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Week 52: Southwest Arrival at KMCI
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The last few weeks have been rather stressful, with several work projects ramping up and the ferrets bringing a big change to our daily schedules. I hadn't gone to an airport to simply watch planes for quite some time. This week I finally made a trip to Kansas City International Airport to see some arrivals from the north. A frontage road provides excellent views of aircraft landing on 19R.
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Russell Stover Candies was founded 100 years ago in 1923. To celebrate the occasion, the company has been participating in several events around its birthplace of Kansas City. I spotted this Christmas-themed van on display outside Kansas City's Union Station.
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Our new ferrets, Mocha and Chai, are quite playful--especially Mocha. Her behavior reminds me of a young child: she will continue to keep playing even when she's tired, and she sometimes needs us to intervene and put her back in her cage. Once she curls up inside, she will fall asleep immediately, sometimes right where she sits.
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We visited a local pet store and rescue to look at their ferrets. This location was highly recommended in the ferret community due to their experience with good care protocols. My wife got to hold two of them, and even after we put them back into their cage, they were still quite curious about us.
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I recently looked at several leaderboards for Super Monkey Ball 2 and discovered that several players have achieved a high score of over 2 million in the game's Expert mode. I decided to give it a try this week. The effort led me to pull off a feat I've been dreaming about for years: reaching the highest goal in the level "Tiers". I ultimately fell short of the 2 million mark by about 30,000 points.
Week 47: Super Monkey Ball 2 Scores
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I've been playing Super Monkey Ball 2 off and on since its release in 2002, including a semi-competitive period from 2012 to 2015. My final scores in the game are relatively stable these days, but every now and then I manage a new high score when I play well. There are a few more tricks and skips I hope to learn soon: my goal is to reach the 2 million mark.
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We visited Magic Kingdom park at Walt Disney World, and unlike on previous trips, we stayed at the park from open to close. At the end of the night, as most guests wer preparing to leave the park, we snapped a few photos of Cinderella Castle. This one was actually taken by a friend, but it came out better than any of my pictures.
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Our hedgehog Kino died this week. He was five years and eight months old, which is quite old for an African pygmy hedgehog. We'd known for a few weeks that his time had come--he was become quite lethargic and wasn't eating much anymore--but he was the only pet we've owned in our marriage so far, and it still hurts to know he's no longer with us. We'd nicknamed him "Beano" since it rhymed with "Kino" and he was shaped like a bean.
Week 44: Brussel Sprout Stalks
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The nearest Trader Joe's is a good drive away from us, but they have many unusual products there which make it worth the effort. One that I'm surprised I haven't seen before is brussel sprouts still on the stalk. I was fascinated with how straight the stalks are; I wonder if brussel sprouts naturally grow that way or if trestles are required.
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We finally got around to making some jack-o'-lanterns this weekend. I'm not the artistic type, so mine was relatively plain. One of our friends, however, took two pumpkins and painted them as Sulley Sullivan and Mike Wazowski from Disney's "Monsters, Inc.". I didn't get a photo of the pumpkins before we left, so she took this picture and sent it to us instead.
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Work and home pressures have been tough this week, leaving me with little time to unwind my own way. A rare opportunity came this weekend when a high school friend invited me to play mini-golf with him. The venue featured a harder adult curse that served beer, lots of challenges to give players an advantage, and lots of dinosaur mock-ups and themed furniture.
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With Halloween on the horizon, my wife's Instagram feed is full of potion bottle videos. This week we decided to try our hand at making a few. I'm not a very creative person, so many of my bottles were simple and boring, but this experiment in layered liquids turned out quite well.
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I've been working from home much more often recently. The change is mostly due to laziness, but after a while I simply need to get outside my house. This week I was sent a list of recommended local coffeehouses and restaurants to work from, and I accepted the list eagerly. One of the recommendations provided a wonderful and much-needed change of scenery.
Week 39: A Very Easy Climbing Tree
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Between a heavy work load and personal commitments, I've had little time to simply walk around a park recently. When my wife had an appointment in town this week, I decided to take a stroll in the meantime. A nearby park had a tree whose trunk was growing approximately 60 degrees from vertical--sloped enough that it was trivial to walk up without needing handholds.
Week 38: Ringo Starr in Spotlight
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My parents, who grew up during Beatlemania, bought tickets to see Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band in Kansas City this weekend. At the last minute, my mother found that she would be too busy to attend, so my father extended the second ticket to me. I snapped this photo of the former Beatle through a pair of binoculars.
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Aside from one recent visit, I haven't been to an arcade since we moved, and I can't remember if I've even played StepManiaX at any point in 2023. We've had a rough few weeks, and I found myself really needing to relax and burn some calories with friends. Surprisingly, I'm not as rusty as I thought I'd be: I got several full combos, including my first Wild 20 FC.
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My wife tried her hand at making apple butter this week, and she needed to prepare more than a dozen apples for the task. She bought this fascinating device on Amazon to help: it peels, cores, and slices an apple into thin spirals all at the same time. My favorite aspect of it is that it works completely mechanically. This extracted video frame shows the device in action.
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The night before we were to leave for an out-of-town trip, we stayed at the house of the couple that had planned to travel with us. Their parents were staying in the house for the week in order to watch their dog. He is often excitable and pretty skittish, but tonight he was just tired.
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One of my cycling trips this week took me to a park I'd never been to before. I found myself in a large field almost devoid of trees, allowing me to see part sof the sky several miles away. A large rain clud greeted me, complete with two separate precipitation columns and a rainbow visible inside one of them.
Week 33: de Havilland DH-115 Vampire N593RH
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I attended an air show in the Kansas City area this weekend, at which I took hundreds of photos with my SLR camera. One of the most special moments for me was an aircraft I didn't even know was going to be there. This de Havilland Vampire was built in 1959 and served in the Swiss Air Force before being sold in 1991, at which point it changed hands a number of times before being purchased by a Delaware foundation in 2022.
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I took very few photos during this week, and almost all of them were low quality or unfit for publication. Before meeting up with some friends for dinner one evening, I took a stroll around a nearby shopping district and snapped a few photos of the promenades. Even those photos turned out poorly; this was the only one that looked even remotely decent.
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My cycling route around town takes me across a bridge over a set of railroad tracks. THe town is rural and very quiet, and when I stop on the bridge, I can often hear trains coming from a mile away or more. No trains passed by on this day, but the view down the open tracks was an aesthetic one.
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Last year I was involved in a Final Fantasy XIV-themed tabletop RPG game. Due to differences among the players, that campaign eventually fell apart. In it wake we formed a new campaign based on Ilvermorny, the American wizarding school from Wizarding World.
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Strong storms hit parts of the American Midwest at the start of last weekend. We were unaffected by them beyond getting moderate amounts of rain, but residual atmospheric turbulence led to more showers and winds for days afterward. Some of the cloud formations were quite striking. Aside from reducing the resolution and applying dithering, this photograph is unaltered.
Week 28: A View of Kansas City
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One way I'm trying to deal with a rough mental state is by cycling more. This week I took a trip to Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport in Kansas City, which has a publicly-accessible perimeter road and is popular with cyclists. The southeast corner of the field provides an excellent view of the city center.
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We stayed at a hotel recently with a strong art-deco theme. The room was inexpensive but well-furnished and very comfortable, though of course we spent very little time there. One of my favorite features of the room was its "Do Not Disturb" sign.
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Over the weekend we were invited to a fireworks show in a city south of us. The venue was a small park with a lake in the center, but we chose to park by the nearby access road and watch the show from there. I was struck by how open and calm the sky was before the show.
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We traveled to a very rural part of the US this weekend to visit a relative. He owns several acres of land in the area and works a full-time farmer. In this field he had planted wheat at the beginning of the year, but a lack of rain caused the crop to die. When we arrived, he had finished planting milo in order to recoup some of the loss. The green of the new sprouts contrasted with the dry, dead yellow of the failed wheat.
Week 24: Grimace's Birthday on SP
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I own several flash carts for various video game consoles. Last month, on the recommendation of a friend, I decided to add a GameBoy Color flash cart to the collection. Not three weeks later, McDonald's announced the release of a new game for the platform as a marketing tie-in. I enjoyed playing the game "Grimace's Birthday" on original hardware.
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While attempting to dump an old Windows 95 drive, I discovered that a pin on the IDE connector had broken off. I don't have a soldering iron or correct replacement equipment, so I did the only thing I could think of: bend a jumper wire pin to bridge the gap, and wire the rest of the connections to an IDE-to-USB adapter. This abomination is the result. The drive still didn't work.
Week 22: Signed Bucky O'Hare Graphic Novel
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I've been a fan of Bucky O'Hare ever since I first saw the cartoon show in the early 1990s. Since then I've dreamed of owning the full run of the original comic run. That dream has yet to be satisfied. However, at a comic show last year, my sister found this edition of the Bucky O'Hare graphic novel, signed and numbered by original series artist Michael Golden. This is an absolute treasure to me.
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I had about two dozen candidates for photo of the week from our trip to England. I consulted my wife on her favorite, and she singled out a photo of Stonehenge, a pre-Roman stone monument in Wiltshire and one of the most famous landmarks in the UK. I was quite pleased with how this particular photograph came out.
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Last year, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the future of the Airbus A380 was unclear. I decided that I would not pass up the opportunity to fly aboard one, so I purchased upper-deck seats on the two-storey airliner on our flights both to and from England. This extracted video frame shows A380-841 GX-LEE arriving at the gate at Chicago O'Hare International Airport before we boarded. Funnily enough, I had seen and photographed her at Dulles just eight months before.
Week 19: Massive Cumulonimbus Clouds
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We now live quite far south of the city center, and the lack of tall buildings means that we can see things far off on the horizon. This severe thunderstorm was several miles away from us, but as I drove home on Monday night, the wall of cumulonimbus clouds above them dominated the eastern horizon. This was one of the last photos taken on my Nokia G21.
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An early order of business at our new house was to replace the furnace and air conditioner inside, which were at the end of their serviceable lifetimes. The morning after the installation, we were awoken by a loud buzzing coming from our thermostat. The displayed message was a false alarm, but it took two more calls to the HVAC company and a visit from the manufacturer's support team to fix it.
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We hired a moving company to help bring everything to the new house--we simply had too many boxes and items of furniture. We had staged most of them in the basement while packing, and the movers brought them up to our kitchen before sorting them and loading them onto the truck. This picture was taken when the room was two-thirds empty.
Week 16: Home-grown Strawberries
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Our new house is located in a rural part of town, with no HOA and very few restrictions on what we can plant. My wife immediately bought some fruits and herbs to grow, most notable among them a pot of already-blooming strawberries.
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With local weather finally approaching comfortable temperatures, I broke out my bicycle for some much-needed exercise. The mild evenings also brought out many flower blooms--and this bench, located along a nearby trail, particularly caught my eye.
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We flew out of Boston, MA at the end of the weekend. As we turned west, I had a fantastic view of the city out of my window. Unfortunately, my current smartphone's camera tends to wash out images, requiring heavy contrast filtering to bring out the details.
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A farm-themed park in the Kansas City area opened for the season on Saturday. High winds kept many locals away, allowing us an unexpected amount of freedom to roam the park. One of the many attractions was a pen full of baby goats--and we were allowed to buy bottles with which to feed them.
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My wife runs a table RPG session for me and some of our friends. While picking up game supplies at a local board game shop, we discovered a small Star Wars AT-ST painted model in one of the display cabinets. For some reason, I don't think Vader or Palpatine would have allowed a walker in the field with this paint scheme.
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We needed to pack like madmen to get our house ready to list for sale. At the end of each evening, all we wanted to do was watch a show together and let our exhausted muscles rest. We were amused to find that Netflix had incorrectly tagged the G-rated "Great British Baking Show" with content warnings for gore, off-color language, and violence.
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A gaming convention occurred this weekend. I quickly ignored the comically-overpriced vintage consoles and used Pokemon cards to visit the game room. A local rhythm game buff brought a Sound Voltex arcade cabinet to the convention, but he decided to run a very different game on the hardware.
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My wife and I went out for breakfast on Saturday morning. While waiting by the front counter for an open table, a little girl and her parents came in. The girl may have been coming from or going to some kind of event, as she was wearing a dress and a plastic tiara. She immediately walked up to us--total strangers in her eyes--and handed us small pieces of blank paper, saying we were invited to her princess party. I knew I had to take a picture to "save the date".
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One of my college friends is an avid home cook and sometimes invites us over for hot pot. I've attended several times, but my wife never had the chance until this week. Luckily for her, this time he prepared quite a spread, including shrimp, bok choy, and pork belly.
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Kansas City International Airport has a new central terminal. Ahead of starting operations, and before even some of the gates had finished construction, the building opened for limited tours for the general public. It was odd seeing a terminal with no open businesses, no airline staff, and no aircraft: observant viewers will notice the empty ramp on either side of the walkway joining concourses A and B.
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I was a big fan of Harry Potter when I was young, so I decided to buy Hogwarts Legacy for PlayStation 5 last week. I tried to pre-order it on Wednesday, but it turned out the local video game shop had broken street date, and I ended up getting a physical copy two days early.
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The college campus I visited last week has a display shelf near the mathematics department office. Among curio such as tangrams and Rubik's Cubes, I spotted these glass drinking cups. Each one describes a mathematical constant and marks that number of fluid ounces in the cup.
Week 04: Beating an NES Classic
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I loved the cartoon show "Bucky O'Hare" as a child. Many years later, I discovered that it started as a comic book series, and it had two video game adaptations. A friend sold me his copy of the NES title, and while I love playing it, the game is very difficult. This week I finally beat it on-console (without save states) for the first time--and I happened to get a 1cc to boot.
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I don't visit the airport nearly as often as I used to, since I now work from home and our house is a very long drive away. This week I had a chance to visit during the day, and I jumped on that chance. It also gave me an opportunity to test my new smartphone's camera on a subject I've taken many photos of.
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A small creek runs through our neighborhood, and a footpath follows part of it. The creek has many bends and curves that erode one bank much more than the other. A prominent example is the soil underneath this tree, much of whose roots are exposed and dangle seemingly precariously over the water.
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I purchased an interim smartphone while waiting for my F(x)tec Pro1 X to arrive. The Nokia G21 is fairly cheap as far as smartphones go, at least in the United States, but it boasts a 50-megapixel main camera. While on a walk around a local park, I decided to test it out.
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