Snow today during commuting hours had me working from home. We only received about 3 inches of the 5 inches forecasted but that was just fine by me. Normally I wait for the snow to stop before clearing it but needed to make sure Maya could get out for a job interview, doctor’s appointment, and trip to New York City to visit her friend Sarinnagh. The house was empty for most of the day and the lack of distractions helped me to focus on a tricky mechanical challenge that my team is working on. This evening I sold Nico’s drum kit which has been sitting idle since he left for college. Little by little we are clearing out all items which will not be joining us when we move to a smaller house at some point in the future. Not for sale is the framed cymbal and drum sticks, signed by Alex Van Halen with a dedication to Nico, a gift when he received the Shane’s Inspiration Award in 2008.

Maya was in a baking mood this evening and I popped into the kitchen several times to monitor her progress. If I had to guess, I would say that Caleb is going to be the beneficiary of her little project.

Most mornings I leave Concord very early to avoid traffic. When I arrive in Cambridge, my first priority is breakfast which involves a one-mile roundtrip walk into Central Square. I have already photographed most things along the route of photographic interest.  This morning I encountered a small addition to the normal scenery that was “barely” visible.

We had planned to move the tiny house to a new winter home last week but the snow made that impractical. With most of it melted, Maya and I readied the tiny house for towing and completed a number of small interior projects (installed door and window trim, and the shower head and toilet valve and some caulking and varnishing).  The house is tight as a drum and quite toasty with the heat turned on.  Neither Maya or I will have time to work on it again until the summer at the earliest and our HOA rules preclude us from keeping it on our property.

Twenty-four hours of rain and balmy temperatures made quick work of the foot of snow covering our backyard and the rest of Massachusetts.  Oddly, we still have a two-foot-high snow drift on the shaded portion of our back porch.

I recently started working with a new image processing program that has a rather nice HDR (high dynamic range) merge function.  The idea is that you take multiple exposures of a scene while mounted on a tripod, underexposing one, overexposing another, and properly exposing the last. The software then combines the shadows from the overexposed image with the highlights from the underexposed image with the mid-tones of the properly exposed image to create a single high dynamic range picture.  I decided to reprocess some images I shot back in 2009 and was very pleased with the results.

Occasionally I spend a little time perfecting my product photography technique. This evening I practiced lighting an object on a white background with minimal shadows. Not as easy as you might think.
 

Constructed in 1902 for a cost of $40,000 the Kensington, located a few blocks from my office, is now a condominium with 49 units. A three bedroom, 1,500 sqft. condo is listed at $1.3M and has a $550 monthly homeowners association fee.  In 2015 the same unit sold for half the price.  To say that the Boston real estate market is hyper-inflated would be a huge understatement.  The situation is only going to get worse if Amazon selects Boston for its HQ2.  At $250K, a helicopter is starting to sound like a good alternative to solve my commuting woes.

The snow banks in Cambridge are several feet high.  When most of the land is used for houses, roads, or sidewalks there remains very little space to pile up snow cleared from the latter two. Below is the mountain of snow that was cleared from our parking area at work.

In response to popular demand, I am embedding the longer version of the tiny house time-lapse video in today’s post.  This is the same exact material from the shorter version but slowed down so that you can see some of the more detailed construction steps.

I was finally able to upload a time-lapse video of Maya’s tiny house construction.  It only covers eleven days of construction but you will be amazed at how much we accomplished in that time.  In addition to construction, you will see visits from neighbors and friends and a “loft raising” party which includes several of Maya’s friends. I prepared two versions of the time-lapse, a short version (3 minutes) which is the most fun to watch, and a longer version (9 minutes) which allows you to appreciate all the details of the project.

With record-low temperatures, Nala is all too happy to curl up in her “dog house,” an antique Japanese palanquin with one of the doors removed. Palanquins were used as transportation during the Tokugawa period of Japanese history, which ended in 1868. High-ranking Japanese nobility sat in the fancy compartments, and as many as six bearers would carry them through the streets.

Snow crews did an excellent job clearing the streets after more than a foot of snow fell in Boston yesterday.  My drive to work was a breeze. The same cannot be said for my return.  A driver trying to negotiate the roundabout at Harvard Square wound up in a snowbank. Had I left work 20 seconds earlier, he might have crashed into me. Fortunately, the driver was not injured.

I had never heard the phrase explosive cyclogenesis before this week.  Now I understand the phenomenon in very tangible terms (think winter time hurricane). We received a little over a foot of snow and intense winds.  Using a snowblower in high winds is an exercise in futility and the best you can hope for is getting 90% of the snow up. Fortunately, I have a cab on my snowblower which made the task much less disagreeable.