When returning from a recent trip, I arrived on a Sunday afternoon and found Katherine in the kitchen madly drawing this picture over and over again.

 

She was really having fun, and there were many minor variations, but they were all pretty much around this theme. Sometimes they had eyes, for example.

 

Anyway, after a moment, I asked her what the picture was.

 

"It's plankton, Daddy," she said.

 

"Plankton?"

 

"Plankton."

 

...and then she taped them all to the fridge.

I haven't talked a lot about my job and I'm not going to go into great detail here. I'm currently consulting to the senior management of cheapflights.com. The company is headquartered in the Marylebone section of London. Our concern over the situation began, for some, in the wee hours of the morning. London is five hours ahead of Boston, so it was 4AM here when the attacks happened. Our London staff set about trying to make sure that all our employees were safe. Despite a nervous wait, all turned out to be OK. Throughout the day, we in the US received a string of E-mails, instant messages and phone calls asking if we were OK. I had two calls before I left for the office, and a bunch of E-mails and calls throughout the day.

 

As is typical when I'm working out of our Boston office, I try to spend the morning talking to London, because their day ends at noon, EST. And I did talk to folks even into the afternoon. It's fair to say that there wasn't a lot of work going on. It's hard to appreciate the disruption caused by the termination of bus and Underground service. There is a major difference here between Boston and London. The London transport service is huge, heavily used, and crowded. You just don't drive into London if you can avoid it and there is no reason to with a transport system this strong. Many of our employees were looking at walking for up to several miles to get to an open rail station. Some just went right back home this morning.

 

By the afternoon, I was reading that there was some indication that the officials of the Underground were trying to reset operations a bit to be ready for limited service tomorrow, but that's pure rumor at this point. I can tell you that although I heard reports in the press of "indignation" and "outrage", the mood I experienced was mostly one of sadness, maybe with a tinge of depression. Not even shock, really -- this city is no stranger to terrorism.

 

Tomorrow will be a very different day, no doubt. What a roller coaster the city is on. From the high of winning the 2012 Olympics, to 37 dead in one day. But I will tell you one thing. I'm still going back this Sunday.

More later, but I am in Boston right now. I'm happy to say that all the employees of our London office have been accounted for.

There were some quite nasty thunderstorms last week when I was in London. A few really active cells came right over my neighborhood. So of course I couldn't resist taking a few pictures of lightning.

 

A warning to you all: this is not an activity that I condone or encourage in any way. In fact, I believe that it is quite dangerous, and should not be attempted by anyone without proper instruction.

 

In this case, I was reasonably safe because I had the camera propped up in the window out of the rain. The camera is still a potential target for lightning, but there are so many other things around with much more electrical potential. I also was not in contact with the camera for most of the shot.

 

So here's the best of a series of 30 second exposures. There's no mystery to this - you wait for an active storm, set the aperture to get a long exposure time, pre-focus, and just take a series of photos until you see lightning when the shutter is open.