Tucson's 4th of July

We had a very delayed fireworks show this year due to a thunderstorm that pounded the downtown area around 7pm. The A Mountain show was pushed back to 10pm, but that just gave us extra time to find the perfect vantage point. We ended up along Granada Avenue, right near El Minuto. Even though my camera's starting to show its age (and does not do well with low-light photography), I brought my gorillapod and figured it was worth a shot. I mounted the pod in a mesquite tree, forgetting that mesquites tend to be frequented by large, biting ants. Ugh. Got some good pictures and some embarassingly bad ones, and ended up with a final count between 12 and 16 ant bites. Whoops!

Fun with architecture

I spent the past weekend in Raleigh and Charlotte, NC. I was there to visit a friend and take in yet another Rush concert (woo!). We spent Monday at Charlotte's Discovery Place science center, and then wandered around uptown so I could search out interesting buildings. One of my favorites was the Hearst Tower. I'm not at all familiar with Charlotte, so I don't know anything about the building, but it instantly reminded me of the Chrysler Building in New York City (my favorite building in the world), so I wasted a lot of battery power snapping pictures of it. Here's a great shot of the ornate entryway.