and gas drilling on this
sensitive ecosystem.

This is great news!

Garden pictures

Ornamental pepper "Black Pearl" that has ripened
Zinnia

And now the bubbling brook of the outing

The setting

It flows over the rocks
Swirls around in haste
Bubbles
Water laughs - "What larks!"

Flowers of Sunday outing

Last Sunday we went to the Japanese garden. Hardly had we entered when a sudden storm blew up, wringing itself out after about 20 minutes. We were sheltered by the awning of the entrance to the Garden, along with a motley group of individuals. Afterwards, I took pictures of the flowers and flowing water in a brook, swollen after the rain.
These are the flowers, of a most interesting type.
Some lightly-fragrant flowers
After the rain
Blue flower
So what color is that?
The hoi polloi of flowers

Yosef at work

My father took this cellphone picture a while back of me in full gear during a gardening day.
Kibbutznik Yosef

Pictures from garden

Sprightly lemon balm with shiny bug
Lemon balm doing much better in bigger pot
Lime and chocolate mint
Basil: "Ruffles"
Ornamental pepper: "Black Pearl" (ripening to red)
Pepper with butt shape

A trip to Tea's Nursery and flowers

Bougainvillea
While finishing up shopping at Teas Nursery for important supplies and plants for the first time ever, my mother took some pictures of the many esoteric varieties of roses, most named after celebrities.
Variegated flowers of butterfly bush
Rose
Rose

These are some pictures of cotton

Cotton
On one of the streets in my neighborhood, there is a house with a cotton plant growing in front. Every so often I see that a new cotton pod has formed and opened, and sometimes I take one. Recently I photographed some cotton with its pod.

Please Watch (and maybe donate)

This is from the NRDC. We must prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. As it says in Uva Letzion in Shacharit - "...shall not be withdrawn from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring, nor from the mouth of your offspring's offspring ... from this moment and forever." Please take this to heart for your children's futures and to ensure that we have a beautiful exemplar of wildlife tundra still there for generations to come.

NRDC Video

Evening.

I called KUHF 88.7 FM and asked them to play the Mozkowski Etude No. 4, Op. 72. They played 1-3, but not 4. And I was so hoping to get it on tape cassette. Oh well. Check this site out:

NetDisaster

THis allows you to "destroy" the web-site you put in in any way you wish, selected from a list. Really Fun. This too:

Dig a hole through earth - where will you come out?

Some pictures...

The lizard on Ester

Word Wealth etymology adventures

Guess what these words mean:
1. bisaaltiotic
2. bicuitemial
3. visuovalentudology
4. dextriskophobiogamyotic (hint: two O's are for ornamentation)

Answers:
1. pertaining to something not twice the height
2. blood that is cooked twice
3. The study of the ability to have seeing power (eyesight)
4. a little fear of the right marriage

I made these up, and almost forgot the definitions to 3 and 4, even needing Mrs. Sternthal, my British Literature teacher, to figure it out. It was amusing to crack.

A day at the pool

On Sunday, everyone but Ester went to the pool, and had two serene hours there, with no noise breaking the silence (except for cicadas). Here follow some pictures of some fun:

Yosef performs a cannonball (and gets camera wet)
Underwater handstands
Yosef in mid-air (ready to become a cannonball)
Rebecca's splash-less jump

Long time no see

Due to school , which started on August 23, I have not been able to get to the blog until now. Schedule follows for those interested, with annotations:
1. Advanced Text (the same as Gemara)
2. Jewish Philosophy ( for the fourth Judaic credit, taught by R. Aharoni Carmel, a shliach from Israel. Class is sleepy, frankly speaking. Currently learning about repentance.)
3. AP Psychology (taught by Mrs. McCracken, a great teacher, especially in a class of six - three 11th graders and three 12th graders. Very interesting)
4. Physics H.
5. Word Wealth ( guess what is a lavatonym, a ovtheist, i.e rooster, and hippopotomonstronym.)
6. Lunch
7. Gemara
8. Chumash (again R. Carmel)
9. British Literature Honors ( quite challenging)
10. Pre Calculus Honors (10, 11, 12 graders)

There you have it. Garden does kacha kacha, with some crop failures marring what otherwise has produced some great work for the camera and the palette. I took some new pictures of the passionflowers from recently, i.e three months ago, and also included are the eggplants.
Passionflower
Passionfruit
Cute Japanese Eggplant
Other beautiful white flowers growing wild
Eggplant