The weekly post of extra photographs returns with extra images from familiar places, and delicious food with which I stuffed my face. Let us get to it, then.
This was the reception for the wedding we attended yesterday. You walked in and saw the ice sculpture and then this sign:
Well then, now you are intrigued. They offered two different mini-quiches.
There were miniature pancakes, already drizzled with syrup and topped with blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. We all know pancakes:
Maple-glazed bacon on a stick. This was the hit of the night. I ate too much bacon:
This guy was out of control, climbing on tables, blowing out candles. His grandfather there might be something of an enabler:
And today, the largest moth I’ve ever seen. This is a Promethea Moth, Callosamia promethea. I would have picked him up, but it would have taken two hands, and lifting with the legs:
The Yankee took this one, but it is cute so I stole it:
And now, scenes from a morning ride. These horses were unimpressed:
The Yankee is wearing purple for Elise, the beautiful, beautiful young daughter of a friend of hers who died early this year. There was a “virtual race” today, a fundraiser to help pay medical costs.
It was a nice ride. My legs felt good and the little hills we chose didn’t seem much of a challenge for a change. I spent most of the time thinking of the pictures and videos of that little girl’s face. When I found myself in a lull I remembered how much that 3-year-old loved to do burpees. That’ll make you laugh, a tow-headed baby doing toddler burpees with enthusiasm and giggles. You can cover a lot of ground quickly that way. Over the last few miles it all slowed down and I found myself thinking of her mother and father and the empty spot in their home.
So we rode 35 km in the midmorning sun and that was delightful. Guests came to visit and that was wonderful. We went to the wedding of one of The Yankee’s former students and that was lovely. Beautiful bride selfie:
It all made for a full and rich day of emotion. It started with a banana and ended with brunch finger foods and, ultimately, will conclude with my being too tired to eat a proper meal. But I spent the full day with my wonderful wife and we managed to cram a lot of a day into the waking hours. It was a good trade, even if the horses weren’t impressed.
I made it home in time to watch baseball. It was a tough night for baseball. There was defense and home runs and unfortunate umpiring:
But, hey, a beautiful spring day was before us. The sunset behind home plate and we spent the evening with friends and then we went out to eat with some of them and we laughed until the restaurant made us go home. So it was a great evening and a fine start to the weekend.
The Internet is becoming an increasingly mobile medium, but it appears that newspaper publishers are not only struggling to make the transition, they’re falling behind.
This year, for the first time ever, the amount of time Americans spend consuming media on mobile — smartphones and tablets — will exceed that of the desktop Internet, according to an eMarketer report released in April. Nearly a quarter (23.3 percent) of Americans’ daily media consumption will be on mobile in 2014, compared to 18 percent on desktop.
We get it. You think that story we shared via social media and posted on our website is ridiculous, stupid and far from newsworthy. And we hear you, and we appreciate your opinion. But that’s not going to stop us from sharing it.
[…]
For us, news is anything popular or trending or being talked about. It’s often serious, but not always. It’s often bad but sometimes good.
And sometimes, it’s just plain silly. Or not helpful.
Delores Dennison never went to her high school prom. Times were tough. Money was scarce — just enough for the necessities.
But if she had gone to the prom, Delores might have imagined wearing a lovely dress and promenading through a sea of balloons and dancing with a handsome young man on a crisp April evening. She might have imagined the band playing the Frank Sinatra song, “How I love the kisses of Delores.”
[…]
A few months back, Delores received a telephone call from her great-grandson. Austin is 19-years-old, a senior at Parkway High School in Rockford, Ohio. And he had a very important question for his “Granny DD.”
“I asked her if she would be my prom date,” Austin told me. “How cool would it be to take my great-grandmother to prom?”
But there wasn’t room for everyone. The volunteer firefighters, led by Mary’s husband, Fire Chief Jesse Rager, let local residents use the safe room while they hunkered down beneath the fire engines parked in bays inside the cinder-block station on U.S. Highway 72 in western Limestone County.
Chief Rager, on his way from work in Huntsville, was attempting to reach the station but didn’t arrive before the violent EF3 tornado struck not long before 5 p.m. It touched down at Bay Hill Marina and cut a path up the highway, killing two people, downing at least 100 utility poles and cutting power to 16,000 residents, overturning and smashing dozens of mobile homes and ripping roofs from others.
Jesse Rager said as many as a dozen people sought refuge beneath fire trucks.
“We had 10 or 12 people, some crew members, some members of the public, who took shelter under trucks,” he said. As they huddled beneath the engines, firefighters, including Davy and Dawn Hill whose house next door to the department was damaged, could hear the station roof being lifted and set back down. Two metal bay doors were bowed and a fluorescent light fixture was torn from the ceiling.
When the storm had passed, firefighters could see light in places where they believed the roof was separated from the building.
Odierno said the cutbacks would cause a “significant” level of risk and force the services to assume any conflict would be short-lived and backed by allied support.
“If any of those assumptions are wrong, then our risk goes much higher than it is today,” Odierno said. “And so I think we’re on a dangerous path if we have to go to full sequestration, in our ability to what I consider to do is protect our national security interests.”
“We’re headed down the road to decimating our armed forces, aren’t we?” Shelby asked.
“I think it’s going to be difficult,” Odierno replied.
That story touches on multiple campaigns and missile defense. Let’s talk about carriers and the navy, though.
He told officers that he was pedaling north on Narcoossee Road in a bicycle lane about 7:35 a.m. when a police car turned right at Dowden Road and hit him. The car’s turn signal was not on, he told investigators.
Two other drivers said they saw the police car hit the bicyclist, then take off. One of the drivers said the cruiser left the scene at “a fast rate of speed,” the report states. The other said the police car’s turn signal was not on.
(Days later update: They have two witnesses and all manner of ways to ascertain the whereabouts and possible routes of police officers, yet there seems to be no indication that Orlando authorities have figured this out, which is mystifying.)
A train derailed in Virginia. There is compelling drone footage. I need a drone.
Here’s what I did this month. The red is on the bike, as you can see. The dark blue is obviously running and the light blue is in the pool. The purple is one night of walking around New Orleans. It felt like we walked a lot, so I mapped it and, what do you know: we’d walked a lot. The sport line near the end of the month is from my lake swim.
