Buddha’s Hand in Uppercase and Lowercase

The bizarre plant of the month is called Buddha’s Hand:

Also know as fingered citron, it looks like a lemon that met a creative chief with amazing carving skills.  But reality is stranger, it actually grows this way.

They couldn’t fix my camera, so they gave me a new one to replace it!   Coolpix S8200.   This guy modeled for me on our carpet so I could test out the macro focus:

We had a great Thanksgiving visit with Mom and Dad:

We touristed Antelope Island, an Island in the Great Salt Lake that is semi-famous for one of the few places where Bison were not exterminated by hoards of white men with big guns in the 1800s.  So they called it Antelope Island.  Maybe Bison are like Antelope.  Except bigger.  And blacker.  And less jumpier.

We also had a great visit with the Tim, Sue, and Abby.  Tim plays a mean game of ping pong.  Checked out the frightened yellow ping pong ball in this shot … I think it pee-ed its pants in fear of the upcoming hit (you can see a left a trail of yellow to the left of it):

And Abbey has the rare innate ability to hula-hoop in either direction … took me a lot of practice to be able to do that:

We were all surprised to see that Abbey had a growth spurt and is now as tall as 6’ 2”Tim!  Maybe it was the hula-hooping.

We visited the new Natural History museum.  That guy about to eat Dad is a ancient sloth bear:

And here Mom and Sue are planning a rare gem heist:

Last weekend we went to the Annual Epilepsy conference, this time in Baltimore.   This is taken from an skyscraper observation deck, looking down on the historic USS Constellation.   Those tents in the corner are from “Occupy Baltimore” … I wonder what the 1800’s ship’s crew would have thought of the tent city protest.

They had a science museum with this cool 10 foot globe magically suspended in air with various movies displayed on it:

This was a 200+ tower that made ‘drop shot’ for guns by dropping molten lead from the top into water at the bottom.  Was the tallest structure in the US for 20 years:

In this museum I learned that the term UpperCase and LowerCase come from they way they stored the moveable types used in early printing presses … the big types were in the upper case, the smaller ones were in the lower case.  True story.  I think our tour guide invented it (that part probably not true, but maybe his Dad did):

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the piano.   I took out the keyboard assembly to count all the parts need to make a piano.   Helen was terrified.    

I got up to about 10,000, about 8000 in the key assembly alone, then decided to count the number of lights we can see at night in the Salt Lake City valley instead.   Seemed easier, but I’m still counting.

B