The Spectrum food court has ripped out the planters. I guess they realized they needed the floor space after they chopped off one end.
It’s Halloween, so Target has the Christmas decorations up! 
Just heard a commercial that started off, “Winter is Coming.”
The Great Park Balloon in Irvine, California, all dressed up as a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween. I was hoping to get a shot of it aloft, but it landed as I approached the park.
It looks really eerie lit up at night, floating off in the distance. Or just floating above office buildings.
It’s not as good a picture as the one I found on Flickr last week, but you can see the whole face.
More of my own photos of the balloon on Flickr, including this non-zoomed shot, showing the big empty field and Saddleback in the background:
Balloon, originally uploaded by blueskyoveraquatic.
Actually it’s the Great Park Balloon in Irvine, done up with a Jack-O-Lantern face. I keep meaning to run out at lunch and try to catch a photo of it floating above the office parks, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
For now, this photo I found on Flickr will do.
Would you believe I found a postcard for Irvine?
It’s a bunch of office buildings with mountains in the background. I guess it makes sense. I mean, what else would you put in an Irvine postcard?
Here’s a cool project: In Ansel Adams’ Footsteps, re-creating his photographs of UC Irvine from the 1960s. There are a lot more trees now. (Or, as a friend pointed out, the trees that were there are a lot taller!) It’s a really impressive look at how the campus has changed…plus it’s always fascinating to look at Ansel Adams’ photography. I remember when I was in college, prints of Adams’ photos lined the walls of one of the Student Center hallways.
A couple of years ago I did my own then and now project — well, less a project than a spur-of-the moment 2007 re-creation of a 1997 photo I took of the Student Center as seen from what was then the Humanities Office Building (now Murray Krieger Hall). In this case the trees hadn’t changed much in 10 years, but UCI had flattened the Student Center complex and built an entirely new one.
