Bandelier

Bandelier national monument is about two hours away from Albuquerque. I have been there several times, always liked it, and want to spend more time there, but always seem to have only a few hours. It is similar to Mesa Verde, but much smaller and not as spectacular. Anika and her friend from Mills wanted to go see it and I tagged along to take some pictures. The sun was low and only occasionally hidden by clouds. We were there early enough to get some of the warm colors photographers like, before the sun could not reach down into the deep Frijoles Canyon anymore. You can see the whole set on my Picasa album.

The very fist time I was in Bandelier was in 1984 when my friend Jürg visited there on our grand USA tour. We've had had some trouble with our VW bus and kept getting flat tires. Just as we drove into Bandelier, we had another one. This time the culprit was a set of keys someone had lost. They were laying in the sandy drive and one of them pointed straight up, punching another hole into our tire.
Unbelievably, that's almost 30 years ago! That's when my second life started with a six-month visit to North America, and then continued a few years later with me moving to the USA.

These Bandelier pictures turned out okay. Some of them could have used a little bit more sunlight. For the one above I was waiting for the sun to come back out behind the clouds, but it did so only partially. Taking pictures at sunset is stressful. Should I wait for the light to get better or rush to the next site in hopes that there is enough time to get a good picture there as well?
It was a good time of the year to be there to take pictures. I had hoped for more snow on the ground to accentuate the pictures, but was compensated with a park that had a manageable number of tourists. I definitely have to go back and try again.

Did you know that the national monument was named after Adolph Francis Bandelier? And that he had been born in Switzerland? Another guy from Bern who likes New Mexico ;-) Here is another interesting article about him.
So, this brings us full circle: Swiss leaving their home country, going to Bandelier national monument, and ending up back in Europe. Bandelier in Spain, and me in Ireland.

Christmas

Christmas light display in Hoffmantown Albuquerque

Happy Christmas everyone. They say happy instead of merry in Ireland. I like that better. Merry seems more something out of Robin Hood. Google tried to avoid that whole problem by wishing everyone happy holidays, which some people took as a declaration of war on Christmas.
I view Christmas as a time to be off from work and spend time with family and friends. Those of you whom we haven't seen in the last few days: Peace, and we hope you are having a good time around this time of the year (whatever you may call it ;-)

Making a Picture

We're back in Albuquerque for the holidays and I had a little bit of time working on a picture. Click on it to get the full-size version. I got the idea when Lee Ann and I were walking through a Christmas market in Dublin. An artist had stitched together panorama pictures to create some cool images. I tried to recreate that. It came out okay, but is not exactly what I saw in Dublin. I need to play with this some more.
I started out with a bunch of postcards shown below and then arranged them to solve the puzzle.

Well, actually, I started out with the picture below. I took it last month when I was at Supercomputing. Kurt and I had gone up to Ensign hill park one evening and took a few pictures. Because it was getting dark, I put the camera on a rock and chose a long exposure time. That worked okay, but the picture was crooked since the rock surface was not level. For the picture in last month's post I rotated it and then cropped it. For this project I only rotated it to make the horizon level, but did not crop it. Instead, I put a frame around it.

Then I cut out the smaller sections, added a border to each section, and added a background. This took some time, since I wasn't sure how to get the effect I wanted, and two gigabytes of memory really isn't enough to process that many layers efficiently. The computer was swapping quite a bit. BTW, I use the gimp to this kind of work.

Sunrise and Sunset

Over the last week or so we had some very nice weather. Cold, but sunny and pretty. It just didn't last very long each day. The picture above is around nine o'clock in the morning. The kids are heading for school, frost is on the ground, and the sun is just now beginning to clear the houses across the park. By four o'clock it is well tucked away below the horizon.
This will be the last blog post this year from Ireland. The day after tomorrow we'll head back to Albuquerque to spend the holidays with our kids, but without our cats. A neighbor's teenage daughter is going to "mind" our cats while we are gone. We were discussing whether to activate the alarm system or not. Lately, a lot of house alarms have been sounding off in the neighborhood. Everybody has one because it lowers the home owners insurance, but none is connected to the police. Alarms go off for hours and nobody shows up. According to Dave Barry, the sound of a house alarms is reassuring. If a burglary was in progress, the thieves would have disabled the alarm a long time ago.
There were some break-ins lately around here. It seems one of our neighbors across from the park likes to leave her front door open; even when she goes out shopping. Times have changed. You can't do that anymore around here.

Sometimes clouds are good: a good sunrise needs some backdrop.

Not sure which one of those got burglarized.

Paperwork

Knocking at the Garda station

We have been going to the Garda (police) station a lot lately. Not the one in Enniskerry pictured here, but the one in the town center of Dublin. It is the place where you get visas and residence and work permits. It's a very busy place. We went there twice and were told that they had run out of tickets for the day. The ticket is a number that determines your place in the waiting queue. At another time we were there and were told that we could go in early, before all the foreign students applying for their visas at the beginning of the school semester.

Because Lee Ann is married to a Swiss citizen, she doesn't need a work permit. But she does need a stamp in her passport and a picture ID-type card with her finger prints encoded in the embedded chip to prove that she doesn't need a work permit. On our most recent visit to the Garda station in Dublin we finally accomplished that. I had to go along. It was not enough for Lee Ann to show them my passport.

Now Lee Ann can legally work here. She can also stay here, but only temporarily. As the wife of a Swiss citizen she has the right to reside with me here in Ireland, but that too, requires a form. In this case a residence card. We are halfway there with the paperwork for that, but not quite. The main obstacle remaining is proof that she has taken up residence in Ireland. They send her mail to the house we are renting here, and Lee Ann is responding with mail stamped here, but that is not enough. We need a utility bill that has her name on it and some other thing from the county board that oversees property rentals.

The electricity and gas bill comes only every other month. Given how they run their business, I'm not sure why the Irish government places so much trust in them verifying that Lee Ann actually lives here. It's not like Airtricity comes by and checks up on Lee Ann. They don't even read the electric meter. In many places that is done electronically, and at ours we read it and enter it on their web page. Inspectors do official checks a couple of times a year. Lee Ann and I called Airtricity together on the phone and both affirmed that she lives here now.

A few of those still exist.

It's time consuming at frustrating, but we are making progress. In the meantime it is almost time to pack for our trip back to Albuquerque. We'll spend Christmas and New Year's there.