Dave's Journal Turns 18 This Month !!

July 2007

Deb had an echocardiogram today, prep for her knee operation in a few weeks. They let me in the room for morale support. It was a very interesting 30 minutes.

You didn't ask, but .....

"Echocardiography, also known as cardiac ultrasound, is the use of ultrasound to examine the heart. It is a type of medical imaging, using standard ultrasound or Doppler ultrasound. The visual image formed using this technique is called an echocardiogram, a cardiac echo, or simply an echo. "

"Ultrasound is composed of sound waves with frequencies greater than 20,000 Hz, which is the approximate upper threshold of human hearing. Ultrasonic images, also known as sonograms, are created by sending pulses of ultrasound into tissue using a probe. The ultrasound pulses echo off tissues with different reflection properties and are returned to the probe which records and displays them as an image."

"Recognized as the "Father of Echocardiography", the Swedish physician Inge Edler (1911-2001), a graduate of Lund University, was the first of his profession to apply ultrasonic pulse echo imaging in diagnosing cardiac disease......
In fact, Edler in 1953 produced the first echocardiographs using an industrial Firestone-Sperry Ultrasonic Reflectoscope."

My 2004 Subaru passed a milestone yesterday.

Despite that I could not pull over, slow down or stop, Deb handed me the camera and I shot these while driving. "Opportunity knocks only once."

We were out west yesterday at the candle boutique and dropped into the butterfly sanctuary. The highway crosses over this neat bridge with a nice view, if you stop and walk to the center. I did "dramatize" the picture a bit to fit how I felt standing there.

Butterflies in an atrium ...

"It's not a picture of anything, it's just colors, shades and shapes and it doesn't mean anything. Honest."

So I'm on a roll again with this abstract art stuff.
What kicked me off was this book I grabbed out of my bookcase. Written by this guy from Slovenia, and I actually knew him on a photo forum maybe 10-15 years back and we bugged him to make a book of his pictures and he did! and it's been sitting on the shelf here and I revisit it every few years or so.

From IMDB: Blaz Kutin was born in 1970 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Yugoslavia. He is a writer and director, known for The Final Day of Rudolf Nietsche (2018), Nikoli nisva sla v Benetke (2008) and Lara (2019).

His approach was taking macro-photos of walls and trash and stuff and printing them. Made really nice abstract pictures of colors, layers and shapes.

These days I am using a vintage Minolta 50mm macro lens focused at 6" but taking photos of stuff 10'-20' away. What you get, as you move the camera around, is blurry colors and shapes. Some are nice, many are not nice, so you pick and choose the 1 you keep and the 9 you trash.

Maybe it's "Art", maybe it's not, but whatever it is .... I am having fun !!!

Here is Deb and Her Brand New Knee

Doctor says "The surgery is easy - the recovery is harder."

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Before she went to surgery, Deb put me through her intensive laundry wash class.....

Don't ask why .... just smile ....

(Brought to you by the Internet Archive - mankind's video recycling bin.)