Home on the range...

I finally got around to getting the pictures of my Halloween pumpkins loaded onto the computer.

The first one is mine. I decided to go with something pretty simple this year. You'll see why a little later.


This next one is Christine's. There's a bit of a story to this one. Apparently, when she was little, this is how she used to draw people's faces. You can tell by the nose that she had an eye for detail. If you think about it, most people's noses are somewhat pointy and have two nostrils. It's actually pretty accurate for a kid. For an adult, as a jack-o-lantern, I think it's funny.

Sorry about the photo on that one. It turned out pretty fuzzy, didn't it? Perhaps my focus was a bit off.

The next one is the reason I decided to go simple on the other two. This one is not actually a real pumpkin, but a carvable foam one my mother-in-law gave me last year after seeing the one I did with my own photo (see my profile picture). Her idea was that I could carve that into foam and keep using it. Instead, I waited until this year and picked a picture with both Christine and myself. I think it turned out pretty good. On this photo you can see the coarse texture of the foam. Just ignore that, please.

I used a photo from our wedding as the inspiration. Mostly because it was the one I found I thought would work. I didn't use it last year on my real pumpkin because I thought Christine's glasses would be too hard to do. And there were a lot of places it would need to be thinned in order to get the proper shading. With a real pumpkin I thought it would be too difficult, but I decided to try it on the foam and it worked great. Of course, my mother saw a different meaning in my choice of photo. She asked if I used the wedding photo because I thought getting married was so scary that the only way to truly express the horror was to carve it into a jack-o-lantern. She also said she thought I looked like Frankenstein. She did not comment about Christine being the bride of Frankenstein. One guess as to who her favorite is.

Here is a photo of all three together.


We didn't stay home on halloween, so I didn't get to hear everyone say how my pumpkins were the coolest ones they've ever seen, so you can do so here. Actually, I'm not sure anyone even saw them. We left for a party before it got dark, so we lit them all just as we were leaving (the foam with a battery-powered light bulb sitting in the window). When we got home later that night, none of them were lit! The candles in the real ones turned out to be duds and stayed lit just long enough to burn the wick down to the wax and go out. And the batteries in my other one had died. I have no idea if anyone even saw them. I was able to get things fixed long enough to take some pictures, and with an extra candle I was able to light them the next night, but it wasn't the same.

I've been wanting to try some HDR photography for a while now. For those who aren't familiar it stands for High Dynamic Range. There are lots of technical ways of looking at it, most of which I confess I don't understand, but the gist of the thing is to merge several photos with different exposures to achieve one image with detail in what would normally be dark shadows as well as blown-out highlights. You then use a tone mapping system (again, I don't understand it) to make it visible on a low dynamic range medium (like your computer screen or photo paper). To do that, you need a computer program. I heard about one called Photomatix, which is pretty spiffy. They let you download a free trial, which contains the entire program and never expires, but it does put a watermark on your image. If you want to get rid of the watermark, you just buy a code (for a seemingly reasonable $99). I haven't bought the code yet, as I just wanted to try out a few things first. Here are the two that I have done (you may need to click on the picture to see it full size).





These were taken in the Book Cliffs on Steer Ridge when I was out there for work a couple weeks ago. I think they turned out pretty well, despite not having a tripod, or really knowing what I was doing. I've got a few ideas in mind for my next trials, but I haven't had time to do them yet. And I'll definitely want to try out a few more before buying the software, but I think I could really enjoy this stuff.

The latest addition to our house came Monday afternoon at 12:31.

Katherine Grace Mathis checked in at 8 lbs. 6.4 ounces (not the 12 lbs Dad was telling everyone) and 21 1/2 inches long. She has dark hair and dark eyes. We can't quite tell if they are blue or brown or a sort of bluish-brown, but they'll probably change anyway. Christine says she has my nose, but aside from that she is about the cutest little girl there ever has been.

Local genealogist, Christine Mathis was recently seen at her home with a suspicious-looking "baby bump." Could she be expecting?


Sources close the family say Christine has recently had a bout of illness that could be consistent with pregnancy; however, those closest to her say that doesn't mean much--health issues are just par for the course for this woman. Detractors say she is merely pretending to be sick so she can skip out on church and go fishing. One co-worker was heard to say "I don't think she looks pregnant. She can't be pregnant." Which makes one wonder if Christine has always been this fat, or if the co-worker is just really insensitive.

Could the Mathis family be expecting a new bundle of joy? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

I've recently been reminded again how few people actually know what our State flower is. To be fair, I think most people know it is the sego lily. (Except for the person I heard about recently who thought it was Indian paintbrush. As a side note, they didn't know what paintbrush was either; they were pointing at a globemallow, but that is a different story.) The trouble is, it seems like very few people know what a sego lily looks like. And probably even fewer have actually seen one, or would recognize it if they did. So, I thought I would do a little educating.

Before I go into a description of sego lilies, let's get a quick reminder about the parts of a flower.

This diagram shows pretty well the parts of a typical flower. Note, the "pistil" is the female organ of a flower and is composed of three parts: the ovary (which contains the egg [ovule] and when fertilized develops into a fruit), the style, and the stigma (the sticky part that receives the pollen). The male organs are known as stamens and contain two parts, the filament and the anther (the expanded part on top of the filament which produces pollen).

Everyone knows what the petals are but not as many are familiar with the "sepals." They are the (sometimes) leafy looking things just below the petals. On some flowers, the sepals and petals are pretty much indistinguishable (think tulips) and are referred to collectively as "tepals."

A couple more important notes. For flower identification, it is often important to notice the position of the ovary. If the ovary sits on top of where the petals arise, we say the ovary is "superior." If the ovary sits below where the petals arise, we say the ovary is "inferior."

One more thing about plants in general. Plants are typically broken down into two groups: vascular plants and non-vascular plants. The non-vascular stuff are mosses, lichens and so forth. Pretty much everything else is vascular. The vascular plants are again broken into two groups: Gymnosperms and Angiosperms. The technical difference is that angiosperms have an ovary surrounding the seed -- gymnosperms don't. Gymnosperms include coniferous trees (pines, spruces, firs) as well as cycads and Ephedra. Pretty much everything else is an angiosperm. The big difference here is that angiosperms have flowers. Granted, sometimes the flower consists only of the pistil or stamen (grasses) but it's still considered a flower. The angiosperms are then generally divided into two more groups: monocots and dicots. Generally, monocots have tepals in multiples of three and dicots have tepals in multiples of four or five (I often wondered what it would be with twelve, but then I found out plant taxonomists never count that high). Monocots also generally have parallel veination - that is, the veins in the leaves run parallel to each other. Dicots typically have some sort of more complicated, branching or net-like veination. Monocots include grasses, and stuff that has leaves that look like grases - like tulips, daffodils, irises, and lilies.

Sego lilies are then, monocots. They have linear, grass-like leaves with parallel veination with three petals and three sepals. As seen below.
Other important things to note are: the ovary is superior, that is, it sits above where the petals arise. There are six stamens, and the stigma is divided into three parts (it actually has three ovaries, but they are fused). Other important markers are the colorful glands at the base of the petals. These glands also have lots of little "hairs" on them, but you can't see that from this picture.

Typically, you won't see sego lilies quite this open. They are usually closed up a little more, like this:

Also, if you look at it from the side, you can see that the flower is a sort of a cup shape, with the tips of the petals curled over:

If you look really closely, you just might be able to make out a couple leaves in the above photo, but probably not - they really don't have much by way of leaves. It's mostly just the flower. Generally there is only one flower per plant, but you will fairly frequently see two flowers per plant. Last week in Brown's Park I found a patch that consistently had three and four flowers per plant, but usually they only have one or two.

Most of the time, sego lilies are white, but they do come in a sort of pinkish form:


I'm not sure what plants are most often confused with sego lilies. They are pretty distinct and if you know what you are looking for they should be unmistakable. However, a few years ago at a ward campout I was with a small group of young men. Another adult pointed out the following flower, and told them it was a sego lily, and that if they were ever in an emergency they could dig up the root and eat it.

This is an evening primrose. Notice the four petals and non-parallel veination. The stigma also has four branches. This is obviously a dicot. Also note that the ovary is inferior, nor does the evening primrose have the colorful glands at the base of the petals. If you were to dig up the root, you would find that it looks like a typical root. A sego lily has a bulb, like an onion or garlic. The only explanation I can come up with for people confusing an evening primrose with a sego lily is that they just don't know what either one of them really is. But now you do.


EDIT:
I should have noted that there are several other closely related Mariposa lilies (genus Calochortus) that could easily be confused with sego lilies (Calochortus nutallii). The only other one I have seen is the Gunnison Mariposa lily (Calochortus gunnisonii). The only place we have it around here is on the higher elevations of the book cliffs, where it is quite common. It has a purplish tint to the petals and a large purple band above the gland in the middle of the petals. It is also a fair bit bigger than the sego lily.