What I was doing last year at this time.
Photographing double-decker busses
Photographing Keystone Towers (I need to go back here – lots more graffiti!)
Test-driving Cars (we bought Eddie Rabbit just after this)
Having Lunch with co-workers at the Mousetrap (not a regular occurance)
Attending Matt’s Labor Day party
I took Thursday and Friday of last week off and created for myself a four day weekend. That was fun. I got some organizing projects done around the house, and played around a bit with a photography project. The end result of the photography project wasn’t great – but I know what I need to do to fix it, so I just need to reshoot, and I had a lot of fun playing with it, so I’m happy about what I learned.
The household organizing – I’m pretty happy about that too. It was mainly little stuff, but stuff that makes a difference. We had seven or eight redundant flower vases that we purged, keeping our favorites. I rearranged appliances in the kitchen, and threw out some liquor that has been hanging around my kitchen since I was a renter and not a home owner – one bottle that I know a friend brought to a party I threw in February of 1999. (Yikes!) Not big drinkers we. You can look into the site https://certifiedfixed.com/service-areas/sarasota-appliance-repair-fl/ – if you are looking for quality and affordable appliances repair services.
I bought some better storage containers for winter apparel and cleaned out the dining room closet so we can get at our winter stuff more easily. The cats are now fascinated by the free space in the closet. They keep wandering in there to see I’m not sure what. Maybe they’re just astonished that we have a space in the house that’s actually organized. I know I am.
I also wrangled Drusilla and Huckleberry to the vet on separate days for long overdue checkups and shots. Everyone is apparently healthy, if a bit grumpy about the wrangling process.
For a friend’s birthday, we went to see Julie & Julia, which I loved. Don’t go to that movie hungry – you’ll be ravenous when you leave the theater. And possibly a bit in love with Julia Child, or at least Meryl Streep. I particularly enjoyed the segments about blogger Julie Powell, the parts of the movie that were critically panned by apparently everyone. But then, I’ve been blogging since the 90s, so I thought her story was hilarious, where others thought she was self-involved.
The eye candy of mid-century modern furniture in both Julia and Julie’s abodes is worth going, and I’m strongly considering wearing my strand of faux pearls from now on. At least I’ll know by people’s reactions who actually still reads my blog.
So, we got a scooter. The plan is to ride it to work. For now, Stephanie and I are both going to share the Buddy 125, and later, if it works out money-wise, I’ll get my own Scooter. It’s been 20-some years since I rode my brother’s moped, so I’m shaky on the corners, but I zipped around the neighborhood pretty well. I need to do that a bit more before I set out to work. Which is fine, anyway, since it’s supposed to rain for several days.
Other than that we had a low-key weekend at home. We harvested cucumbers and zucchini from the vegetable garden and pulled lots of weeds. It was hot all weekend.
I did a bit of photo editing; I’m drastically behind on that. Stuck somewhere in early July right now. I’m having a hard time getting motivated about it. I’ll have to figure out how to get unstuck.
I’ve been in quite a blue funk lately. A large chunk of that is due to hitting 41, which seems to have affected me more than 40 did by a large margin. The “thinking about mortality” issues that advance with each turn of the year tend to thrust themselves into my conscious mind with alarming regularity. It does not help at all that I’ve had friends die in recent years, and parents of friends are having serious health issues. It occurs to me that this is one of the purposes of babies – watching them grow and discover the world and all the promise of youth is definitely a positive distraction from looking in the other direction.
The other source of the blues is work-related, which is mainly why I haven’t written much about the blue meanies going on in my life right now. I’ve had a long-standing policy of not blogging about work, in order to avoid creating problems with my source of income. I’m somewhat violating that here, but I think it’s fair to say that my morale about our product development is quite low, and that has affected practically everything else in my life; my weekends are filled with pouring over problems and frustrations, and I find it hard to let go and just enjoy the times when I’m not at work.
Photography and knitting have been lifesavers recently — normally I’d take out my frustrations on some fun online project, but web design is the last thing I want to think about when I leave work these days, so other creative outlets have filled in the gaps. I love photography and have learned a lot; I think I’m a bit suspended figuring out where I want to go with it next. I’ll land in the right spot on that soon.
Knitting. Knitting is awesome. I’ve found I’m quite good at what I’ve learned so far, and as a zen “take your mind off things” activity, it’s stellar. Have I even mentioned it here? Holy moley, I haven’t have I? Other than a photo I put up back in May, I haven’t.
Stephanie has been a crocheter for 17 years or so, and has made afghans, scarves, blankets, etc. for people in that time. She’s been wanting to learn to knit, but my mom hasn’t had a chance to teach her because she’s been so busy. One of Stephanie’s skating friends taught her some really simple knitting on a trip to a competition, but she needed more info, so we went to Mass Avenue Knit Shop to find out about classes. I was charmed by the atmosphere of the shop and the wild varieties of yarns they had available, and asked if she minded if I took the class too. So we signed up together. The class teaches how to create a beginner sweater, which covers pretty much everything you need to learn to knit well.
On the side, I’m working on two other winter scarves – one of alternating red and yellow stripes that will look somewhat like this:
Evoking a bit of that Gryffindor magic, doncha know.
The other scarf is my own variation of a Dr. Who Scarf, which is far enough different in concept to be actually not a Dr. Who Scarf at all, except that it will be super-long and striped. I find I have to disclaimer that because Dr. Who Scarf fans (they are legion) are very religious about their patterns and making their scarves match the props used in different seasons of the show exactly. I find that the preciseness of people who fit into the cross-section of Dr. Who fans with knitting fans to be charming, if not a bit on the unnerving side.
Part of my motivation for this scarf is that it will replace one that I lost – I had a great multi-color striped scarf from the Gap that disappeared from work last winter, and I haven’t been able to find a winter scarf that I liked as well as that one. So I’m making my own!
Mine will be alternating stripes of color with black. I’ve restarted it several times; I started with it being too wide and with lots of dropped stitches and holes, so I’ve taken it out and started over repeatedly. I finally have it going the way I want, but I imagine it’s going to take a while to do, because I’m knitting in the round to create a tube so that the “finished” or knit side is the only one that shows (that’s another variation of mine from Canon; real Dr. Who Scarves are garter stitch, not stockinette.) The yarn I’m using is all the left-over bits of stuff that Stephanie used on various crochet projects over the years, so I have the bonus of using up lots of scraps and having a really varied color combination.
Photos of both of my scarves in progress will be coming forthwith. Eventually. Really Soon.
Slideshow of the Eastern Caravan headed out to Roswell:
Photo Set:
Return to Roswell 2009 – Eastern Caravan travels West
We’re in the final throes of packing for our trip. This year we put together a spreadsheet on Google Docs of all the stuff we know we need to take, and we’re going through and checking off items as we speak.
Phoebe is cleaned up and ready to be loaded.
And the pets are all irritated that we are leaving.
I think that about covers it. Time to pack the laptop.
Today is my last Friday of work before vacation – 2 weeks of it! We’re going to go to the official Last Roswell R2K New Beetle event – this is the annual New Beetle car show that Stephanie attends in Roswell, New Mexico. It’s the 10th Anniversary of the Volkswagen New Beetle, and Stephanie’s car Phoebe turned 10 this year. It’s also the last event of it’s kind, for the most part. It’s becoming harder for people to attend due to the economy and to the age of many of the cars, and putting on a car show is a big process to organize, and the folks who’ve made it such a fun event in the past are worn out.
I went with Stephanie on a very long version of this cross-country trek in 2007, and took in all of Route 66 along the way, traveling all the way to California over 17 days.
Slideshow of Route 66 Trip Photos
This year, we take off Tuesday morning, June 23rd, and meet the rest of the Eastern caravan around Memphis, Tennessee, then proceed on to Roswell over the rest of the week, arriving at the car show on the weekend.
Google Map of the Caravan Route
Since we’ve done this before, we have a pretty good sense of what we need, so we haven’t killed ourselves packing yet. We’ll do a lot of that over the weekend. I’ll post some photos here to my blog and make updates, but I don’t plan to upload all my photos of the trip like I did before. It took a long time and I did very little photo editing on that round, and this time I want to post fewer, but better photos. I’m really looking forward to the time off and spending time with Stephanie, and I’m salivating at the chance to take photos all day long, too.
We’ll also keep in touch via Facebook, and Stephanie will be on Twitter, and I’m setting my blog posts to update Twitter as well.
And as always, you can follow along on the whole trip via the All Pods Go to Roswell webcams, running continuously through the trip by our friend Lisa.
I’ve been knee-deep in photography-related activities lately but have barely written about them here, other than posting a few pictures. Let me fill you in on how things have been going.
Looks like I wrote about my camera back in July after I got it, outlining how I made the decision to go with my model. I’ve made some additional equipment purchases since then.
The Olympus e-420 is a great camera for me. It’s small, light and I take it everywhere with me. It came with a 25mm f/2.8 pancake lens. This lens is a fixed focal length lens that’s very tiny. It’s a great lens; super useful.
After taking lots of photos with that lens, I felt I needed a zoom lens to capture more far away stuff, so I bought a 40-150mm f/4-5.6 lens. It’s a fairly cheap lens; it’s clearly lots of plastic, rather small in size and I have to use some sort of stabilizer (like a tripod, monopod or home-made monopod) because it’s very susceptible to camera shake. But it does take photos of gargoyles on the top of 20 story buildings and such, and I’m glad I have it. I got some good shots at the track with it. (I have to say with a great deal of thanks to my friend Rachel, who is very familiar with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and had a handle on where all to go to get good photos. She was a great location scout.)
My next lens purchase was a 12-60mm f/2.8 lens that I got just before Christmas. This is the workhorse that stays on my camera a lot of the time, because it captures wide angle shots really well at the 12mm focal length but also gives me plenty of range without having to switch lenses. The downside is that it’s rather large and heavy, and people tend to react to the size of it negatively. They think it’s a paparazzi spy lens and that I’m invading their privacy (never), or they think I’m a professional photographer and ask me to take their photos for money (no, please. the pressure!). The large size has nothing to do with focal length of the camera – it’s about the lens quality. It’s a really heavy, sturdy piece of glass that I like a lot.
And my most recent acquisition is a 50mm macro lens. I’ve been having a LOT of fun with this, although I’m still getting used to it. Lots of my recent photos of miniature action figures have been taken with this lens.
I carry this and all my other crap around in a Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home camera bag. I picked that one out because it’s what my brother and one of my friends carry. It’s cool because it doesn’t really look at that much like a camera bag, or like a lunch cooler, which is what a lot of camera bags resemble. It’s a tight fit to get the camera and all four lenses in there along with other general purse-like items. At times I pick a lens to leave at home. But I have tried out the next size up (the Crumpler Six Million) and didn’t care for it; a bit too bulky and noticeable.
I have a cheap Kodak Monopod and a couple of inexpensive tripods, too. I haven’t used them as much because I’ve been shooting mostly hand-held. This dandy little home-made device has really helped me out a few times, though:
The gear I have covers everything I want to do right now – mainly that’s becoming good at taking good photos for the time being. The class I took helped a great deal. It was just four weeks, once night a week – but it filled in the gaps in my knowledge of what my camera can do. I have a lot more practice that I need to do on the fundamentals before it will become second nature to me. I still have to think through getting the right exposure each time, and I need to be more bold about seeking out the shot I can see is there.
I also need to find my visual voice – what is it I’m trying to see and photograph and how do I take those photos to get the look I want. I have favorite photographers on flickr that I follow for inspiration. I think I have an idea of what I want to express visually. I’m just not sure how to achieve that on the technical side yet.
I think the most time-consuming and least favorite task is the photo editing. I don’t enjoy that as much and am perpetually behind on that task, so it’s days or weeks after an event before I finally get photos ready.
At some point I HAVE to sit down and finally create and install a real masthead for this blog. It was one of those things I just didn’t get around to when I was reworking the site – and it was a small enough piece that I thought I would squeeze it in. But every time I decide to actually work on it I get interrupted by something more important, and now it’s been months. Because, you know, according to the painters denver, branding is the thing you should always put off. So I’m going to get that done. I hope.
I signed up for a photography class from Indy Photo Coach. I had been looking at classes The Indianapolis Art Center but the Indy Photo Coach classes are a bit cheaper and closer to home. I’ve seen the work of some of their former students, and it’s really good. I start April 6, so expect to see lots more photography passing through here.
Around the house (that was bought via https://webuyhousesinatlanta.com/ site) we’ve been finishing up the bookcases in the dining room – one more to build, and we’re done – and the room is completely transformed with the help of painters in vienna. For one thing, there aren’t boxes stacked up everywhere, so it looks like we actually live here and aren’t just passing through. And it means that Stephanie has all the room she needs for her books. We were able to double her storage capacity – and nearly all of that is filled, which tells you something about how many boxes we had stacked up. The library is really straightening itself out, also. Moving my desk freed up a lot of space in that room and made it more comfortable. I’m excited; we almost have the house looking respectable enough to have people drop by more casually. We shouldn’t have to kill ourselves cleaning before people visit. I probably still WILL, but we shouldn’t have to.
And we’re doing some container gardening for the front porch this year. We’ve got two flower boxes full of pansies, and we’re going to plant some Freesia, and other annuals in pots for the porch. I planted some of this this weekend, although it was 38 degrees and SNOWING. For Pete’s sake. I also moved 800 pounds of topsoil in the cold – I need to fill in some low spots on the north side of the house. We’re also going to do some vegetable gardening. If the weather is nice, we may be able to get that done next weekend.
There are a couple news items about the economy that I found to be tremendously helpful. I’ve linked to them from one or another of my links posts, but it’s very much worth it to pull them out and highlight them, because knowledge is power, and more average people need a really good understanding of what’s going on than the lame drivel they’re getting from the news.
This American Life Podcast: Bad Banks
The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. This is an AWESOME explanation of our current economic situation. If you’re at all like me and financial stuff is SO BORING that it gives you a headache, this podcast will do wonders for you. Everything laid out in layman’s terms so it’s clear what’s going on.
The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone
Matt Taibbi takes the explanations from This American Life quite a bit further, filling in the blanks and making the situation much clearer about how bad things really are. Which is bad. Really bad. As in “batten down the hatches and hold on for dear life” bad. Taibbi isn’t afraid to point the fingers and name the names. And to use the colorful language that is frankly required in this situation.
And now back to lighter things, because if I think about all that too long I’m going to curl up in a ball in the corner — Part of the lack of blogging is that we’ve been rather heads down on household projects over the last couple weekends.
What we’ve been working on:
a) Finishing painting in the staircase room:
b) And doing some reorganization in the library:
c) And also – not the least of our household projects – building new bookcases in the dining room for Stephanie’s library:
We have a couple more bookcases to put up, and we’re done, and ready to move on to some yard work and some other fun projects.