Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Random fun things
Turned out to be a fantastic day for the First Flush Festival at the Charleston Tea Plantation. Met up with a few people from the photo meetup group and wandered around enjoying the festival and taking pictures.
This is what I came back with
A tin of green tea, two peach and two of the First Flush to resupply my stock from last year.
Travel pain aside, my weekend excursion to Vegas was a pretty good time.
On the way, there were cool sights like this to see. Not entirely sure where the plane was, but the pilot said we were passing by the Grand Canyon when I started taking these pictures.
Went to Vegas mostly to meet up with Rick and Mike and hang out. Since Sara is in that area too, we met up with her also. We were supposed to be there for Mark’s “wedding”, but he stood us up. We still had a good time anyway.
Took me a little bit to track down Rick when I got into Vegas, but eventually I tracked him down. After dumping my stuff off in the hotel room, we headed off to wander the strip and find some grub. First stop was the Vegas Hilton to see what was left of the Star Trek Experience. The Experience is gone, but oddly enough the Starfleet logo remains on the Hilton’s sign out front.
Then we hopped on the monorail to the end and decided to wander the Strip starting at the Luxor back to our hotel (Circus Circus). Turns out the Strip is a lot longer than it looks on the map.
The next day we met up with fellow geek Sara and spent a good chunk of the morning in the geek nirvana known as Fry’s. After, we decided to go for wings at, fittingly enough, Buffalo Wild Wings (a bit of an inside joke).
The rest of the evening we spent hanging out and talking at one of the hotel bars.
The trip home took almost as much time as I spent in Vegas.
From the SC Aquarium‘s turtle lady:
I have exciting news to share! Recent findings of DeBordieu, 320-pound adult female loggerhead of the Aquarium’s Turtle Hospital since October 2007, have caused us to make some quick decisions concerning her release. DeBordieu is currently producing follicles (yolks) in preparation for the nesting season that is just around the corner. Just in the last week, she has gone into migratory mode with almost constant swimming. She is also completely refusing food. I have just learned that adult female loggerheads have a very small window of mating receptivity. Before and after the small window, the females actually repulse the males. In light of this information, it is very important that DeBordieu get released as soon as possible so that she does not miss that mating window. Mating will allow her to fertilize the follicles and ultimately lead to a productive nesting season. Current water temperatures are in a safe range, especially for an adult animal of Deb’s size.
DeBordieu will be released on Saturday, May 2nd at the Isle of Palms (IOP) County Park at 10am. I hope that you will be able to join us for this release, even with the short notice. The IOP County Park parking lot opens at 9am and parking fees will apply. An extra day will be added to the hospital tour schedule this week so folks can get a chance to see Deb before the Saturday morning release (Wednesday, Thursday or Friday at 1pm). Including Deb, there are currently 9 patients in the Turtle Hospital. Tour information can be found on the Aquariums website at www.scaquarium.org.
The release will be wonderfully timed with the start of sea turtle season in South Carolina. The majority of SC barrier island light’s out ordinances start May 1 and loggerhead nesting begins soon after.
You can keep up with what’s going on with the SC Aquarium‘s Sea Turtle Rescue on their blog.
Had a great time at CREATESouth today. There were some excellent keynote talks given by Tiffany Trent on creativity and writing, and Tee Morris on the “social” in social media.
The keynotes were followed by a delicious BBQ lunch prepared by Andre Pope
Following lunch were the breakout sessions, organised into 4 different tracks: Community, Writing, Media and Art. I started off with the Writing track and Marsha Guerard’s talk on editing, which I quite enjoyed.
Then popped over to the Community track to catch Chuck‘s talk about organizing groups using Meetup.com and Jared‘s meme talk.
Caught part of Kreg Steppe’s presentation on digital photography where he talked about what’s ok and not ok to photograph, and Creative Commons licensing. A very informative session. Wish I had made it in earlier to catch the first part of his talk.
The final session of the day was the discussion panel in the Community track about geographic communities. There was a pretty good discussion about how the media was starting to use Twitter and some of the benefits and challenges in getting meetups going so that people participating in social media can get together and meet in person.
Overall I had a great time at CREATESouth, meeting and putting faces/voices to more people, and came back a little more refreshed and energized than when I went.
The rest of my CREATESouth photos can be found in my photo gallery and on Picasaweb.
A mostly free evening finally coincided with an installment of the Palmetto Acoustic Series at Muddy Waters Coffee Bar so I headed out there and met up with Ian, Kathy and Heidi for what turned out to be an evening full of some very good folksy music. I think I enjoyed the performance by the Barnard Sisters most. They had a fun folksy style that just makes you want to smile. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Hopefully I’ll have more free evenings that coincide with future installments of the series.