Knee high by the Fourth of July.

Or an example of the relative height of maize as compared to the lower extremities of able bodied human beings on the fourth day of the seventh month of the Gregorian calendar.

The wife & I, trying to remember any semblance of normalcy, drove all around the area farms yesterday looking for knee high corn, given the titular colloquialism. To our surprise, we discovered most of the corn was already way past chest height.

After almost giving up on the concept, we found this comparatively stunted crop in a nearby community garden.

The image itself is kind of an inside joke. I have a habit of butchering colloquialisms. Such as “six of one; half dozen of another” in regards to equal quantities, becomes “half of one; six dozen of another,” but still used in the original capacity in a manner of attempted ironic humor.

“Knee high by the Fourth of July” entered our lexicon as “ankle deep on a rainy Thursday in the third week of April” or “hip length on the 17th of June” or “up to your armpits in August” and other such variations of nonsensical meaning.

My wife & I often bat these pseudo-sayings around without regard for our audience, sometimes leading to semi-awkward explanations, akin to the one you’ve just read.

Diamond Head Sunrise, Waikiki, HI. Canon 40D, PS.

Diamond Head, the iconic Hawaiian volcano, is probably one of the most photographed mountains in the world and, as a good tourist on O’ahu, I tried my best to do my part.

From sea to summit, Diamond Head rises 762 feet; fortunately, the hiking trail inside the crater already spots you two-hundred feet of elevation for a modest 560 foot climb over a 3/4 mile to the top. I say ‘fortunately,’ because after the roughly 160 steps to the top and an odd little ladder scramble to the summit, my knees felt like they were made of molten iron, and not in a good ‘molten iron’ kind of way.

But the views from on top were worth it.

Waikiki from Diamond Head, Canon 40D.

Waikiki as seen from Diamond Head, O'ahu. fBHF on Ektar 100.

Diamond Head Lighthouse, O'ahu, HI. Canon 40D.

Windswept Bush on Diamond Head, O'ahu. fBHF on Ektar 100.

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Polaroid PoGo printer & print

Last year, I received a Polaroid PoGo printer for Christmas and with it came daydreams of creating a photo-a-day journal in a series of Moleskine Cahier notebooks….

I never made it out of January.

My beloved new gadget wasn’t what I hoped it would be… instead of being a source of inspiration, it became a major frustration.  So, soon it sat on a shelf gathering dust.

The PoGo is designed to be a mobile printer: a small, battery powered, pocket-size device that could print small 2×3 low fidelity pictures on the go.  A pseudo-replacement for the middle ground between film & digital photography lost after Polaroid bewilderingly discontinued its namesake instant films.

You would no longer need a bulky Polaroid camera with expensive film to have that instant gratification of physically holding a photograph you just captured… any digital camera would do, even your always-on-you cell phone (as long as your device had bluetooth or was PictBridge enabled and had a USB cable with you).

Sounded good enough to me.

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Wildflower in Beaver Lake, Baldwinsville, NY, Three Meadows trail. Canon 40d, 50mm f1.8 II.

A stalled low pressure system over Canada has given us some interesting weather this week.