Skyline - Frederick spires

Three shots of the church spires in downtown Frederick. They were taken last Friday near the intersection of East and All Saints streets.

Tragedy near and far

Danny Markham, Marianne's grandnephew, died January 7. He was 41. A memorial service was held Friday attended by many relatives and friends. The service began with the song "Danny Boy" and closed with bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace". There was not a dry eye to be found.

This tragedy was close and personal for us, but at the same time the earthquake in Haiti has affected many lives. We will miss Danny, but will comfort each other within the family and our lives will move on. The people of Port au Prince are in dire need of medical care, and basic shelter, food and water. Many have begun the aide effort and many organizations are responding and can use our contributions. I would like to recommend one for you to consider. SIGN (Surgical Implant Generation Network) is a non-profit organization that supplies orthopedic implants (and training) to surgeons in developing countries without real-time imaging and power equipment. Dr Lew Zirkle (a college classmate) founded SIGN after many years of working with orthopedic surgeons around the world. He got his start in Vietnam treating Vietnamese patients as well as US soldiers while an Army surgeon. SIGN's initial projects were in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. The SIGN team is setting up in Haiti. If you would like to help go to the SIGN web site and donate online or send a check.

This post also appears on Lew's Other Pics.

Word Verification? - 11-th edition

Here are more of the "word verifications" I spotted while commenting on blogs; along with my impression of their meaning. Each one has been verified against dictionary.com and wikipedia. First edition was posted as Round 1. Today's words:

aplaw
dictionary.com - NOT a word, suggested "apolar"
wikipedia - NOT a word, suggested "apply"
Lew's definition: ap-law - cell phone download restrictions

suman
dictionary.com - NOT a word, suggested "saman"
wikipedia - IS a rice cake made in the Philippines; also a proper name.
Lew's definition: su-man - a fast talking lawyer.

byssn
dictionary.com - NOT a word, suggested "Byssin".
wikipedia - NOT a word, suggested "bys".
Lew's definition: by-ssn - bring your Social security number (acryonym used by most places we go since retiring!).

Bonus word
uncentz
dictionary.com - NOT a word, suggested "incents".
wikipedia - NOT a word, suggested "unsent".
Lew's 4 definitions: un-centz - 1. no smell, 2. free, 3. uncommon sense, 4 no centz at all.

And in recognition of the fact that the American Dialect Society has chosen "Google" as the word of the past decade, I googled these words. Here are he results:
aplaw does not appear, but there are about 61,800 refereences to "aplaws".
suman has about 9,080,000 hits.Those rice cakes must be popular and so is the name Suman.
byssn has 1,120 hits. Written "by SSN" is used in searches by using social security numbers.
uncentz has 4 hits, including the person Uncentz Maslowski.

More snow and Photoshop

This image was cropped from a shot of our backyard on the morning of December 19 as the snow continued to fall. I applied auto color correction turning the gray day white.

Then I applied the glowing edges filter making a negative.

Finally, a shift in the blue level of the image and we have a white tree with blue snow.

Broken fence

The old fence between our yard and the farm, early morning New Year's Day.