Everything Has A Price

These beautiful ficus trees that bring visual grace and welcome shade to this Santa Monica residential street aren't without a cost.

There's the water they need, the sidewalks and streets their roots buckle, and then there's the gunky fruit they drop.

Fortunately, I don't to clean the roof of this car.  Though, while I was in LA, I did manage to wash my mom's car with less than a gallon or water.  The car wasn't nearly this bad.  I found an old fuzzy mitt with which to give the car a wet rubdown and some old rags with which to dry when it was reasonably clean.  And the dirty water was gulped up by her thirsty garden.  Drought requires some modifications.  And lowering one's standards of a clean vehicle.   

Photoshop means seeing is no longer believing.  There are lots of good reasons to use PS, such as to join two pictures - as with the top one - or to make a picture more interesting, playful, and/or to make the background less distracting - as in the roof shot.  I always want readers to know whether pictures are straight from the card or doctored.  I never intend to deceive readers with PS.  I try not to assume they will all realize that I've played with the image a bit.  So, except for minor touchups - changing the exposure level a bit or cropping - I'll try somehow to alert readers.  It's also an attempt to raise the awareness of people who don't tend to notice these things, so they'll be more watchful at less forthright sites.

I've got a bunch of backed up blog posts - thoughts, photos, people that require a little (like this post) or a lot of time to get back up info and think through. (Actually, just before hitting the publish button I did double check to make sure this was a ficus and I found someone who took a bit more effort on her ficus report.)  I'll try to put up some more short ones like this while I work through the others.  And some will just fall off the list and vanish.

The first version of this post didn't get pinged to blogrolls on other blogs.  This happens now and then.  Sometimes I can manually ping it and it goes.  A few times it had to do with the coding in the html and I cleaned it up and it worked.  Sometimes I have to copy the post and post it again and it works.  And sometimes nothing seems to work and that feedburner is just slow in getting it out.  That seems to be the case now.