Chad Orzel's Blog, page 8

Vacation Review Blogging

As mentioned in passing a little while ago, we spent last week on a Disney cruise in the Caribbean, with the kids and my parents. We had sort of wondered for a while what those trips are like, and since the first reaction of most parents I’ve mentioned it to has been “Oh, we’ve thought about that– let us know how it is,” I figure it’s worth a blog post to say a bit about the trip, which the kids enjoyed just a little bit:

SteelyKid swimming with a dolphin, The Pip on a waterslide.

The ship we were on was the Disney Magic, which is the smallest of the Disney ships, and had something like 2500 guests on board (the others hold closer to 4000, I think). It’s got three pools (a wading pool, a 4′ deep kid pool with a giant video screen above it, and a 4′ deep adults-only pool with classy jazz guitar music to drown out the noise from the other two), and two big waterslides. There were also a couple of “kids club” areas in the lower decks, with various activities and counselors to keep kids occupied while their parents relax elsewhere. This being a cruise ship, there were also a million dining options, of which we only used a few– the buffet restaurant at the back of the ship for breakfast and lunch, and three formal dining rooms for dinner. SteelyKid was a big fan of the self-serve soft ice cream machines near the pools, and there were also multiple snack-bar sorts of things in those areas.

The formal dinner arrangement has you rotate through the three dining rooms, but you have the same service team in each place. Our kids are insanely picky eaters, and rejected most of the official menu options, but the servers bent over backwards to accommodate them, bringing a bunch of stuff that wasn’t on the menu. The kids were surprisingly cheerful about dinner, and even sitting around after they had finished waiting for us to eat. It helped that they had some sort of entertainment almost every night, and our waiter helped divert SteelyKid with math-y puzzles (mostly of the “here’s a shape made out of a dozen crayons, move two to make a different shape” variety).

We didn’t make all that much use of the floating day care options, though about once a day we’d drop the kids there for a little while so the adults could shower or otherwise relax. They were pretty cheerful about playing down there, but also perfectly happy to leave when we came to get them. We picked the itinerary to minimize at-sea days in favor of stops at interesting places, and when we were in port we did stuff all together, because why would you take your family to an interesting place and then not spend time with them?

When we were on board, the kids were very happy with the pools– The Pip would’ve been content to splash around in the “circle pool” all day, and SteelyKid was happy to float around in the deeper pool watching Pixar movies on the giant video screen. We also went to a number of the shows and activities– SteelyKid has gotten interested in magic (she’s constantly asking to watch Penn and Teller videos), so we went to both the Magic Dave show in the evening and the “class” that he ran for kids the next day. We also saw a hypnotist, a stage musical version of Tangled, and a couple of comedy juggling things. These were all pitched really well– mostly under an hour of running time, and kind of broad humor-wise but not too eye-rollingly so. The kids also went to see Zootopia and we carefully kept them from finding out about the live-action Jungle Book and The Force Awakens, which were also playing but are probably too scary for The Pip.

In port, we did a bunch of ocean-oriented activities, because we were in the Caribbean for God’s sake. In Key West, we took a glass-bottom boat ride (a bit windy, so the visibility wasn’t fantastic and there were some minor motion sickness issues). In Grand Cayman we visited the Cayman Turtle Farm, where SteelyKid was cranky and overheated but cheered up enormously when she got to pick up some green sea turtles (as the name suggests, these are raised in captivity…); The Pip was delighted by the big freshwater pool. In Cozumel, we went to the Dolphin Discovery where SteelyKid and I did a “Push, Pull, and Swim” activity with the trained dolphins– the photo above is from the “Pull” portion, where you grab the pectoral fins of a dolphin who swims upside down towing you back to the dock. The “Push” involves a boogie-board with dolphins pushing on your feet. SteelyKid was absolutely over the moon about this, and I was very impressed with how well the whole thing was run (I did a “swim with dolphins” thing years and years ago up in the Florida Keys, which was much seedier). The Pip wasn’t old enough to swim with dolphins (and isn’t quite comfortable enough in the water yet to really enjoy it), but cheerfully passed an hour or two fighting imaginary crimes in the freshwater pool at the park.

The last stop was “Castaway Cay,” which is Disney’s corporate island in the Bahamas, seen in the “featured image” up top and here for those reading via RSS or too lazy to scroll up and back down:

Disney’s Castaway Cay, from the balcony of our stateroom on the ship.

There’s a nice sandy beach with three inlets; the first is for boat rentals, the second swimming and snorkeling, and the third has a water slide platform that we never did get to. SteelyKid wanted to try snorkeling, so she and I rented gear (my parents brought their own gear) and got in the water. The first attempt was only moderately cool– we saw a big red snapper and a stingray (she climbed onto my back while we were swimming above the ray, and peeked at it around my shoulder). After lunch, she wanted to go again, which is when we discovered all the stuff they sank in the lagoon for people to look at (character statues, fake boats, and lots of big pots and urns), and ended up spending more than an hour in the water, going from one end of the beach (just behind the buildings in the front right of the picture) to the other (by the buildings in the back middle) by way of the lifeguard stand just left of the center. Grandpa and I gave SteelyKid occasional breaks by letting her hang on our shoulders, and we saw a huge array of fish- not much coral, because the lagoon is artificial and of recent origin– but there were snappers and angelfish and blue tang and parrotfish and at the end of the swim two good-sized green turtles. Again, she was over the moon excited about the whole thing, so there will definitely be more snorkeling trips in our future.

(That kid has stamina like you wouldn’t believe– after all that swimming, I could hardly walk, but she was running and splashing and then she and The Pip went down the waterslide on the ship ten times while Kate and I were packing up the room…)

There were some suboptimal aspects, of course– the wifi on the ship was expensive and metered in a way that seemed to us to be massively overcounting the bandwidth Kate and I used. The on-board phones were pretty bad– old-school texting with a phone keyboard, but they didn’t always work– and the chat function of the Disney cruise app was awful– messages were routinely delayed, and after a couple of days it developed a bug where every time we would reconnect to the wi-fi, it would blort out a couple dozen old messages from the second day of the trip. And there were some issues with the sheer number of people on board– the pools got very crowded during the at-sea days, at a level that was frankly pretty scary when The Pip decided he wanted to “glide” from one adult to another in the deeper pool on one at-sea day.

And, of course, that’s the really big issue for anybody thinking about this sort of thing: just how much of other people do you have to tolerate? As I said, we were on the relatively small ship of the bunch, but it’s still a BIG mob of people, a large fraction of them with kids.

While there were occasional displays of, let’s call it “baffling parenting strategies”– mostly involving overstimulated and undersupervised children in the pools and on the waterslide– it was actually pretty reasonable. There’s some amount of forced jollity pushed at you, but the cheesiest bits were easy enough to avoid (it helps that the “Character Appearances” don’t hold much attraction for our kids– they were mostly happy to look and wave from a distance, and didn’t force us to wait on lines to pose for pictures with people in character suits). You can’t completely get away from crowds, but it wasn’t notably worse than most other activities you might choose to do with kids the age of ours. And Disney as an organization is very, very good at managing large crowds of children, with most of their programming well matched to the attention spans of kids about the age of SteelyKid and the Pip.

In fact, it was probably less stressful than a lot of other things we might’ve done with the kids, precisely because dealing with kids is What Disney Does– they’re such terribly picky eaters that it’s really hard to take them out, but they have a good variety of stuff that kids like on board, and as noted above, they were awesome about accommodating our oddball requests. And all the staff on the ship were fantastically cheerful and patient with kids– one of the guys busing tables at breakfast distracted a slightly grumpy Pip by doing magic tricks, which he totally didn’t have to do, but we appreciated enormously.

This is, of course, not remotely cheap, and we were able to do it mostly because my parents are way too good to us, and bought us the tickets as a gift. Despite SteelyKid’s expressed desire to do this all again next year (if not even more frequently), it’s not going to be a regular thing. But it was an excellent experience overall, so if you vacation with kids and have the cash, I’d recommend it.

And now, I need to try to get back to doing actual, you know, work. And also find a way to reconcile myself to being back in Niskayuna where it’s 50 degrees and raining…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: ARPES, Optics, Band Gaps, Radiation Pressure, Home Science, and Catastrophe

It’s been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there’s a good bunch of stuff on this list:

— How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in condensed matter. I’m trying to figure out a way to list “got 1,800 people to read a blog post about ARPES” as one of my professional accomplishments on my CV.

— The Optics Of Superman’s X-Ray Vision: Spinning off a post of Rhett’s, a look at why humanoid eyes just aren’t set up to work with x-rays.

— Why Do Solids Have Band Gaps?: A conceptual way to see why there are some energies that electrons simply can not have inside a periodic structure.

— How Tropical Birds Use Quantum Physics: Blue feathers on many birds aren’t blue because of pigment, but thanks to the same physics that gives solids band gaps.

— Why Do We Teach Old Physics? Because It Works: We had another round of people lamenting the emphasis on “old” topics in introductory courses; here’s my defense of the standard curricular order.

— How Hard Does The Sun Push On the Earth? In which one of The Pip’s silly superhero books gets me thinking about radiation pressure forces.

— How To Use A Laser Pointer To Measure Tiny Things: In which I use a green laser to settle the question of who in Chateau Steelypips has the thickest hair.

— Don’t Just Talk About Science With Your Kids, DO Science With Your Kids: A simple home experiment, and a pitch for the importance of doing simple experiments at home.

— How Quantum Physics Starts With Your Toaster: A blog version of my half-hour fake class on the “ultraviolet catastrophe” and why Planck needed the quantum hypothesis to solve black-body radiation.

Both blogs are likely to be on a sort of hiatus for the next little bit. I’m giving a talk at Mount Holyoke tonight, which will get me home really late, then Thursday and Friday I’m going to NYC for a space conference. Then on Saturday, we’re flying to Florida with the kids and my parents, and going on a Disney cruise in the Caribbean for all of next week. Which will provide a badly needed opportunity to kick back by the pool, because oh, God, so busy…

213-228/366: Kid-Light Photo Dump

As promised in the last catch-up post, a set of pictures less devoted to cute-kid shots.

213/366: Zone Defense

The superhero-themed “zones” of our house, as defined by the Pip.

The Pip has been making one of his preschool teachers draw superheroes for him. At some point, he cut these out with scissors (or possibly made Kate cut them out), and hung them up in different rooms. So the living room is now the Captain America Zone, the kitchen is the Flash Zone, and the library is the Spider-Man Zone. I’m not sure what exactly that means, but it’s a thing.

214/366: Red In Tooth And Claw

A hawk with the grackle it killed in my parents’ yard.

This raptor was in the side yard at my parents’ house during our Easter visit. It’s not the greatest picture, because I had the 24mm lens on so at to be able to get good wide shots of the kids, so this is cropped down from a much larger image. I think this is a Cooper’s Hawk, because the head and beak looked a little more blue than the Sharp-Shinned Hawk pictures in the bird books I looked at, but I could be wrong.

215/366: Chilly Birds

Birds at the feeder in the snow.

One of the notable events of the stretch where I was bad about photo posting was the most significant snowfall we got this winter. Which of course happened in April. Anyway, these birds were not amused.

216/366: Soaring

Turkey vulture from Thacher Park.

Speaking of birds, we took the kids up to Thacher Park, where the kids were super excited to be on the edge of a high cliff. The Pip insisted on skipping and dancing all over, which wasn’t nerve-wracking at all, nope, no way. While we were on the clifftop, there was a flock of eight or so turkey vultures soaring and swooping just off the edge, and I got some really good pictures despite only having the 24mm and 50mm lenses with me.

217/366: Trompe L’Oeil

My room at the Col. Blackinton Inn near Wheaton College.

A big part of my lack of posting has been travel-related. In this stretch, I made a run down to give a talk at Wheaton College south of Boston (not the one with the big ugly controversy over the firing of a professor who said nice things about Muslims). They put me up at the Col. Blackinton Inn, which had nice paintings on the walls and ceiling.

218/366: A View, Who Knew?

View from the empty field where Sawyer Library used to be.

On the way back from Wheaton, I got on the road early and made a detour over the Mohawk Trail to stop in Williamstown for lunch. Where I went and admired the empty field where the main library stood when I was a student– turns out, there’s a nice view from that spot, which I never knew because there was a giant ugly brick cube there.

219/366: One Of My Favorite Places

The rugby pitch on Cole Field.

Same mountain, different angle.

220/366: Another One

The Science Quad at Williams, looking at the Physics building.

As I tend to do, I swung through the Science Quad and visited a bit with the physics faculty.

221/366: Yet Another Favorite Place

Whitney Point Lake.

222/366: Spring!

A softball game at Union.

As noted in the previous post, SteelyKid is going to be playing rec softball this spring, and is pretty fired up. Accordingly, we went over to watch a game at Union, because it really, truly is Spring, and we do sometimes get nice weather.

223/366: Light

The empty bird feeder at Chateau Steelypips glowing in the morning light.

One of the things I struggle with, photo-wise, is trying to capture cool light effects like the early-morning sun when we’re getting the kids off to school. This one worked better than most of my attempts, as the sunlight coming around the house makes the empty bird feeder look almost like a lamp.

224/366: Failed Attempt

Set-up for an experiment that didn’t work.

At one point in this stretch, I was working on an experiment for a blog post that didn’t really pan out. Here’s the set-up for the video I was trying to make, before I had a problem with the camera that scuttled the whole thing.

225/366: Microscope

SteelyKid’s digital microscope looking at hair on a Lego frame.

Here’s the set-up from an experiment that really did lead to a blog post.

226/366: Height

My height at different times of day.

Another experiment that turned into a blog post.

227/366: Fake Class

The audience the fake class I did for prospective students.

Yet another of the many things I had to do during this stretch: The nice folks in Admissions asked if I would give a half-hour “mock class” for a Saturday program they were doing for accepted students. So I put together a short bit on the “ultraviolet catastrophe” and how Planck’s quantum hypothesis avoids that problem. This is a cell-phone snap of the audience filing in– there were even more people than this by the end, probably pushing the limits of the fire code. It was a fun time.

228/366: Waterfall

One of the waterfalls at John Boyd Thacher State Park.

Finally, here’s the “featured image” from up at the top of the post, showing one of the seasonal waterfalls at Thacher Park. This is, I think, the only actual appearance of the kids in this set of photos– you can see the on the left side, where SteelyKid is climbing a rock. This is the Indian Ladder Trail, which goes down the cliff face, under a couple of waterfalls, and back up on the other side. The kids were super fired up for this, and watching The Pip do the Monty Python knight gallop along a narrow path above a steep drop only took a couple of years off our lives. Fortunately, the three times he tripped over rocks and faceplanted all took place in the park at the top…

And that brings us just about up to the present.

198-212/366: Kid-Centric Photo Dump

A bunch of stuff happened that knocked me out of the habit of editing and posting photos– computer issues, travel, catching up on work missed because of travel, and a couple of bouts with a stomach bug the kids brought home. I have been taking pictures, though, and will make an attempt to catch up. Given the huge delay, though, I’m going to drop the pretense of doing one photo a day, and do the right number, but grouped more thematically.

This span included Easter, which meant a lot of family time, which means photos of the kids doing stuff. So here’s a big group of those.

The Sillyheads Together:

198/366: Swinging

Swings are fun.

This is on the playground at the JCC; SteelyKid is dressed as a ninja because we were there for the Purim carnival (which the kids decided they wanted nothing to do with…).

199/366: Builders

Power tools plus Lincoln Logs equals fun.

My parents have a mix of old and new toys at the house for the kids to play with, which is why The Pip is using a power drill to build a house with Lincoln Logs. SteelyKid is assembling the plane that the drill actually goes with.

200/366: Climbing

Climbing on the Adams building playground.

I like the dramatic lighting in this one.

201/366: Baking

Helping Grandma make a cake for Easter.

Wouldn’t be Easter without a bunny-shaped cake.

202/366: King of the Hill

Teaming up against Grandpa.

It’s a little hard to see the “hill” in this, but they were very determined to keep Grandpa from reaching the top of it.

SteelyKid Solo

203/366: Move BACK!

Watching tv from the dog’s bed.

This is SteelyKid’s preferred location for watching television at my parents’, and she needs to be told to back up about six times a day.

204/366: Flying Turtle

Whee!

SteelyKid riding her physics demonstration on the bike path.

205/366: Slugger

SteelyKid hitting a softball.

SteelyKid’s going to be playing rec softball this spring (starting in a couple of weeks), so my parents got her some gear for Easter. She’s got a really good eye, and can get a bat on just about any pitch.

206/366: Catch

Catch with Grandpa.

The Pip solo

207/366: Boo!

Boo, Haman!

I went to see the Purim costume parade at the JCC day care, where they did a dramatic reading of the Purim story. Apparently it’s traditional to boo and shake noisemakers whenever the bad king in the story gets mentioned, which The Pip really enjoyed.

208/366: Headfirst

This is totally safe, I’m sure.

Our Little Dude can be pretty daring.

209/366: Building Is Hard

Legos demand intense concentration.

The kids both got Lego sets for Easter, and The Pip worked very hard to assemble his little Spider-Man set.

210/366: Ironic Duck

Quack.

The Pip has developed quite the array of skeptical facial expressions, probably because of my habit of deliberately getting things wrong. These are kind of hard to get on camera, but I like his look here.

211/366: Pipside Down

Wave your legs in the air like you just don’t care.

Sometimes, you just need to sit on your head.

School Pictures

The photo shelf in my parent’s living room, with school pictures of the kids.

Also the “featured image” up top, this is the photo shelf in my parents’ living room, with both the first school pictures the kids got taken, and the most recent of their school pictures. The Pip is very pleased with his Batman hoodie.

And that’s about half of the pictures I need to get caught up, in terms of numbers, so the next photo-dump post will be devoted to non-kid pictures.

193-197/366: March Meeting

I didn’t take the DSLR to March Meeting with me, but I did throw a point-and-shoot in my bag. A few of these are still just cell-phone snapshots, because I didn’t have the bag with me all the time.

193/366: Stadium View

When I checked into the hotel, they told me I had a “stadium view” room on the sixth floor. I was in a hurry to get to a social event, so I didn’t really look that night, but they were right:

Football and baseball stadiums in downtown Baltimore, from my hotel room.

194/366: Convention hall

The primary purpose of the trip was, of course, to attend the March Meeting, and that meant going to lots of talks. Along with a lot of other people:

The meeting area of the Baltimore Convention Center.

The Convention Center in Baltimore isn’t really set up in a way that lets you get good crowd shots, but this gives you a little sense of it. Not only people bustling around on their way to and from talks, but also a lot of groups collaborating on laptops at tables.

195/366: Eromitlab

Just to prove that I was, in fact, in Baltimore, here’s a shot that includes (to the right) the famous Bromo-Seltzer Tower:

Buildings in downtown Baltimore, near the convention center.

This is probably the structure that is most distinctly Baltimorean. And was prominently featured in the sniper plotline of the late, great, Homicide: Life on the Street.

196/366: Posters

No physics meeting would be complete without a poster session, so:

Crowd shot at one of the March Meeting poster sessions.

Honestly, I kind of hate these. Mostly because, as a large and self-conscious guy, whenever I’m in a big crowd I feel like I’m about to awkwardly trample somebody. The March Meeting made these easy to avoid, though, by scheduling them at the same time as sessions of talks, and also by moving the time for the poster session around from one day to the next (2-5 on Tuesday, 11-2 on Wednesday, 1-4 on Thursday), so I actually completely missed one that a bunch of Union students were presenting in. Not sure who thought that was a good idea.

197/366: America!

Really, the physics-conference part of these trips isn’t very photogenic, so here’s another shot of Baltimore:

Camden Yards from the outside deck at the Convention Center.

Okay, fine, it’s a little cliche to do the baseball-stadium-and-American-flag thing, but I like the way it came out. And it’s my blog. So there.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Mostly March Meeting

I was at the APS March Meeting last week, because I needed tp give a talk reporting on the Schrödinger Sessions. But as long as I was going to be there anyway, I figured I should check out the huge range of talks on areas of physics that aren’t my normal thing– in fact, I deliberately avoided going to DAMOP-sponsored sessions.

This also affected my blogging, so the last few weeks’ worth of posts at Forbes have mostly been on March Meeting-related areas:

— How Cold Atoms Might Help Physicists Understand Superconductors: A post about the connection between ultra-cold atomic physics and condensed matter, prompted by a visit to Illinois and the impending March Meeting.

— Why Physicists Want Their Best Theory To Fail: Another few-sigma result from the LHC got a bit of attention, prompting some thoughts on why everyone is so anxious for the Standard Model to break.

— Why Isn’t The Biggest Conference In Physics More Popular? Money. Dig down far enough, and the answer is always money.

— Soot And Diamonds: Progress And Perspective In The Practice Of Physics: A remark by Jim Kakalios at dinner spins off into some thoughts about the factors that drive the choice of systems to study in physics.

— Physics Will Never Be Over: Most of the stuff I went to at March Meeting was quantum, but the last day was all powered by classical physics, proving we’re not done with Newton’s Laws yet.

As always, traffic to the blog passeth all understanding. Of these five, the one I’m happiest with is “Soot And Diamonds,” which is last in terms of readership, by a factor of two. Go figure. But I’m not unhappy with any of these, even though two were written in airports and a third banged out over breakfast. If I were ever to bang together an ebook collection of physics blog posts, these last couple of weeks would be well represented…

192/366: Springing

One of the surest signs of the imminent arrival of spring is the appearance of these little purple flowers in our back yard in large bunches. I have no idea what they are, but they’re kind of photogenic, so…

Little purple flowers.

Having spent much too long on the Internet, I can just about convince myself that this is really a photograph of gargantuan sculptures of flowers run through a tilt-shift filter. This probably indicates that I need to get out more. Fortunately, I’m off for a week at the March Meeting; whether that counts as “getting out more” in the usual sense of the phrase is a topic to debate in the comments.

191/366: M-O-O-N

Really not a lot to say about this one. Pretty nice crescent moon last night, still had the telephoto lens on the camera, so: this shot.

The crescent moon dropping behind the trees across the street.

189-190/366: Technology

Having done a thematic set of animal photos, it makes sense to complete the catching-up process by pulling together a couple of shots of man-made things.

189/366: Tower

The broadcast tower from the local CBS affiliate.

This is also from my trip to the post office the other day. The tall tower is a broadcast antenna of some sort from the CBS station, which is actually not in the foreground building here, but one behind it that you can’t see. The giant flag is associated with a stockbroker. America, f*&k yeah.

190/366: Ghost Plane

A slightly fuzzy plane through a tree.

I like the way that the thin clouds and a little bit of depth-of-field combine to give this plane a sort of ghostly aspect when seen through the trees. It’s not just the camera focus, because I saw the same effect by eye (which is why I was shooting a plane through trees in the first place). It’s definitely stronger in the photo than it was live, though.

And that catches us up to the present day… I’m solo-parenting tonight, as Kate’s down in The City to argue a case, so I may not have the time or brainpower to edit and post photos tomorrow. Next week, I’ll be at the March Meeting all week, so it’ll be mostly cell-phone snapshots; consider yourself warned.

185-188/366: Critters

Sunday and Monday were wrecked by SteelyKid getting sick. She was actually only really ill on Sunday, but that was highly miserable. Monday, she had to stay home from school, and we spent the day watching the original Star Wars trilogy (which she had refused to watch on two previous occasions…). So, there weren’t a lot of pictures taken on those days…

Since I’m pulling a couple of photos from other days to compensate, I’ll just do a thematic group of shots of wildlife. I slapped the telephoto lens on the camera the other day, and took advantage of the sudden onset of summer weather to get shots of various living things in the neighborhood.

185/366: Woodpecker

Profile shot of a woodpecker on a tree across the street.

I’ve featured a couple of previous shots of the neighborhood woodpeckers, but this was a really good angle on one. Also, it was what got me to pull out the telephoto lens in the first place, so it gets pride of place.

186/366: Squirrel

A squirrel high up in a tree.

I needed to go to the post office a few days ago, and it was a beautiful day, so I walked and took the camera with me. This was probably the best shot from that walk, a squirrel way up high in a tree eating some sort of fruit-like thing that I think is left over from fall, not a new bud.

187/366: Boids

Little birds on the feeder.

We have tons of birds around, because we have a hanging feeder outside the dining room window, and mostly remember to keep it stocked. Most of the visitors are either big nasty grackles, or these little brown-and-white guys.

188/366: Hover-Cardinal

Hovercardinal goes whirrrrrrrr

There are a bunch of cardinals in the neighborhood, and they have both a nicer song than most of the other birds and a cooler overall look. They’re skittish as hell, though, so it’s hard to get good photos. This one was clear on the other side of the neighbors’ yard,and didn’t stay there for long. I got this wings-folded shot as it took off, though, and I like the way it looks like it’s levitating…

So, there you have the best of my recent amateur wildlife photography.