CHRISTMAS IN DUBUQUE w/iBOOK & NIKON

How cold did they say it was going to be?!

Yes, I'm in Dubuque, Iowa, writing this a few hours before what they say will be the coldest Christmas morning since 1879: the forecast is for 22 degrees below zero! No doubt many of you can brag of worse (hi Tim!), but that's plenty cold enough for me and my Nikon CoolPix 950. When I was out this afternoon taking some of the shots you see below, the camera started acting up in the single-digit temperature: refused to focus, took a picture that wasn't in the viewfinder (!), all kinds of weirdness. I ended up walking around with it tucked inside my leather jacket to keep it warm enough to function.

Back at my mother-in-law's apartment, I hooked up the SanDisk USB Compact Flash reader (powered by the bus, no extra power supply needed), took the Compact Flash card out of the Nikon and popped it into the SanDisk, and transferred everything to the iBook's hard drive in a matter of seconds. A little massaging with wwwART 2.0 made the QuickTime JPEGs fit to post, and here they are. I wasn't going to write anything this week (it being Christmas and all), but here I am. This week when I hadn't promised a thing, you get a picture show on two pages. Woo-hoo!

This illustrates why insulating your roof is a good idea: whoever lives here is heating the sub-zero air outside, or at least trying to! Note the absence of snow on the roof and the humongous icicles. Quite dangerous, of course.

No, not Siberia, just northeast Iowa. My oh my. These pictures are all from the same neighborhood (it was too cold to walk very far). My wife's nephew says that most of this snow will be around until April. He exaggerates, but not by much. . .

Would you believe it, some poor fellow was rebuilding a carburetor on one of these frozen hulks. He kept running back inside the house, presumably to warm up his hands or tools. My 240SX is in the right foreground.

There's probably an easy way to correct for the bluish cast to the shadowy snow, but I'm lazy. Then again, maybe it did look that way. Had enough? No?? Well, I've posted a few more images on page two. . .

John H. Farr also edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past three years of columns (!). John also writes a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM and has an nasty project called Zoozone News that he wants you to visit. On the more benevolent side, over 70 New Mexico pictures can be seen at the ZZN Photorama (more than worth a click).

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