Botswana Trip Day 2 Part 1

Posted on 2025/09/15 by Gunther

Greetings folks. Neil’s hard at work on processing the photos from the trip and today’s post includes the first full day morning boat ride. Turns out that the Chobe River is what one would call a target rich environment so Ima gonna have to split day in half (more or less). I don’t know for sure if that will continue every day or just busier days…it was a little slower out at Camp Kanana in the Okavango Delta region about day 4 or 5 so perhaps there will be some single post days coming up…stay tuned.

On the home front…we’re into September now and the weather is starting to cool off a bit. We’re still running the A/C but within a week or so we expect to be able to open up for at least a few hours most days. We much prefer having the windows open for the breeze rather than being cooped up inside. Connie’s got her radiation treatments scheduled 5 days a week for 3 weeks starting on the 22nd. She’s about over the surgery aftereffects…she is still itchy near the incision as the glue they used to close it contains starch it turns out and she is allergic to starch…so she’s taking antihistamines (Allegra) for the time being and Neil keeps scrubbing the area with alcohol to help get it off.

It’s getting into concert season and we’re adding a couple new orchestras to our Sarasota Philharmonic subscription. One is the Florida Philharmonic which performs at a church over in Burnt Store…they’re a pretty new group. The second is a local concert series with differing groups…they seemed interesting so we’re going to try them out as well. 

And that’s about it for the home front.

I forgot to mention last time Neil’s report on how irritating the porters at the airport in Johannesburg are. They’re like leeches…and there are hundreds of them all trying to carry your luggage or take you to the counter or point you to the gates…for just a small tip. While he appreciates that they need to make a living…they really don’t like to take no for an answer and give you lines like “I’ll get fired by my boss if you don’t let me do it and pay me”. Luggage carts are free in the airport and one can take them right across the street to the IHG hotel he was staying it so he didn’t need them to push it. And showing me where the check in line is or where the gates are when both are clearly labeled makes no sense. He had to tell dozens of them no in his 4 trips through the airport and after the first time he stopped arguing with them…just politely said No Thanks and kept moving. They actually try to take the luggage cart away from you and are really aggressive about tips. Perhaps this is the norm elsewhere but he’s never seen anything like it.

OK, let’s get onto images. Schedule wise…things just kept repeating every day. Early breakfast followed by a morning boat ride or game drive depending on location from just after dawn until 1100 or so then back to the lodge/camp/houseboat for more breakfast, some image reviews, and rest followed about 1430 or so afternoon tea then another drive from 1500 until after sunset arriving back about 1830 or so followed by dinner, backing up images, and charging camera batteries. Then sleep, get up early and repeat.

Here’s the boat we were using. About 25-30 feet long with 8 seats aligned fore and aft, each with a gimbal to mount the long lens on. Steve stayed in the front (he’s the one standing with the green jacket) and Rose took the back seat with the 6 clients in between and rotating forward one seat every drive. As you can see…early morning was pretty chilly…in the 40s most days but it was in the 70s to 80s for the afternoon drive and we were all in short sleeves then…at least until sundown because the temperature fell pretty quickly after sunset and it was a windy drive/ride back home.

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Pretty early on after leaving the dock we encountered a large group of Black Skimmers. These are exactly the same bird as we have in the US with one difference. US ones dip their beaks to catch prey for much longer times as they fly low but African ones stay low but only dip when they see something edible.

You can see in this first one how close their wingtips get to the water on the downbeat without actually touching it.

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There were also some hippos nearby.

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And this one skimmed and dipped really, really close to that crocodile behind the bird.

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Drat…missed.

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And sometimes even after a success your friends try to come and steal your breakfast.

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Here’s the croc they kept skimming by…it basically ignored the birds.

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Moving on after a half hour or so with the skimmers we found this Little Egret which we would call a Snowy Egret (same bird) here. It’s the Little Egret to differentiate it from the Great Egret (which is the same bird as a Great Egret here).

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Departing after a fish splashed in front and startled it.

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Nearby a mated pair of Pied Kingfishers…the male is to the left and the female is to his right and slightly behind him. Genders are differentiated by the chest markings…2 black bands on the male and a separated single more brownish one on the female. These are about 2-3 times the size of the Belted Kingfishers we have here. Perspective being what it is…she actually looks closer but her bill disappears behind his back and the females are slightly larger (as they are in most bird species due to having to deliver eggs).

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Cormorant…same bird as a Double Crested Cormorant but with varied local names depending on country.

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Brown Hooded Kingfisher…smaller than the Pied and a bit bigger than a Belted. This is…we think…a male.

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Baboon.

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African Darter…even though it’s the same bird as an Anhinga here.

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Close up of the baboon…if you look close you can see the shadows of his fur in the eyes.

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This one was watching the youngster above and then turned to look at the boat.

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Water Thick-Knee…a very common shore bird there.

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And another in a long list of very similar birds…this is a Gray Heron which is pretty much the same as a Great Blue Heron.

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They then next happened on a rookery for White Fronted Bee-Eaters. They nest in holes they did in vertical river banks in large groups and mostly eat insects that they catch mid-air. With these…and a lot of the kingfishers in flight shots you’ll see…Neil had to use a relatively new capability in his bodies called Precapture shooting. While modern bodies all have automatic exposure, focus, and subject detection they don’t actually (until recently) take a picture until you press the shutter and then they take 20 frames per second as long as the shutter down. The problem is that human reaction time is about 1/4 of a second to see the launch and press the shutter and the birds launch faster than that…so waiting until you see movement almost inevitably resulted in blank frames of the perch with perhaps the tail of the bird as it disappears from the frame. So…enter precapture. As long as one is engaging autofocus (and most wildlife shooters use a button on the back for this and not the half press of the shutter button that’s the default) the body is continuing to buffer images without storing them for whatever duration one sets…typically 0.3 seconds or so) Then when you see movement in the viewfinder you press the shutter and it saves the last 0.3 seconds worth of images (about 7 of them for 20 frames per second) and then saves 20 per second until you release. Simultaneously with shutter press one tries to pan to keep the bird in the frame but this is typically a hit or miss proposition unless you keep the bird small in the frame which is detrimental to the idea of filling the frame for maximum quality. The upshot of precapture is that you get the whole launch sequence…the downsides are that it gives you a lot of essentially wasted frames to review and it forces you into using JPEG image format instead of the higher quality RAW format but in good light with proper exposure the benefits of RAW are mostly diminished.

This section of bank is about 10 feet high from the river and pretty vertical and about 20 yards long. There were probably 200 of these birds there, all doing the same things. The boat was nosed into the bank about 10 feet from them and we mostly shot the ones right in front of us.

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This is a mated pair…male to the left and his mate frequently came out to complain at him that he wasn’t helping dig the nest.

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She would fly into the partly dug nest, toss out some dirt, then fly out, perch for a few second, and repeat. You can see the dirt coming out from the nest behind her and they emerge from the next and fly so quickly that without precapture he would have no shots of them like this.

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And here she is complaining at him.

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Moving on…we found a Little Bee-Eater…they are about 1/3 the size of the White Fronted ones and are much more solitary along with hanging out in more wooded areas. This one flew off the wrong direction (behind the tree) so getting launch shots didn’t work as they were all obscured.

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Another male Pied Kingfisher. His mate was perched alongside but he didn’t export it for me…the extremely narrow depth of field of his 600mm lens of about 3 inches at the less than 10 yards distance prevented having both of them in focus and even stopping the lens down would not have helped the depth of field enough. Kingfishers have a nictating eyelid that goes over their eye when they hit the water to protect it but still allow sight…I think he got one that has it visible. I’ll get him to export that one if he has it so you can see the difference…and I’ll get him to export the shot with the female as well so you can see the depth of field issue. While there are ways to work around that…basically taking two photos with one bird shape in each and merging them…it’s almost impossible to do it from a moving photo platform since the two shots don’t match up very well.

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And that does it for most of the morning ride. He’ll finish up that and the evening one processing today hopefully and I can post more. 

Interesting things found on the net.

C’mon…really?

Southern Food Pyramid.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Critters, Okavango Delta, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Botswana Trip Day 1

Posted on 2025/09/08 by Gunther

OK, Neil’s got all of his photos from the trip culled and imported into Lightroom and he’s finished processing the first day’s worth so I can now get into providing you some excellent images from the trip. One thing I’m gonna do differently this time…yes, I’m going to do the field guide sort of shots for identification of a species or whatever Burt I’m going to try and include interesting or interestingly processed shots as well.

Before that…a quick update on life here in SW FL. Connie had her follow up with the surgeon and she’s doing well…her swelling is almost gone and while the incision is still red and not looking all that great it’s a lot better than it was originally. She has mostly regained her former shape but the right side is going to not look the same as the left one after the surgery and that’s just the way it is. She’s graduated to wearing her underwire bras that provide more support as the bruising and soreness has diminished. Her pathology report is excellent…all of the cancer cells are gone and she’s going to undergo some localized radiation treatment to make sure. The oncologist wants her to take hormone replacement for 5 years…but there is a black box warning about doing that with retina issues so she’s going to most likely decline to do that. Her radiation doctor agrees and she’s just not comfortable taking the hormones given the side effects and her only one working eye situation as well as a detached retina from 2019…while it’s her decision Neil agrees with her that if it was him he wouldn’t take the hormones either.

She’s off to Mastersingers rehearsal tonight…so is happy about that as she’s getting back to doing what she likes to do. We are looking at some more concerts this year as well as a potential trip to see the leaves in Appalachia as they turn in the fall as well and we’ll stop by and see the kids in Richmond for diner as part of that. 

The weather is starting to cool off just a bit…I’m sure we’ll still have some hot and humid days but we’re getting close to when the weather is what we call comfortable and can open the windows for fresh air most of the time. It’s still raining most days…but Florida summers are like that. 

So…overall we’re doing well and getting back to what passes for normal for us. She’ll still need a mammogram every six months (vice once a year) for at least 2 or 3 years but that’s just fine with her.

So…let’s get on to discussions about his trip to Botswana last month. I’ll report on it on a day by day basis along with both photos and some observations about the trip. Suffice it to say he had an excellent time overall.

He left on July 29, Connie dropped him off at the local airport and he was smart enough to get business class both ways…otherwise it’s simply impossible to sleep if you’re back in the economy section. It costs more of course…but well worth it in our opinion. Flights were all Delta but some of them were operated by KLM as their partner. He had a 2 hour first class flight up to Atlanta…after all you have to go through Atlanta to get to Hell as we all know…and then a 2.5 hour layover there before boarding his business class KLM flight to Johannesburg, South Africa…all 16 hours of it. They departed at 2230 and there’s a six hour time difference along with the 16 hour flight. While he really appreciates the excellent service in business class…serving a full meal at 2300 followed by breakfast 5 hours later and then another meal 5 hours after that plus a snack before landing is just too much food. His dinner was short ribs and mashed potatoes and he ate part of that along with a cocktail and some wine but then it was past midnight so he crashed and skipped the next meal. Luckily KLM has lay flat seats in business…which while not really comfortable compared to a real bed are far better than sitting up crammed in the back. He put on an eye patch and blanket and fastened his seat belt over the blanket so they wouldn’t’ wake him up and slept pretty well. And 16 hours later they arrived in Johannesburg at about 2200 at night. He picked up his luggage, cleared customs, and headed to his overnight hotel…the International Hotel which was basically 50 yards from the terminal exit. He checked in and basically went right to bed before his next flight the following day. 

After breakfast in the hotel, he got a late checkout as his plane didn’t leave until early afternoon and headed back to the airport for the 2 hour flight to Kasane Botswana. The city is located right on the Chobe River which is the border between Botswana and Namibia and since it was Botswana there was the whole leaving South Africa entering Botswana immigration thing but overall that was pretty easy. On arrival in Kasane the tour company…Pangolin Safari Company…picked him and 4 of his fellow clients up at the airport, the 5th one (Luanne) had flown into Zimbabwe for a visit to Victoria Falls which is just a 2-3 hour car ride from Kasane. They all met at the hotel, had a quick checkin there, a brief meeting with Steve and Rose Perry the workshop leases and then went off on the first game drive.

Slight aside here…the workshop was divided into 3 parts. Three days in Kasane staying at the Pangolin Lodge with game drives actually being boat drives on the Chobe River. Then a mid day flight to the Kanana bush camp in the Okavango Delta area about 200 miles southwest of Kasane where game drives were actually in vehicles. Then the flight back to Kasane and a boat ride to officially enter Namibia as the houseboat is registered in that country followed by another boat ride to the houseboat where they spent the last 3 days. Again…boat rides on the Chobe River but they headed upstream 15 miles or so and visited some of the channels and tributaries of the Chobe River on the Namibia side of the border.. I’ll talk in more detail about those as we get there in the reports on the trip.

Some general geography to orient you. South Africa is at the southern end of the continent and Johannesburg is over to the eastern end. Botswana is the next country north of South Africa and Kasane is at the northern border of Botswana about 350 miles from Johannesburg. Namibia is mostly west of Botswana but there’s a thin section of that country that extends eastward just north of Botswana and then at the eastern end of that thin section there’s a common border area with both of those countries and Zimbabwe. The Chobe River forms the boundary with Botswana on the south side of the thin eastward section of Namibia. The first and third sections of the trip were along the Chobe. The middle section was in the Okavango Delta area which is about 100 miles southwest of Kasane, you can see the delta swampy area as the green area in the map below. The camp they were at was on the island (named Chief Island) in the center of that green area. Kasane isn’t marked on the map but it’s just west of Livingstone which is visible and it is located right where the two red lines cross just west of Livingstone. The Okavango is the area just northwest of main in green and Chief Island is the yellow area in the middle of that green. The second map below is about 400 miles across both north-south and east-west. Of note…the Kalahari Desert on the left as it extends from Botswana into South Africa is the area where the recently completed season of Alone was filmed in South Africa. Victoria Falls is actually located near Livingstone and the river there (the Zambezi) forms the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Neil wishes he had known it was that close or he would have visited Victoria Falls with Luanne ahead of the workshop as well.

Also of note…remember that all of this south of the equator thus the seasons are reversed and it was pretty much the middle of winter there. In both Kasane/Chobe and Okavango…highs were in the high 70s to low 80s and lows were in the 40s. So…they all bundled up in the morning and shed layers as the day went on. Neil chose wisely with his wardrobe…a long sleeve wicking undershirt with a long sleeve safari shirt over that and a windbreaker over that. Add in gloves and watch cap for the mornings (and evenings as they sped back home after dark) and he remained pretty comfortable. On the boats Pangolin provided warm windproof cloaks that they mostly just tossed over their laps…and in the Okavango the camp provided hot water bottles and blankets in the trucks for the morning drives. They were all glad to have gloves and hats though.

Large map of southern Africa.

Zoomed in map with the areas they visited more visible.

All I can say is that it’s a long flight from Atlanta to South Africa and he was glad to have an overnight to recover from that before the trip actually started. I addition…the accommodations and food were simply outstanding overall…but then Pangolin is a higher end safari company and as expected you get what you pay for.

The Chobe River runs from a couple hundred yards wide to about a half mile wide and depth ranges from just a foot or two to probably 20-30 feet in the middle in some places. All of the boat rides were on a 25 or so foot long boat with 8 seats fore to aft…each seat had a nice gimbal to hold your long lens and plenty of space for the second camera on the deck. Seats swiveled so you could see both sides and get shots easily. Steve and Rose took the front and aft seats to provide directions to the boat driver and offer suggestions and the six clients took the other seats…clients rotated forward every boat ride so nobody got stuck with being in the back all the time time. There was plenty of water, tea, and snacks on the boat so nobody got hungry.

Food…well, they fed them 4 times per day. Rising about 0500 they had breakfast then headed off right after dawn for the morning boat or truck ride, returning about 1100. Then brunch which was really more like lunch and an hour or three to rest, download images, charge batteries and whatnot. Then about 1500 it was afternoon tea…the country was colonized by the British after all followed by the afternoon boat or vehicle drive another 3-4 hours arriving back just after dark. Dinner at 1900 or so every night preceded by cocktail hour of course and then some really excellent food followed by more image downloads and battery charging before bed. Rinse and repeat for the next 10 days…but on day 3 and 7 there was a flight to and from the bush camp in the Okavango.

Ok, with that as a basic description of how the trip happened let’s get to some photos.

Gathering around the Pangolin Lodge lobby as we all met up for the first time. The two ladies in the middle are Luanne who was on the trip to Tanzania with Neil last year and Lin with her walker. Lin is almost 80 and that walker has been to all 7 continents with her. She gets around pretty well but uses it to help keep up. On the right in the white shirt is Steve who is actually from Fort Myers. 

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A shot 180 degrees from the one above down the first floor of the Lodge. The rooms are all up on the balcony walkway on the left and Neil and Steve were roommates the whole trip, their room was down the far end. He basically turned around after the iPhone shot above and took this one.

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Headed out…the first critter was a Nile Water Monitor…this one is about 2 feet long and they are maybe 3-4 feet long at adult size. Very similar to the iguanas we have here in FL.

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White Crowned Lapwing…a shore type bird about 15 inches tall…they have a couple of hanging pieces below the bill.

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Bull Greater Kudu…a herd animal larger than an elk but a bit smaller than a moose. The horns reach the full 2 turns after about 3 years of age. Neil ate a bunch of these on the trip…they are red meat similar to venison or elk and very lean so mostly served with sauce of some sort. He wasn’t able to figure out if they’re farmed or just hunted for food. They probably saw 300 of them over the trip typically in herds of a dozen or two at most with an alpha bull, his harem and the youngsters that hadn’t been driven off yet.

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Impala.

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Pied Kingfisher perched then heading down to the river to snatch a fish. These are larger than the Belted Kingfishers we have in the US by about a factor of 2…and they move really, really fast.

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About this time in the drive…our driver got a report from another Pangolin boat about a leopard upstream a bit. So…we put our cameras down and the driver floored it to get to that area before he left. The leopard was originally eating on a guinea fowl that it had caught but then a group of impala came down to drink so it tried sneaking up on them for a real meal…but the chase failed as they took off as soon as she charged them and the leopard gave up the chase pretty quickly. These were taken from maybe 20 yards offshore in the boat.

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Headed back to the grouse after the chase failed.

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And back under the trees enjoying the remains of her guinea fowl.

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At this point…all 6 of the clients declared that no matter what happened the next 10 days the trip was a success. As it turned out they had more leopards later on though.

Nearby there was a Fish Eagle…very similar in both size and coloring to the Bald Eagle we have here in the US.

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By the time the leopard and eagle were done it was getting pretty dark so they headed back to the dock…it was 40 minutes or so back and they got back to the Pangolin Lodge well after dark for dinner.

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A couple other shots from earlier before sunset and the leopard.

Gray Heron…very similar to the Great Blue Heron we have in the US but not quite identical.

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And a family of elephants having a drink at the edge of the river.

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While waiting on dinner Neil grabbed this shot of a carved native outside of the dining room…they apparently believe in anatomically correct carvings in Botswana. This carving is wood and is about 4-5 feet tall…and pretty well done.

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Cocktail hour and dinner ensued shortly afterward and they all went to bed pretty early as nobody had really recovered from the time change and long flights yet.

So…an excellent first day and already a successful trip…because leopard of course. They’re far less common than lions are in the area so getting one early on was a prime opportunity they took advantage of.

Interesting things found on the net.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Critters, Nature, Okavango Delta, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

I Can Report Progress

Posted on 2025/09/01 by Gunther

Well…it’s Labor Day here in the US of A so that means picnics and the like…but it’s really just too darned hot (92 and 70% humidity today) to do anything outside although Neil is planning on grilling our dinner (it’s halibut so it will cook pretty quickly after all) but hasn’t firmly decided yet. We’re also having some apple fruit salad but using balsamic vinaigrette instead of our normal mayo and we’ll add some chopped Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and whatever dried fruit Connie picks out to add and probably some nuts again of her choosing. We’ll bake a couple tater tots to go along with that and a nice bottle of chardonnay.

Nothing too much else new here…Connie has her post surgery visit with the surgeon’s PA tomorrow and then the radiation guy on Thursday. She’s still sore some and is really getting tired of it but is just taking Advil and only when Neil gripe at her about it. The pain level is more sore and tender than painful…but it wears on her and makes her cranky and since he’s the recipient of the crankiness he keeps getting her to go take something. She’s wearing the surgical bra they gave her at night and a non underwire type during the day as the wires press right on the bottom where the bruising is. The good news is that the bruising is starting to fade…it’s mostly just brown and yellow now and the dimple she had due to the swelling is pretty much gone.

One thing we think the surgeon should do differently…they should tell you that the first time you look at at post surgery which is 48 hours out…it’s gonna look terrible and you shouldn’t really take that to be anything like the final result. She had a really big depression on first look where they did the whole removal and reshaping thing but that’s because the rest of it swelled up and now that the swelling is mostly gone it’s pretty much not a problem. However…on her initial view…she was super unhappy about the way it looked.

She also needs a followup with the oncologist but he’s going to want to put her on hormone therapy for 5 years and that has significantly eye and GI tract side effects so she’s learning against doing that at this point…but hasn’t had all those conversations with the docs yet.

Neil’s been busy looking at all of his images and is following a different regimen this time. Past photo trips he pulled everything into Lightroom and then culled and processed but the reality is that when you shoot high speed (20 frames per second) bursts you get hundreds of almost identical shots that will never get a second look. That approach resulted in about 33K images he imported from Tanzania last year and about the same from Cost Rica…and true to form…especially since he used pre-capture that I’ll talk about when he actually processes some shots for me…he came home with about 45K images this time. 

His new workflow is to review all of them…he has a new mouse with a scroll wheel which is set to scroll rapidly through shots and he either Selects, Rejects, or ignores every image. Selects and Rejects go into a different folder and he’s been averaging about 3,000 to 4,000 shots per hour of culling and has been doing it for only an hour at a time to prevent eye burnout. As a result…he deleted about 4,000 and selected another 4,500 and the rest were left as non selects. For normal outings from now on…the non selects will just get deleted as well but he’s keeping them around for now since it’s sort of a bucket list kinda trip. He then imported those 4,500 into Lightroom and separated them by date for the trip and at this point will start doing processing and then blogging about the trip on a day by day basis. However…I did get him to process one quickly for me…this is from the first day on arrival in Kasane as they went to the hotel, dropped off the luggage and then immediately went out on a boat ride on the Chobe River.

The Pied Kingfisher is pretty big for the species…it’s about 9 inches long…which is a lot bigger than the Belted Kingfishers we have here. Later on he’s got several other types of them as well including both smaller and larger than the Pied. This one was taken with his 600mm lens from about 20ish feet and 1/4000 of a second shutter speed since kingfishers are really, really quick. He’s got about 100 shots of this individual and will process more of them later but I wanted to have something to show you to whet your appetite for the remainder. The other score for the first afternoon boat ride was a leopard but this was the one he gave me.

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Interesting things found on the net.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Critters, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Surgery Report…And Some News On The Botswana Images

Posted on 2025/08/23 by Gunther

Well…Connies surgery went pretty well…the surgeon got all of the affected area and then did some reshaping of her right breast to take care of the hole left behind. She was in a little pain on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning but has pretty much quit taking Tylenol as of Saturday morning. She’s tender and sore if she moves too much but no real pain at this point. What she does have is a huge bruise…makes the image of the one I posted from the biopsy look small…and it’s basically black/purple. She’s also going to have a scar across the lower outside but like the one on the other side from 40ish years ago it will not be all that noticeable. Swelling is down some today as well…but she still looks like an E cup or maybe D cup on that side.

The remnants went off to the pathologist and she’s got an appointment after Labor Day with the surgeon to follow up and also the radiation guy that week. Nothing with the oncologist yet as he’s waiting on the path report I guess.

So…overall pretty good news and both the surgeon and the radiation guy as well as the oncologist said that stage zero encapsulated calcified cancer cells are 98% curable so we’ll just have to wait and see on that.

She’s a bit emotional about “not being pretty naked” anymore…but Neil told her not to worry about it and wait until the swelling and bruising goes away. She’s really more emotional about the fact that she cares about how it looks than how it looks in and of itself. She had told herself that she didn’t really care about looks in the outcome but discovered when she took the bandage off the first time how swollen and bruised it is and that she actually cares about how it looks. But she’s agreed with the wait and see attitude, especially as it’s looking a lot better today than it was on Thursday when she saw it for the first time. Plus…the lady surgeon only does breast surgery and she told Neil that she had done some reshaping so it would look nice but that it would look not so nice in the interim. 

Other than that…not much new here. It’s been raining almost every day and we’re just taking things easy until she feels better. Neil’s doing his usual cooking thing and feeding her well…and we went out to Longhorn Steak House for Date Night yesterday which perked up her a lot.

This image from the local news rag almost perfectly encapsulates the weather in SW FL in the summertime. It was offered as the weekly meme…but it’s more of a simple truism than just a meme. Neil left to go biking yesterday morning and it was not raining and partly overcast. Shortly after he passed Del Prado Boulevard headed south about 3 miles from home it started sprinkling and by the time he got to one of his bailout routes at Playa del Sol…it was raining pretty steadily so he bailed out and headed back home. By the time he got back to Del Prado it was raining hard and stayed that way all the way home. Connie was tracking him on Find My and opened the garage door so he could come in hot as they say. He pulled off his wet bike shoes and jersey and sat down in the beach chair in the garage for his normal cooldown…and with 7 or 8 minutes of his return it had stopped raining and the sun as shining brightly. Go figure.

Summertime in Florida.

On the Botswana image processing front…he’s got over 50,000 images from the trip…shooting at 20 and 30 frames per second in anticipation of the kingfisher taking off or the hippo yawning builds up a lot of them. But he’s using a new processing technique with a multi button mouse to more quickly cull through them…I’ll give you a brief discussion on that later on but not today.

Although not a wildlife image…here’s a photo the other truck took of Luann, Lin, and Neil out in the bush at the bush camp. Our leader Steve is in the front left seat and these are right seat driver vehicles since…Botswana and Namibia were British colonies and well, the Brits drive on the wrong side of the road and from the wrong side of the car. These are special constructed vehicles based on a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup that gets an entire new body…at least from the used to be cab back. With 3 people in each truck plus the driver and Steve or Rose depending on the drive…clients have easy access to both sides of the vehicle for shots. And since we all use telephoto lenses…we tend to stay farther from the animals which both accommodates the lens reach and reduces the looking down on the critter angle…plus we sometimes hang the camera over the side holding the lens foot and the rear screen to focus and frame the shot to get more eye level shots. Your typical (and much cheaper) tourist safari is mostly a bunch of iPhone shooters and the drivers tend to get far too close to dangerous game because of iPhone lens reach and because their tips are better when people can go back and tell their friends they were within 10 feet of the lions. People like that are more interested in impressing people than in taking actually decent photos…and in both the boat and truck drives we noticed plenty of that sort of guide doing things that were just stupid and dangerous.

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I’ll go into more detail about the places we stayed and what we ate later…but in short the places were fantastic and the food even better. We ate a lot of lamb and a lot of kudu which is an antelope in between the size of a bull elk and a moose…and they were all tasty. They asked us the first day about any dietary requirements and we had one fellow (coincidentally from the Fort Myers area) who tries to be gluten free and they went out of their way to have at least 2 or 3 gluten free dishes at every meal for him…and special gluten free cookies in the rooms in addition to the regular ones that Neil was eating. Wine and cocktails were included and they fed us far, far too much…but a photo workshop is generally a luxury trip so that’s to be expected I guess.

His team Alabama opens their season next Saturday against Florida State then has a cupcake, Wisconsin, and a bye before the SEC season opens against Georgia…and the SEC announced this week that starting in 2026 teams will play a 9 game league schedule instead of the current 8. Each team will have 3 preserved rivalry games every year…Alabama’s will be Auburn, LSU, and Tennessee…and will rotate the other teams so they play everyone in the league every 2 years and have a home and home with every team over 4 years. With the expanded playoffs…strength of schedule becomes an important factor so with 9 league games and at least one power 5 conference game every year that will reduce the cupcakes to 2 per season.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Homebody, Okavango Delta, Travel | Leave a comment

And He’s Back

Posted on 2025/08/14 by Gunther

Hi, Gunther here.

And by popular demand…I present you Neil for some important updates.

————————-

Hi, Neil here. Just wanted to report what I’ve been up to in the past couple of weeks…and what I’ll be up to in the next few weeks.

I just got back…well, actually at 0100 Wednesday morning…from a basically 14 day trip to Botswana for another photo workshop with Steve Perry. Essentially 10 days in country at Botswana and 2 days flying to and fro to get there and back. While I have about 50,000 images…I just wanted to give you a few quick hitters on the trip before turning things back over to the bear.

Johannesburg, South Africa…it’s a long way away. 16 hour flight and another 6 hours time change and while I left Fort Myers at 1700 or so the overnight flight left at 2330 and got into Johannesburg at 2130 the next evening. Luckily…I had a reservation at a hotel literally 40 yards from the airport exit so I went there and crashed for the evening. Next day…we had a 1400 or so flight from there to Kasane, Botswana where the actual workshop would take place. 

While under the label of Steve Perry…Pangolin Safaris was responsible for the details. On arrival in Kasane which is right on the Chobe River…we went to the lodge where we spent 3 nights and had a total of 6 boat wildlife drives along the Chobe River. It’s the dry season there so animals come down to the river to drink and we saw a leopard the first night.

After 3 nights there we flew on a bush plane to the Kanana Bush Camp…which while labeled a bush camp is actually the nicest place I’ve ever stayed outside of the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. While we were there we had a total of 8 game drives 3-4 hours in length and saw a whole passle of wildlife. 

Flying back to Kasane…we went across the Chobe River and entered Namibia where Pangolin has registered houseboat which we lived on for 3 days including 6 more boat rides. The first afternoon and morning were close to the same area we were in before but then the houseboat went about 15 miles upriver to a much less populated area for a couple rides then came back to the original mooring near Kasane. 

We then transferred back to the original lodge for lunch and then back to the airport for the flight to Johannesburg, arriving there about 1530. I stayed in the same hotel overnight and had a nice kudu (a herd hoofed animal about the size of a moose) dinner and then headed over to the airport again the next day for the flight home.

A 11 hour flight to Amsterdam, 4 hour layover, 9 hour flight to Atlanta, 6 hour layover, and 2 hour flight to Fort Myers got me home about 0100 2 days later…and I gotta admit I was pretty toasted.

Of the three places we stayed…the lodge was pretty nice…the camp at Kanana was not only the best safari camp I’ve stayed at but when evaluating it as hotel it’s in second place all time after the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. The food at all three venues was excellent but Camp Kanana was the winner of the three.

Ok, that’s a few quick hitters, I’ve got 50,000 images to go through so I’ll have them up…eventually.

Back to the bear here.

Ok…lemme talk about the schedule a bit. Neil’s going to work on photos but to be honest it’s pretty low on the priority list, Lemme look at what is on the list.

-Connie’s breast cancer surgery on Tuesday, this would normally be top of the list but has been bumped #2 based on schedule.

We got new iPad Pros today…and since we have trade ins they only have 2 weeks. So…Neil work on them over the weekend and get the returns ready to go back.

Then she has her surgery on Tuesday.

In the meantime…he has the following on his priority list.

We’re in the middle of a tech upgrade at home…new wifi…new iPads, new printer (our old one died)…and then finally we’ll be able to work on photos. Neil’s going to try a new culling regime this time…but to be realistic you probably won’t see those photos until September.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Photography, Travel | Leave a comment

The Knees of a Twenty Year Old

Posted on 2025/07/26 by Gunther

Well…things are pretty slow around mostly…but it I summer in Florida and it’s hot and humid and we have thunderstorms just about every day.

Neil is finishing up his preps for a photo workshop in Botswana…got his stuff mostly packed and he’s trained Connie on all the stuff that she might have to do if we have a hurricane in the next few weeks. However…with the persistent high offshore of Jacksonville and the repeated dust storms from Africa heading across the tropics to the west of the continent…those cut way down on the development of storms. Anyway…he’s not all that worried and she’s got people who will help her with the storm shutters if needed so all is pretty well there.

On her breast cancer diagnosis…she’s had her pre-surgery appointment and all the pre-op tests and things are looking pretty good. Sure…it’s the big C…but it’s isolated, no mass, and she should be just fine according to the surgeon, cancer guy, and radiation guy.

Then there’s the knee thing…and this story is a bit interesting.

A few weeks back Neil had his normal routine annual visit with Doctor R who is his primary care guy. He’s a really good doctor…a cuban refugee that used to be a surgeon but reverted to being a primary care guy after escaping the island…but he (in Neil’s opinion) tends to try to solve problems that aren’t really problems.

Anyway…he decided there was some fluid behind Neil’s right knee and so sent him over for an X-ray and after that came back with a diagnosis of osteophytes and mild osteoarthritis he sent Neil to the orthopedic guy. Now…to be fair…Neil has no issue with the knee at all…no pain, nothing. So…he was really wondering what the heck he needed to see the ortho guy for.

So Neil has his appointment with ortho doc yesterday…and naturally they can’t get into the system to see his original X-rays…so they took more. Obviously this is just a ploy to get to charge Medicare more instead of just getting the original X-rays…but I digress. 

Then the doctor comes in and Neil tells him the whole story. He asks questions about pain, clicking in the joint and that sort of thing…and Neil says no, no, and no. Then he looks at the X-ray and Neil wonders why he was referred to ortho guy in the first place. Ortho guy responds that the ‘mild osteoarthritis’ was the reason but then he looked for about 30 seconds at each of the 4 X-rays they took that day and says “you know…that osteoarthritis statement is just a way, way over read of the actual situation. Then he looks at Neil and says two different things…”you have perfect knees for a 71 year old guy that was a runner for 40 years”…and “you have the knees of a 20 year old”.

Neil said thank you…they left…and headed off to date night. After all…it was Friday and we were down south of our normal stomping grounds a bit so Connie got all date night dressed up and we stopped at one of our favorite seafood places on the way home. A few glasses of wine…some steamed oysters…and then some New England Clam Chowder for her and some Shrimp Tacos for him and they headed home.

So…there you have it. Neil has 20 year old knees, a 12 year old attitude about life…and the rest of him is just old feeling. A quite spritely old mind you…and the floor keeps getting farther and farther away…but ortho guy congratulated him on his 2,000 miles a year on the bike, said that’s the best exercise for your knees, and to come see him if there is ever a problem.

Sorry…no images today…but by the next post he’ll be back from Botswana and probably have some for me.

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Medical | Leave a comment

Wow…Going On Six Weeks

Posted on 2025/07/18 by Gunther

So…I need to get everything up to date. Sorry about the delay but it’s been a considerably busy 6 weeks.

My only excuses for not posting are (a) it’s been busy and (b) Neil hasn’t provided me any photographs to share.

So…here’s a brief list of what’s happened since early June.

The biggest thing is that after Connie had her biopsy of the right breast she was diagnosed with DCIS…that’s Ductal Carcinoma in Situ. She’s at stage zero and ductal means it’s in a milk duct and in Situ means it hasn’t spread. The cells are calcified and it’s about a 1 cm section of one milk duct. As a result…we’ve had a wave of appointments…Neil went along on all of them to serve as a second less affected set of ears. Surgeon, oncologist, and radiation oncologist we’ve all completed along with an MRI of both breasts to make sure there are no other issues…and there aren’t, no mass, no other regions other than the single duct. She also had genetic testing and none of the bad genes exist in her so that’s also good news. While cancer is never good…this is pretty much a home run if you have to have breast cancer as the docs all agree. She’s scheduled for surgery (same day) Aug 19 and once the post surgery pathology report she may need therapy. The surgeon and oncologist talked about putting her on a 5 year does of hormone reducing drug…but the radiation oncologist suggested that if things happen as we think they will that’s probably overkill and it does have some significant side effects. She’s researched a bit and is not going to do the drug unless something changes…too many eye, heart, and liver issues for essentially no gain in cure rate.

She had just about the biggest bruise Neil has ever seen after the biopsy…he took a photo and after cropping out all of the important parts she OK’ed him posting it here. I’ll put it way at the end in case you just don’t want to see it.

Neil’s scheduled to depart for Botswana for 2 weeks in 10 days and one thing we were concerned about was whether any surgery would impact that…if it did then we would just have cancelled and absorbed the $15,000 loss for the trip. However…the earliest her surgery could have been scheduled was about when he would have returned and the docs concurred that a delay of a week would have zero effect so her surgery is scheduled as noted above. However…Neil’s been busily doing pre trip preps along with the myriad of doctor appointments and tests and that’s another contribution to the busy schedule.

We also had Bryan, Jen, and Alex here for a week for their vacation…Alex is still a bit picky on food but not as much as a year ago. We had to buy a new air mattress…our one from the Fairfax VA house renovation in 2001 bit the dust so we needed a new one. And Bryan let us know that the guest toilet flapper valve was a gonzo and it was filling and refilling a lot…so we had to get a plumber in to fix that once they left.

In the neighborhood…the HoA management is being turned over from the developer to a homeowner elected board…and there’s been a lot of ongoing controversy over that. Mostly it’s due to the people on the transition committee and the HoA lawyer being incompetent idiots who didn’t bother reading the rules on how to run a board election under both the FL state law and the HoA bylaws.

Add in the bourhaha over the merger of our Elks Lodge with several others…but politics engaged there and the proposal was voted down by 1 vote despite there being no alternative than to merge. So…we’ll probably transfer our member ship to the Punta Gorda lodge by the end of the year.

We signed up for our annual Sarasota Symphony Orchestra season ticket renewals and have also signed up for both the Fort Myers Community Association concert series and the second season of the Florida Symphony series…it took a bit of figuring out what conflicted between those and with her Mastersingers concerts.

Speaking of Mastersingers…the new director decided to have everybody audition…again…(well, only the ones he hadn’t already auditioned last year. She was concerned that it was a thinly disguised attempt to get rid of old people as the new director has added mostly young people in the past year. So…she was sweating it big time but she had her audition and made the cut so she will remain an Alto 1 which makes her happy. However…between her concerts and the 3 mentioned above we will have a pretty packed classical music schedule from the fall through the spring…but hey, it is what it is and none of us are complaining.

Neil needed a knee x-ray…on our routine visit a week or so back Dr. Rodriguez found some possible fluid behind his right knee. It doesn’t hurt and is causing him no issues whatsoever at this point…but he had an x-ray this past week and has a consult with the ortho guy this week to see what the deal is. 

So he’s headed off to Botswana in a week or so…she’s staying home. And since it’s hurricane season here in FL…she needs lots of into on power, water, and assorted hurricane preparations. He’s written her a WHIM (Wife Hurricane Instruction Manual) with all the details on a whole passle of things that need to happen, had her review it, and answered a bunch of questions she had…he still needs to train her on operating the generator to keep the freezer and fridge cold but that’s on the schedule. He’s got anti malaria medication in hand and is collecting all the things needed to charge batteries, watches, laptop, iPad, and iPhone along with the same checklist of stuff he needed for Tanzania last year. None of that is hard and all the stuff is pretty much on hand…but there’s still a lot of checking, gathering, and all that that needs to happen.

And…we’ve even got some computer network upgrades in progress. Our laser printer which is going on 15 years old has started printing really faintly and after a bit of research it needs both a new drum and a new toner cartridge…which total to about $130. So he decided that it was better off just buying a new Brother laser printer for $170 so he decided that it made more sense to upgrade to a printer currently on sale. The new printer needs he needs to reconfigure the local network settings on the router…and that exacerbated another issue. Several years ago…Netgear who built the Orbi Router mesh combo we have issued a software that essentially bricked the ability to connect to the router and reconfigure it. Netgear’s solution is to nuke the router to factory defaults and load the new software (which is now 2+ years old) and start from scratch. Given a couple of factors…the fact that Netgear would rather sell us a new router than fix the old one…and that we now have some devices that work on WiFi 7 instead of of the older WiFi 6 or 6E…he’s going to get a pair of US built Ubiquity routers, establish a mesh, and reconfigure the local network at the house. He’s tested the new printer to verify that it’s not DOA but on return from Botswana will have to deal with both processing the 30,000 or so photos he brings back but also with buying and setting up the new wifi devices, the new printer, and processing photos.

So…as you can see…despite not posting here…we’ve really been pretty darned busy.

Interesting things found on the net.

 

And that’s the only one I’ve got for you.

So…I’m gonna do my usual Cyas in the next paragraph…but if you’re really interested in how big a bruise from a breast biopsy is…scroll down a bit and I can tell you

Cyas.

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Ok, here it is. For scale…Connie is a C cup and the right side is about a half inch from showing nipple (which she vetoed and he agrees). This is the outside of the right one and the actual biopsy incision is under the tape…but as you can see this bruise is probably 3 by 3 inches. And…don’t worry…Connie approved both the cropping of this image and with posting it here. After all…I talk mostly these days about our everyday life and it is what it is.

Posted in Africa, Homebody, Medical, Travel | Leave a comment

Lazy Summer Update

Posted on 2025/06/07 by Gunther

Wow…been a whole month since my last post and I can only blame it on a couple things…life happening, being fairly busy with the aforementioned life happening, and basically no photo opportunities for Neil. So…let’s see what’s been going on.

The biggest life thing is that Connie needs a biopsy. She had annual mammogram and then since she’s got dense boobies they called her back for more imaging…and then they see some sort of calcium things so she’s gotta have a biopsy to see what happens next. No mass visible and she gets one every year so she’s not overly worried yet.

Then there was Neil’s 71st birthday…we went out to Lashley’s Crab House up in Punta Gorda. We had a nice bottle of wine and some Oysters Rockefeller.

We had the annual Elks Conference up in Orlando…Connie had meetings on Friday and Saturday morning so we headed up Thursday afternoon and went to the Hospitality Suites for free dinner and booze both nights. Neil had originally planned on going out to Orlando Wetlands Preserve about an hour east of the Rosen Center in Christmas, Florida but he didn’t feel very good when they woke up so he just stayed in the room instead.

On the home front…we got a nastygram from the HoA complaining that our roof was dirty and needed cleaning. They were right of course and we got that done and also the driveway pavers power washed and sealed and the lanai power washed along with the exterior windows. We had 2 bids…selecting the one that was both a reasonable price and that the vendor seemed professional and reliable. The other one was 2.5 times the price and he and his buddies were obviously amateur good old boys…there’s nothing wrong with being a good old boy of course but overpriced and not professional took them out of the running. Matt and his partner Steph did an excellent job and used their drone to give us some before and after images of the roof. They use a lower pressure spray and some anti mold chemical on everything but the driveway and actually I think they used the chemical on the drive as well in addition to higher pressure. They had a bit of an issue with the sealing…the pavers need to be completely dry with no rain in the forecast for 24 hours and this past week we were in a strange weather pattern with a lot of rain most days on and off instead of the typical summer pattern here of late afternoon showers. They got it done last Friday though…and since you have to not park on it for a couple days while the seal dries and sets we took advantage of our neighbors who are on an Alaska caravan with their RV and not expected back until late August and borrowed their driveway. And as you can see in the before picture the pond out back is pretty low as we’ve not had a lot of rain…and even the post cleaning week of rain only brought the level back up about a foot max.

Before

After

Neil had a checkup with Dr. Warrier…she’s the retina specialist he sees after he needed a little tasering down of a weak spot a few years back. He’s all good to go for another year though.

We’re making progress on the “we have no Elks Lodge” front as well. Turns out that out lodge has some money in the bank but no lodge, another lodge on the north side of the river has no money but a paid for building, and a third lodge south of the river no money but a paid for building as well but declining membership and they’re competing with all of the high end eateries down in Cape Coral. Our lodge management has been looking since last summer but they’ve had a champagne taste and beer budget problem. They lost out on 2 potential places based on cost and too close to a school for an alcohol license and on a third because the plans kept getting rejected. Finally…they admitted to themselves that with all 3 lodges in steady but small or declining membership that merging the 3 lodges made the most sense. This was attempted for 2 of the 3 lodges last summer but both sets of management got into a squabble about which name and number would be kept and it fell apart. So…we’re working on getting a completely new name and number and will become the Central Lee County but until the meetings for approval later this month happen it’s not a done deal yet. So hopefully we’ll have some resolution on that front soon and can move along…Connie will be happy that the Ladies can have Bingo again and I think they’re going to move it to a weekday evening as with our symphony tickets and her chorus Sunday afternoons have been a problem.

On the tech front…Neil’s upgraded all the computers in the house except for his laptop…which just seems wrong because as the computer guy he’s supposed to have the fastest computer in the house and right now his is the slowest. He’s still thinking on what to do…in reality he doesn’t do photo processing on the laptop and has repurposed Connie’s old M1 MacBook Air for the travel computer since it’s the lightest and is more than enough to backup memory cards while on travel. However…since rule number 1 is that the computer guy gets the fastest computer I think he’s gonna end up with a new one anyway and he’ll probably get a loaded one just in case he needs to do some image processing with it. As part of getting the new M4 Max Mac Studio setup for his processing…he’s arranged all the drives so that shifting the Studio Display to a laptop if needed will be a lot easier. 

And on the political front…we predicted months ago…Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have fallen out with each other. The proximate cause is that Musk trashed the “Big Beautiful Bill” as not actually cutting spending and as actually increasing the debt and deficit. He is completely correct…and the Congress and White House are gaming the system to claim it’s actually doing the opposite of what it does. Musks time as a special government employee was about out anyway…it’s a maximum of 130 days in a calendar year…and his companies have taken a severe economic hit with the DOGE and all the other crap he’s been pulling. And since his now named Ship rocket (which used to be the BFR for Big F***ing Rocket until it was renamed) has now failed 9 out of 9 launches and needs major redesign to beef up the structure which will limit both the completely reusable aspect as well as the payload capacity. I think we can take it to the bank that we’re not going to either Mars or the moon again anytime soon…the former because the BRG is a POS and the latter because while the SLS can get astronauts to lunar orbit there’s no landing or ascent vehicle going to be available anytime soon.

Neil actually got a couple of images for me yesterday…we had a Green Heron earlier in the week but it didn’t stay long enough for a photo. We’ve had a couple of off and on appearances by a pair of female Mallard Ducks but they usually leave before the light gets enough to get a photo. Yesterday we had a couple of Black Bellied Whistling Ducks which we’ve never seen before and there was enough light for him to actually get a few shots. The genders look the same so no idea whether these are male or female…but since they mate for life a male/female pair is the most likely.

Black Bellied Whistling Ducks

20250606 Z8 LPR 1079.

20250606 Z8 LPR 1061.

If they had been flying you could see the white wing bar on the leading edges of the wings…they’re the only species of whistling duck with the bar. This image is from Wikipedia.

Interesting things found on the net.

Everybody knows that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America even though the Indians already knew it was here and he was lost and looking for the Orient anyway. But back then European ships were pretty small. The smaller model in the image below is of one of Columbus’s ships from 1492 while the larger one is the flagship of the Chinese Admiral Zheng He who lived from 1371-1434. The Chinese had a whole bunch of far larger ships than European navies did at the time.

Zheng He vs Columbus.

Over in the Swiss Alps there used to be a village named Blatten south of the capital Bern…emphasis on the used to be. It was famous for the views of the large Birch Glacier on the mountain overlooking the valley. Well…the government figured out that a landslide was likely to happen so they evacuated the entire population…and it was a good thing they did. Here’s a shot of the before and after of the village.

Swiss Landslide.

And finally…a little math nerdery. You’ll need a calculator this one so grab your phone and check it out.

Phone Number Trick.

Pretty cool, eh?

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Homebody, Medical, Technology, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Multitudinous Tech Upgrades

Posted on 2025/05/04 by Gunther

Well…we been doing a lot of that lately…upgrading tech. As I discussed a month or two back…Neil had to get a new higher capacity RAID array for the photo processing machine back in the office but then we needed to do some more.

It started with Connie’s laptop…a 4+ year old M1 MacBook Air…the drive was getting pretty close to full and it’s not upgradeable internally so it was time for a new one. So…he ordered her a new M4 MacBook Air which is about the same size and weight but he got her a much bigger drive. She was sort of bummed that the Rose Gold color she had is no longer available but opted for the silver blue color option.

But ya know…the IT guy can’t let anybody have the best computer in the house…no sireee…that just can’t be allowed to happen. So…he did some thinking and his original idea was to get a new high end laptop for himself and photo processing on it instead of the desktop back in the office…he would carry it back there and use the big display of course. But then he figgered out a couple issues with that plan. First off…the desktop would need to stay around since it does other stuff; it’s the home file server, print server, scanner server and laptop backup destination. And besides that…he would have to carry his laptop back and forth every time he wanted to do something photo wise. So…idea one was out of the running; but then we got into that whole tariff thing from the clown car circus in DC and that’s gonna make prices go up when they’re fully implemented. Now we don’t need new iPhones, iPads, or watches as they’re still fairly new…but the photo processing machine and his laptop are both again 4 years old and while still reasonably quick they’re no longer the speed demons on the block. 

So he ended up ordering a new Studio desktop with the M4 Max chip which is quite an upgrade to the M1 Max in the old one and got the all setup and running. He adde a new multifunction mouse to make it easier to cull photos and pick the keepers for processing as well. The only thing left to upgrade his laptop and he’s picked out what he wants and will get it on order this week.

When he was ordering Connie’s new laptop he looked at the trade in value of the old one and it was just under 200 bucks…so they got to thinking and he ended up repurposing her old one as the travel laptop. Yeah…the drive isn’t big but since he doesn’t really do photo processing when they’re traveling but just needs it to run the camera memory card backups to a couple of small external SSDs anyway…and since it is a couple pounds lighter than his higher end laptop it will be much easier to schlep around on traveling excursions. He went ahead and set up both of their email accounts on it and they’ll be happy to have a lighter electronics bag on future trips.

Lemme see…what else is going on. It’s getting into summer down here and we are running the A/C most of the time. For the next month or so we will be able to open up for a few hours most mornings as long as temp and humidity outside allows but probably by June we’ll be closed up for the summer. 

And the idiots up in DC on both sides are just continuing to be…idiots. Looks like Connie and Neil were right back before the election last year…we were screwed no matter who won.

Neil hasn’t been on any photo trips lately…but he did want to test out the new image processing hardware as well as some notable improvements in the Lightroom software he uses to manage and edit photos…so I had him put together a few edits on some of last year and early this year’s outings.

These first two are a pair that he printed up and donated to Connie’s Florida Ladies of Elks Chance Auction at the upcoming convention in Orlando…they printed up nicely on our Epson EcoTank 8550 printer at 13 by 19 inches. First is the Richibucto Lighthouse up in Canuckistan just after dawn from their trip up there in the RV and the second is a Bull Elk in the Madison River that parallels the road coming in from West Yellowstone where they parked their RV when they were up there several times. Again…taken right after dawn so wonderful morning light…and hey, it’s an Elk so it will likely go down well at an Elks function.

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Kildeer from out back of the lanai.

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A few from Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary and Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive this year.

Male Redwinged Blackbird

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Golden slippered Snow Egret in his breeding finest to…ahem…attract the ladies.

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He converted this one to B&W and heightened up the contrast…there isn’t much color in it anyway but the tones and shapes appeal to him.

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Great Blue Heron with breakfast…one of Connie’s shots.

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Reddish Egret using his patented sunshade fishing technique…and again in breeding plumage.

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Goshawk in Serengeti.

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Lilac Breasted Roller.

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Giraffe…one in color and the second in what’s known as High Key.

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Northern Shrike.

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Prototypical African safari image…acacia tree with a storm in the background early in the morning he thinks (although it could be late in the afternoon, he can’t remember)

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And a few from the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica last summer.

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Connie got the one from their room in the resort.

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Capuchin monkey…note the use of the prehensile tail in the second as they crawl through the trees.

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Interesting things found on the net…and you have to be a geek for this one.

For the non geeks…Schrödinger was the physicist that came up with the quantum mechanics theory that if you put a cat in the box and could not observe it then it could be either alive or dead and you could only know by observing it which would possibly change it’s alive/dead state…he did this as an illustration of one of those quantum mechanics things. Heisenberg was another quantum mechanics physicist who came with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Theory which says you can either know the precise location of the quantum particle or its velocity but that it is impossible to know both.

Like I said…ya gotta be a geek for it to make sense. Both of those theories have been proven correct as quantum mechanics physics advanced.

Cyas.

 

 

Posted in Africa, Costa Rica, Critters, Technology, WIldlife | Leave a comment

He Got Done Faster Than I Figured

Posted on 2025/04/11 by Gunther

Yep…Neil actually finished processing the images from Corkscrew pretty quickly so they’ll be down below in a bit.

Not too much else is new since last Monday…we went over to Elks 2742 for Show Me The Money (or Bingo for Dummies as Neil named it) and dinner. On the Elks front…it looks like the place we were going to move into is going to require too much expensive modification even assuming we can get the city to approve the plans so there is some discussion going on that the Fort Myers, North Fort Myers, and Cape Coral lodges might merge into a single new lodge that has more members. Each of the 3 lodges has something contribute to a new merged lodge so hopefully the political considerations that killed our last merger discussions have gone away.

And we went to Walmart and picked up groceries…but there’s a Connie oopsie there. We started doing the order online and pickup thing during the pandemic thing and have continued to do so since it takes us 30 minutes or so to make up the list, pick a time for pickup, and input the list into the Walmart app…then just a quick trip down to pick things up. Plenty faster than wandering around the store ourselves amongst all the strange people that are in Walmart. We still get a few things at Publix that aren’t available at Walmart though.

Anyway…we use these ScotchBrite green scrubbing pads…Neil called them greenies in the Navy…to clean our hand wash dishes and we were out. They normally come in a pack of 6 and a pack lasts us about a year…we toss them in the dishwasher when they get grungy and toss them when they start to fall apart. So she’s going through the Walmart app and found and asked Neil if a pack of 10 would be OK…he said sure and she didn’t look at the price or the details and just ordered them. Turns out that it was actually a pack of 10 packages each containing 6 of them and the price was $45. So…we have now a lifetime supply of the darned things. We always say that we try not to be deliberately stupid but accidental stupidity happens all on its own and can’t really be worked around…but we still have a lifetime supply of greenies now.

Neil’s thinking about upgrading his laptop and upgrading Connie’s Z50 camera to the new Z50II version…she is running on 4-5 year old tech and the II model while it has the same sensor also has he latest version of the CPU chip and the associated better auto focus software including animal detect and eye detection along with a faster frame rate. That upgrade is going to happen and he’s still cogitating on the laptop upgrade.

OK, onwards to photos. The water was getting sort of low down at Corkscrew so we skipped the long portion of the walk out to the tower that looks over the grassland and stayed mostly in the wooded section of the boardwalk and the two wet areas known as the Lettuce Lakes due to one of the plants that is abundant around them looking a lot like lettuce.

Male cardinal was our first specimen just a few yards after leaving the visitor center…Connie didn’t get a photo here because the limited auto focus didn’t lock onto the bird…hence she now agrees she needs that upgrade..

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Flower and bee

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Backlight spiderweb…there was no color in this one to speak of so Neil converted it to black and white as one of those artsy pattern and tone photos.

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Then there was this thing he found…color version first and then a black and white version…again one outhouse tone and pattern images. He actually likes the black and white one better for this particular shot.

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Roseate Spoonbill.

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Juvenile White Ibis…they’re brown and then turn white so this one is an almost adult. Strangely opposite to the Glossy Ibis which is white as a juvenile and turns the black glossy color when mature.

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Connie’s been practicing her panning for catching birds in flight…and this shot of a Great Egret was a pretty decent shot except for the lack of critical focus on the bird itself…that will be helped out by conversion to the new model and also he’s trying to get her to change and select the shutter speed she needs rather than the aperture in the lens as some of the soft focus in this bird is motion blur due to too slow of a shutter speed…she was at 1/320 second and needed at least 1/1600 to freeze the motion and 1/3200 would have been better.

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A different Great Egret shaking water off its bill after swallowing breakfast.

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Snow Egret…started on the log and hopped to the stump and then flew off.

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Gator.

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Barred owl female and her three owlets…these were directly over the boardwalk about 15 feet up which made for less than optimum composition…but hey, ya take what you get sometimes and in the absence of anti gravity boots getting up to their level for an eye to eye shot just wasn’t happening.

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And mom after she flew away from the nest across the lake…then down into the grass to eat something.

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Male Anhinga…still in breeding plumage as you can see by the brighter tan feather tips on the tail.

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Tricolor Heron, sometimes called a Louisiana Heron.

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Juvenile Black Crowned Night Heron.

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Great Blue Heron with breakfast and then a cropped version…Connie just missed getting the toss and swallow shot.

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Another Tricolor…Neil likes the green reflections on the water here.

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Female Red Bellied Woodpecker…the male’s red cap extends all the way to in front of his eyes as opposed to the grey top cap the female has. This feeder is normally frequented by Painted Buntings instead of woodpeckers but they were not there…not sure if the larger birds drove them off or it just isn’t their time to be here. There are 3 or 4 feeders literally less than 10 feet from the visitor center door.

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And that was our day…they stopped by Costco on the way home for some meat to restock the chest freezer, then at the Winn Dixie liquor store for some more adult beverages, and then at the Home Depot to visit the Italian Sausage sandwich food truck there and bring home lunch.

Just one interesting thing from the net today…and I think I may have used this one before. Back in 1911…the Titanic was the largest ocean liner built and this is a bow on view of it compared to one of today’s cruise ships…that isn even the Icon of the Seas which is the largest one afloat.

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Homebody, Photography, Technology, WIldlife | Leave a comment