Saw one of the most magnificent mushrooms I've seen in a long time, a few doors up from where we live.  Looks suspiciously like the dreaded phalloides variety that will quickly induce liver failure, but I have to check a little more. If anyone has any clues, please speak up:

Now reading Anna Karenina for the first time, dealing once again with the travails of a long Russian novel.  Tolstoy, in this and in War and Peace, gives one a lot of book for the money (especially as this is a free Kindle book!) I hope I never have a book out with so many character names that an index is needed.  This is about a month's project at the progress I am managing, as understanding the novel instead of glossing over it requires some investment of time and effort.  A study guide is invaluable and I printed out both Cliff Notes and Spark Notes to help me.  Another excellent historical  novel is Kristin Lavransdatter, a story about medieval Norway. It is a major treatise, too, earning the first Nobel prize in literature for a woman; in this case, Sigrid Undset.

 

Still home and processing our trip pictures in Lightroom (missing a few deleted by loose canon guards at Reidsville Prison, of course--note the blog before this one).  We have some really good sunrise and sunset pictures from the Outer Banks.  The Inns we stayed in were superb.  The 1812 in Macon was the most gracious and antebellum in character.  In Charleston, the Ansonborough Inn was spectacular with an entire suite on the first floor, near the water and all the restaurants downtown. 

At Nags Head and at Hatteras we were on the Pamlico Bay and well positioned for both sunrises and sunsets. It was The Inn on Pamlico Bay in Hatteras where we were facing the intracoastal waterway and just far enough in the water to see both sunrises and sunsets.  I had to use a Singh-Ray reverse filter for these.  These kinds of filters are indispensable: http://www.singh-ray.com/reversegrads.html

This is an in-camera panorama sunrise (Fuji X-E1) with a Zeiss 12/2.8 lens taken at about 6 AM after the first night. The morning colors were awsome, which apparently is common here:

And, how about this one.  Actually, all I had with me was this 12mm wideangle, which, however, is so sharp one can crop numerous single photos out of one frame.  Double click any picture to enlarge:

And about the same time, looking away from the sun and the one below that from our back view:

This one is a the front view of the Pamlico Bay Inn:

Here are a few more of the general area of the Inn.  They have a superb location for these photos:

Here is one at Nags Head, next day from Hatteras. This sunrise was taken from the 5th floor balcony of a hotel on the beach:

We had a nightmare situation this past Sunday. We were driving by Reidsville Prison in Georgia and a little way past the gate, Helen pulled over to download some OnStar instructions. Just as Helen was starting off, a most obnoxious and threatening woman guard in a prison van with a lightbar on top drove up from behind and blocked us from going then came to the car and in an extremely confrontational voice asked what we were doing. Helen tried to explain we were headed to Beaufort and we were setting our navigation, but it was futile and we were blocked for about a half hour. She made a big deal of calling in our license plate and waiting for an answer. She asked if we had cameras. I said yes. She asked if I took any pictures going by. I said, well yes, I have taken pictures of things along the way every since we left Virginia. She said we broke the law, that "you can't take pictures of institutions!" She said also that we were in a "Restricted area" but there were no signs of any kind along the road and no signs prohibiting parking, even. This got worse and worse when another guard supervisor came out and blocked us behind as well, and that guard demanded my camera and incredibly, started punching buttons on my camera, deleting my pictures. The woman kept trying to provoke us and she looked like she would bludgeon us to death if we made the slightest protest. This was the most horrible encounter I have every had even counting wartime in Vietnam as we felt we were about to be tasered, shot, or beaten to death. After they deleted the pictures that they chose, the sergeant said we could go but we were still boxed in and Helen had to pull up and back up about a dozen times while the woman smirked and grinned at the other guard at her difficulty, then the woman, who had to have the last word, went even more extreme and said we could not proceed east and ordered Helen to turn around. Her supervisor acted scared to even countermand her, but I suppose finally figured that maybe that was not a really great idea and actually did overrule her, the first and only time. Being a public highway, making this kind of Nazi encounter from nothing but me taking a few pictures was utterly ridiculous, but that didn't faze these two sociopaths who apparently are given full rein to make up their own rules. Finally we got out with our skins and I am filing a violent protest with the state. Amazingly, we were not asked about guns or weapons, only cameras, as if cameras are the most feared things of all. I called the prison the next day and did get confirmation that they should not have questioned or removed our pictures and I am expecting written apologies, but until I get them I have a letter prepared to send to the governor of Georgia about his Orwellian nightmare. The most damaging encounter to a public image of any government operation that possibly could have been done was done in a short time by these two. We were treated like escapees, not members of an up to now supportive public. I cringe to think of what it must be like as a prisoner in that place.

Many thanks to Chip Deyerle for his review of my book, Full Moon Saturday Night that he did on Amazon. I had just read Chip's book, Last Train From Cleveland,  and I am equally impressed. His account of not only the travails of steam railroading in the 1920's but the state of medical science back then really comes home to me. I remember the trains back then, the Dixie Flyer racing down the tracks on the west side of Highway 41 into Evansville, Indiana when I was a kid, an what a spectacle it was! Those trains were the 747's of today. It was all steam back then and all very exciting. What we take for granted now about medical care is also a huge contrast to what was available back then; not much more than three hundred years prior. Anesthesia was the one big advance, but dying during surgery from anesthesia complications was certainly not unusual. Chip's book brought all that back to me. Back at IU in the late 50's, heart surgery was new and it was so scarey to see up close people go into surgery knowing that many would not come out alive, then having to watch the almost unbearable tragic effects on the families when their loved ones actually did die in surgery. That was and is the way ER work is and always will be, the hum-drum routines mixed up with the awful unexpected disasters that strike so suddenly. We interns were the EMT's back then and at the time I felt like I had found out more about life on those Marion County Hospital ambulances in my first week of that duty than I had in all time before. There were no interstates then and on those horrible gunshot, car wreck, and heart attack runs they had to bust up trains to let us through. Later, when I did over ten years of ER work, I stood it for about as long as anybody could and I am glad it is behind me. Now, there are few railroad tracks to deal with and the lights change to green in the big cities to let the first responders through, huge advances since I was growing up.  In Chip's book, Last Train From Cleveland, BL Deyerle, a steam engineer, died from surgery for a goiter. It was a tragedy for even occurring at all, given most of them were from dietary lack of iodine. But to then die prematurely from a post op infection was even worse. A great read and I urge all of you to read it.

I just finished reading a scary book called Prophet's Prey by Sam Bower about the fundamentalist break-off from the Mormon Church, called the FLDS.  Brainwashing and the use of the church as a breeding farm for innocent young girls as wives for the church's elder men while the boys were eliminated from the church and cast off with nothing to support them was a way of life.  The prophet and his ilk living in luxury while imposing a despotic rule and confiscating people's money was described. It is a tale of horror and anybody wanting to learn something of bizarre religious organizations will find a lot to consider.  I highly recommend it. 

Met Chip Deyerle at our local writer's club last night (Write at the Rails in Manassas, Virginia) and obtained from Chip a copy of his most fascinating book about railroading in the 1920's. It is about steam rail travel back in the 1920's and follows the life of one particular engineer.  Trains were in their heyday then. I remember the Dixie Flyer coming through Evansville, Indiana back in the 1940's when I was young and it was always a spectacle to see. It came down from Chicago and went on to Nashville, Macon GA, Jacksonville, and Miami.  It was operated by the C&EI railroad and that logo was on the baggage cars.  The train looked to be coming at a hundred miles an hour down the tracks on the west side of Highway 41 north of Evansville and it truly was a scene to behold.  Big black steam engines led the many cars that followed it and it must have had hundreds of people on it, probably as much as a 747 holds now.  The train terminal in Evansville was an enormous hubbub of activity as were many along the way. 

Chip's book is about one train engineer who after a long career with the railroad developed a thyroid goiter, something handled routinely today.  In the 1920's, surgery for those was tedious and dangerous and this engineer, Chip's grandfather, died of post-op infection. A sad story but fascinating in describing the days and the life of a steam railroader.