For the next 9 days I’m going to be on the road for a variety of functions. One part visiting places, one part visiting people, one part “last fling of summer”, and one part helping Suzie move to Philadelphia. The car was packed the previous night and the angel food cake, cookies, and fudge were all properly packaged so with two cans of Pepsi Max I headed into the West at around 8:00am.

“How far away is Cincinnati” is a question with many answers. Googles says 10 hours, my GPS says 8 hours, and history says about 9 hours. This time, everything went well and I made it in nearly 8 hours and met Brad, my host, and the University of Cincinnati where his student group was doing promotion as part of the semester kick-off. I helped them clean up and Brad and I retired to his apartment to plan our evening. We had wanted to do karaoke.

Brad: Let me call my karaoke friend. *calls* Rachel, this is Brad. What’s that karaoke place you like? *pause* ok, they’re generally booked a month in advance? *pause* Ok, good know. Thanks. Let’s ask Google.

We googled karaoke near Cincinnati and found one place but on street-view inspection it appeared to be someone’s house. No karaoke this evening. Instead, we took pictures of the University of Cincinnati as the sun set and then took pictures at Washington Park which has illuminated fountains.

UC

The buildings of UC don’t quite harmonize and each seems to come from a different school or time.

The glass facade of the University Pavilion showed but sunset and bell tower.

Almost stock art.

FOUNTAINS

Part of photography is getting a handle on “recipes”.  Certain mixes of settings that achieve a certain effect.  One important fact to me is that water droplets look suspended in air at shutter times faster than 1/2000″.

The above was taken at 1/500″.  Here’s what going to 1/2000″ does.

Notice how the droplets seem to freeze?

On the other end, if you take a longer exposure of colored water falling, the center part will over expose to white and the outer side will maintain color making it look like fire.

This at 1/160″.

When a sheet of water is launched skyward, there will be a moment where it is suspended as a flat sheet.  As it falls, the outer area will experience different air resistance than the center and a bulb may develop.  When this begins to collapse, it kind of looks like a jellyfish.

The last part of the evening was dinner at Adriatico’s where I received what is easily the largest antipasto salad I’ve ever had. The plate was the size of a hub cap and the greens could not be seen from under the massive pile of meats, cheese, and olives on it. The server provided another plate and even after removing most of the meat and cheese I easily had two salads. I’m pretty sure they just threw a cheese and meat party tray through a wood chipper and caught it with a salad bowl. About 2/3s of the meat made it home with me and Brad and I had man time.

Friends of friends are almost always NPCs in my life. They fill ancillary roles as characters in stories or provide a particular expertise in my life and rarely are promoted to the rank of “friend”. Today was my 4th time seeing Brad and I am hopeful that we will reach autonomy.