Veggie harvest amidst a bunny problem

The planter is giving us results.

Thankfully the rabbits were not able to get to these plants. We have been getting tomato by the ones and twos almost every day for the last month and it has been great! We made Okra curry and sambar with home grown okra and it was yummy.

Only issue was that we would collect 2 or 3 okra a day and store it in the fridge and would wait till we got 30 or so before making something with it. Same thing with the egg plant.

In the meantime the bunny problem is reaching epidemic proportions. There are at least 18-20 bunnies around in the bush behind our house and they have a network of holes dug under the fences on all sides so they can freely travel from backyard to backyard.

The railway tracks behind our house has even more bunnies huddling up. I saw a dead bunny on the road on my way to work Friday!  They are now crossing the roads and getting hit.. not a good sign considering they are not as fast as the squirrels. Sooner or later this is going to cause an accident with a person and at that point hopefully the City of Cupertino will act.

High time they did something. I called and they wanted me to pay and put traps for the bunnies and give the bunnies I catch to animal control. Like I have time for that?!

They should put an ordinance on having bunnies as pets and if releasing orphans into the local parks. Bad idea. They give me grief for trying to plant a Eucalyptus tree or Camphor tree but they ignore the rabbits..

Local governance at work!

No thank you

Yesterday we went to a friends house for lunch. I dozed off on the couch in the middle of a conversation and while it is a big "no no" they understood that yours truly had a hectic work week and they let me stay in that state till the snoring got to disturb the conversation (or so I am told). One is lucky to have friends who will let you doze off like that...

Then my friend tells me when I wake up

"When I saw your head after your dozed off, realized that you are balding rapidly. Two months ago at my sons birthday party you had more hair!"

Me : I am not the same guy from 15 years ago when we met.. things are different. Age has caught up with me..or at least my hair. Well, don't care anymore!

Then we come home.. kids go to a birthday party and when they come home the little one does her usual lovey dovey cozying up with daddy who happens to be wearing his white baniyan only and says

"Daddy you have more hair in your kashki(armpit) than your head! Wish you could take some of that hair and put it on your head!"

Me : No thanks. Why are you so worried about my hair when I myself am not?

LO : I am used to seeing you with hair and now it is going away. How come thatha(grandpa) has more hair than you?

Me : Well Thatha was a difficult man to deal with when he was my age. So all the people who dealt with Thatha lost their hair from the stress. That is how Thatha still has his hair and I don't.

Now of course grandma hears this and is caught between defending her hubby or her son. So I quickly divert the conversation to the one topic that is worse than Thatha's hair.. my own hair.

It is only a question of time before I am going to start growing it long and put a pony tail with what is left on what will be called the "ring of fire" a narrow band that goes from ear to ear on the back which is the only area with any reasonable density of hair.

It is just hair..instead of saying "Please let it grow!" telling my inner self something different.

It is just hair..Let it go Sundar.. Let it go!

Call me obsessive..

It has been a hectic week at work but the good news is the cold is gone in spite of skipping Yoga the entire week. Finally managed to go back to Yoga today after an entire week of long distance driving, 18 hour work days and beating a cold.

The kids have recovered completely as well and that is good. 

In the middle of all this, dedicated 90 minutes every night to parallel process work and Photoshop to get 70+ HDR images of the Joshua Tree National Park trip. That was 210+ images condensed into 70 images. Most of the images are a composite of 3 images (a normal, over exposed and underexposed image) to grab component details in bright areas from underexposed image and details in the dark areas from the overexposed image!

Are you with me so far? No?

See the picture below the way PHotoshop does it. I give it three images with -2, 0 and +2 eV and it does the initial superposition. Then I get to work with the slider bars to create the right image, i.e., the way I thought my eye saw it at that time!

Do you see how the sky details are clear in the darker picture, the tree details are clearer in the brighter picture and they have to be ported over into the picture in the middle? 

That way you can see it the way your eye sees it!

Finally the photos are done and have been uploaded into two Galleries. One is the HDR Gallery and the other one is the people photos. 

Have not found a way to get comments into the individual photos yet. Will work on that tomorrow!

The little one who sits on my lap during the editing process encourages me to go overboard on the synthetic HDR look. That is why the previous post had an artificial look for the trees. Guess she wants every thing to look like Dr. Seuss land in Universal studios.. psychedelic colors, too much vibrance, over saturation, less detail.. etc.

Daddy is more into photorealistic HDR. So most of the snaps fall into that category!

Hope all of you enjoy the Photos.