I recently had the honor and privilege of flying with the inimitable Capt. John Shearer in his Piper Aztec for a trip to Ocracoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. I called shotgun and it turned into a training flight. First time at the controls for me and I loved it, it was both technical, physical, important to do right, and tons of fun.  I want to write more about that experience in another post, but had to share this pic of the prop on the right engine.  With the iPhone’s shutter speed, I caught the prop in a sort of stop-action shot, but at you can see, this two-bladed prop looks as though it has six or eight curved whisker-like props.  Very cool.  Everything about the experience of this airplane was cool, stay tuned.

  
I gave Jazz a chance to improvise the color, and added some scratches and a few light leaks.  I liked how the cut papaya looked like a calving glacier. To me. 

Photography, as I’ve said before, is my way of seeing the world in new ways. It is easy to sleepwalk through life and never really look. Taking pictures of quotidian details, the stuff of daily life, really delving into its properties, makes me feel alive and aware that I’m alive. 

Life is short and precious. Practicing a simple awareness in each moment prepares me for whatever might be next.  I am grateful for the good and the difficult. 

This is the way to wake up: a good notebook and the perfect pen. The world’s best laptop. Supremely effective coffee. I truly lead a blessed life.

This is Albert, a kinkajou at the Carolina Tiger Rescue. Albert looks cute, doesn’t he? Like a little plush huggable teddy bear. Well, don’t be fooled. Kinkajous are rated as Level 4, which is the most aggressive and dangerous animals. Lions and tigers are Level 4. If you were unfortunate enough to be in the same space with a kinkajou, it would launch itself at your head before you ever saw it coming. It would attach itself to your face, which it would pull off while ripping your throat open with its hind claws. They are as pitiless as any animal you can imagine. 

Now here is an amazing thing:  people buy these animals because they want them for pets. 

Huh?

Yes. They pay upwards of $2000 for a kinkajou, get it home, and it promptly terrorizes their entire household, if not actually putting someone in the hospital straightaway. 

These are wild untamable animals. They look cute, but they’re not.

Do not ever think of wild animals as pets. Leave them wild, and do not support the breeders who are as pitiless as the animals themselves.  Maybe worse, because they don’t care who gets hurt as long as they walk away with a big pile of money. 

  
You’re not going to catch hackers and “bad actors”, as they’re known in the biz, by playing by nice-guy rules. There are some bad people out there. Maybe they think that hacking doesn’t count as stealing because it happens in the impersonal new reality of cyberspace. I am arming myself to do battle.  

started with this:  

 And applied The Decim8 app to produce these: