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Year 2010

The Fairy Slipper

Orchid

These beautiful flowers are called Fairy Slippers. They are a native Montana orchid my mom pointed out on a beautiful birthday hike two Sundays ago. Montana has, get ready, thirty native orchid species. This list of all of them has some beautiful photos.

Many people are surprised to learn that orchids grow in Montana. They associate the plants with faraway, exotic places. While it’s true that most orchids live in the moist, hot tropics, they also show up in many other environments. They inhabit every continent except Antarctica and are found in nearly every type of terrain except true desert.

Orchid season in Montana begins in late April, when the first pinkish purple blooms of fairy slippers emerge in moist woodlands and mountain foothills. It ends when the spiraling flowers of ladies’ tresses begin to wither, usually in August.

-From a good essay on wild Montana orchids.

Flipper Bridge

In Hong Kong, cars drive on the left while in the rest of China, they drive on the right. If you’re building a bridge between the two, you’ve got to come up with a clever way to switch lanes without disruption or accident. Behold, the flipper:

FlipperFlipper 2

The only way that could be more cool is if one of the lanes went into a tunnel under the water or corkscrewed over the other lane in a rollercoaster/Mario Kart fashion. Lots more on the NL Architects site.

From kottke.org

Lake Geneva: Video Journal

I assigned myself the project of making an edit of some videos my sister took with her new flip video camera. The edit was easy, the rendering was impossible.

My laptop runs Mint Linux so there are a lot of free video editors for it. I chose to use PiTiVi because it seemed so simple. The edit was simple, but the render was taking hours and hours which seemed wrong to me. Turns out that that software, as simple as it is, doesn’t render flip generated video. So after a few blind alleys I converted all the clips to a different format and edited the xml file in a text editor was finally able to render this thing. Black bars, squished faces, low res. But you get what you pay for. Next time I think I’ll go a different route.

Enjoy the show!

Bannack Relaxing Poolside

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I was out most of today with weird allergy/humidity/wimpyness related symptoms but Bannack didn’t stop for a second. He didn’t exactly LOVE floating in the frog Pete and Mary Ann got him—he’s got that skeptical look—but he got used to it. That was until his big boy second cousin (twice removed?) tossed a squishy football right in there with him. He has a low tolerance for splashing and therefore was out of the giant floaty toad shortly after that.

Lake Geneva: Arrived!

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This year we will mark my grandma Rose’s 90th birthday with all of the Chicago Caseys in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Sara, Bannack, my parents and I flew all day to be greeted poolside by a contingent of cousins, aunts and uncles. In the photos are Gram, my cousin Kevan, her daughter Claire and uncle Bill Gockman and of course my favorite aunt of all time: Colleen.