Happy Mardi Gras!

I hit up my first Louisiana Mardi Gras parade last Saturday - the Spanish Town Parade in downtown Baton Rouge. Unfortunately, most of my pics of the floats were not very good because of where we were standing (it was great for catching beads, though!), but I did wander around afterward taking pictures. You can see the good ones here. After the parade, there were thousands of beads still on the street:



It's sort of like Mardi Gras threw up, yeah? We found lots of good strands on the ground though, and added them to our already ridiculous collection. =)

Here's to a happy & safe Fat Tuesday, a contemplative Ash Wednesday, a fulfilling Lent, and the promise of a glorious Easter! =)

Itching for a change?

Does anyone else out there have Desktop Wallpaper ADD? As in, no matter how much you love the picture on your desktop, you get bored of it quickly and crave a new one? What's that? I'm the only one? Crud.

Well, check out my new one anyways:



Every year, the Division of Research and Graduate Studies at Texas A&M (whoop!!!) publishes an annual report titled Profile. This year, they took some of the images from the report and created a calendar, and then turned them into ready-for-download desktop images. Cool, eh? So if you've run through all 3,115 of those LoC images (which I haven't, but you know, it's feasible...), you can head over and get one of the Profile 2007 ones.

I picked Thin Section, which comes with this description:

A sample of hardrock attached to a glass slide, polished to a thickness of several microns and viewed with cross polarized light. Colors are determined by the minerals that are present. This is a research sample from Texas A&M's Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.

I love the colors, and the way the crystals slant. It was hard to choose though; next up I might pick the mouse neurons (so stinkin' cool), or the 3-D stereo-optic spiral (because I totally know what stereo-optic means, don't you?), or the transgenic cotton plant (again with the big words!), or, well, any of them! (Click on the main page to see the descriptions.)

Hope you enjoy, and Happy Mardi Gras!!! =)