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The more I talk to people…
The more I realize how much I suck at it. And it only gets worse as I get older. The reason I mainly talk to people by email is because it gives me time to get everything straight and coherent. When I’m talking on the fly, look out!
For example, while we were camping this weekend with Kelly and Pat, we had to drive somewhere to get wood. Their car was in front of my truck, so I had to drive around it. Always looking for an excuse to go off road, even for only 10 feet, I jumped on it. I then tried to start a conversation on my love of going off-road. Here is what I wanted to say:
“I love driving off-road. When we were at Snowshoe one time, they got slammed with a snowstorm, and I looked for any excuse to go driving. I would try to nail every snow bank and pile I could. Given the choice between plowed roads, and the untouched path with 2 feet of snow, I chose the untouched path every time.”
What I really said:
“I love going off road. One time, Snowshoe, big snow. Off-road lots. hrrrrr Plowed roads, nail snow banks. derrrrrrrrr.”
And if you looked around the car just then, you would’ve seen me with the big dopey grin, and everyone else with blank stares and maybe a couple pity looks thrown Michelle’s way.
And I knew right away that what I had said made absolutely no sense. So I dropped it.
Fucking retarded.
A different world
We had a lot of fun watching the MotoGP bikes live. Our seats allowed us to see a third of the corners and the first half of the straight, so that rocked. We got to see Rossi putting the moves on Hayden each lap, which sucked. Hayden constantly burns his tires out halfway through each race. Hopefully, he does better on Bridgestones next year.
However, I’ve never been glad to see a city at my back until Indianapolis. It was just depressing being there. Everything is run down, empty, or a cornfield. Driving on their version of the Beltway in the middle of a Sat was a real WTF moment. Mainly because there would be periods where I would see three cars total. Combined in both directions. In the middle of a Saturday! Where the hell was everyone? (Probably at a bible rally considering all the In God We Trust license plates I saw )
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if that was normal and I’m the weird one. I’ve dealt with DC traffic all my life, so I expect the highways to be jammed at 2 in the morning (and they are), let alone in the middle of a Saturday.
We were driving somewhere in Indianapolis, trying to find the Palomino for dinner. I took a wrong turn, so I got off the interstate to turn around. We get off at the next exit, turn left and go under the interstate and then left again on a parallel road to get back on. We get stopped at a red light right before the entrance, so I look around. We are in the middle of the city, buildings everywhere, but not a single soul around. Not even in another car. At 8pm on a Saturday! It looked like a total (modern) ghost town. So I mention to Michelle how this looks identical to scenes in zombie movies where all of a sudden a whole horde of zombies comes around the corner. She didn’t like that comment and started looking around a little nervously.
She REALLY didn’t like when I yelled, “Look! ZOMBIES!” and grabbed her leg. Oh, the scream that pierced my ears. It was worth it. :)
And considering what I saw of Indianapolis, I wouldn’t have been surprised to really see them.
thy color is blue
All of that rambling yesterday and I forgot to mention the most important thing that’s happened recently: Michelle’s painted our bedroom! She’s been wanting to do it for months and finally got tired of my procrastination. So she spent Friday priming and Saturday she painted a light grey blue; I’m sure she’ll post pics soon that show the color.
The room looks AWESOME though. She did an amazing job. I’m really looking forward to getting all the furniture back in place and really giving a good look.
She also spent time last week replacing all the outlets and light switches with pure white rockers and covers. Including the new faucets, the house is really starting to come around. It’s too bad people only do this when they are preparing to sell. We should have done this years ago.
The coffee tastes like… coffey?
Long time, no post. So I think I’ll do a quick hit on recent happenings.
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San Diego was a blast. But it’s always a blast hanging out with Jen and Coffey. Hopefully, JEN follows through with Tahoe for our annual wedding anniversary snowboarding trip. (Hence forth referred to as AWAST since that is a ton to type. Hmm, how can I change that to AVAST?) Mary Ann and Don’s wedding was very beautiful and I thought the parasols the bridesmaids had were an awesome touch.
We also went to the zoo and watched the zebras throwing down UFC style. Awesome. (and I demand everything to be awesome)
Michelle kept mentioning how my brother had said something about custom white balance on his blog. So I decided to play with it while taking pictures of the wedding. It was pretty overcast, and here is how the pictures were originally coming out with Auto white balance.
It doesn’t look bad, but it’s kinda muted and flat. It also has a blue tinge. Here is the very next picture after I changed the white balance to Cloudy.
Quite the difference, eh? Much warmer with more natural tones. The grass is greener; Mary Ann actually has a color. Both of these images are straight from the camera.
And here is my favorite picture. Straight from the camera with a little cropping.
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How come whenever I find a new band I really like, they break up after an album or two? Before it was Death From Above 1979, and now it’s Be your own pet. I’ve had them on repeat all day; it’s definitely been pumping me up. I’ve also been listening to Flyleaf and Civet. Girl punk day.
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We changed out all the fixtures in the master bathroom to go along with the changed faucet in the kitchen. Chrome is apparently out like glass tables with gold legs (WTF? Those rock) and brushed nickel is the new pink, black, shitfit. It does look really nice, and I can finally wash my hands all the way to my forearms. (The old faucet was so short that my hands would nail the back of the sink before I could even get to my wrists.)
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I’m not arrogant, I just love how awesome I am.
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The skins were absolutely horrible on Thursday. I am very pessimistic about this season.
Two challenges in one
So I’m really late on the cold challenge. I have no excuse except that I have been spending my weekends luxuriating in the fact that I don’t have homework or tests. I’ve also come to the conclusion that I want to get into macro photography. All the ideas I have for these challenges have shown me that I really need a macro lens to pull them off. Or perhaps I need to think out of the box more…
Here is my entry for BOTH fuzzy and cold. 
This is unedited from my camera. Amazingly, this is the first of about 6 I took. 123mm - 1/3200 - f/5 The focus is slightly off, the glass is in focus but the face isn’t. I didn’t notice that until I just posted it and now it’s going to bother me.
Here are some others I took. I actually bought this monkey a year ago for expressly this purpose. But he was hijacked from me by someone who shall remain nameless… I really should’ve waited a couple hours to the take these pictures; the sun is way too hard right now. I wanted to surprise Michelle with them, however. Maybe I’ll take more later.
This one was an accident. I was holding the camera by my chest and I went to press the shutter button halfway so I could adjust the exposure. I accidentally pressed it all the way, resulting in this shot - which I really like. Figures, the unplanned, completely un-aimed, is the one I like the best. (I did crop the sides and top a little bit)
by the power of grayskull!
Soon after my shoulder surgery, I started having issues with my hands. They felt like they were tightening up, getting stiffer. Soon they started to hurt a little bit. I talked to my physical therapist about it and she had me do some exercises for them. I told the doctor who worked on my shoulder and he didn’t seem to care much about it. I figured they were just getting tighter from lack of use and me sitting in the same position all day. I figured once I got the sling off and got back to full activity, they’d loosen up in no time.
Fast forward nine months.
My hands have done anything but get better. I used to be able to bend my fingers back 90 degrees. Now I can barely make five. My knuckles are so swollen that I can’t make a full fist, nor can I get my wedding ring off anymore (Michelle is happy about that…) I figured I may be getting carpal tunnel from being on the laptop all the time, so I went to see a different orthopedic doctor. He did some x-rays (no damage) and some blood work and put me in for a month of physical therapy. The PT did jack, but the paraffin bath felt nice as hell! (I just bought one for myse… Michelle so that she could have nice soft hands and relax her aching joints)
For my blood work, the doctor made me call him on the phone to get the results, so I knew something was up. My blood tests came back negative for everything but ANA. I thought he said they were 1:60, and that falls in the normal range, so I wasn’t worried about it. He did recommend I see a rheumatologist, though, and I made an appointment. After my month of PT was up, I went to see the ortho doctor again and got a copy of my blood work for the rheumatologist. I ignored it and left it in the car so I wouldn’t forget.
Michelle and I were going to get coffee one night last weekend and she saw it on the floor and started reading it. And pointed out that my actual ANA results were 1:640! Shit! That’s a pretty damn positive test. So I definitely have some sort of auto-immune disease going on. Could be rheumatoid arthritis, could be lupus. Who knows.
I saw the rheumatologist this week and he didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t learn from the Internet. He did have me go get more extensive blood work (10 fucking vials worth! And no cookie! wtf?) and gave me a prescription for prednisone, a steroid. And that, finally, brings me to the topic of this post.
I don’t know if it’s the steroid, or the recent bouts of mountain biking, but since I started taking it, my energy, mood, and strength have improved a lot. When I do my workouts, I usually struggle with the first sets of each exercise until I get warmed up. Today, the 35lb kettlebell felt like 10lbs. I pretty much doubled my reps in everything with ease. I didn’t have any pain in my forearms or wrists either like I usually do. I felt absolutely great!
I felt the same when we went mountain biking after work a couple days ago. On Sunday, I was beat after 30 mins. On Wed, I was raring for me after 40 mins and we did a more difficult trail. I don’t know if it’s a combination of everything, or one thing in particular, but I haven’t felt this good since before my shoulder tearing incident, and, in some ways, even better than then. I can almost touch my toes with my legs straight! Before, I was hard pressed to get past my knees.
So, bad news is my hands are fucked and I may have lupus (but am hoping for RA) . Good news is I haven’t felt this good physically in a long time. Maybe I should have bought a bike a long time ago.
Photo Challenge - Circle
I had a perfect idea in mind for this week’s challenge - Michelle doing mad mountain bike tricks. Logs + bikes = lots of circles. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera. Figures…
So after many other attempts, I submit this:
That quarter left of center keeps drawing my eye to it. I haven’t edited this one at all, not even a crop (Maybe I should crop it). I really And here are some of my failures.
Candles at 10 mm. This might have worked if I had more candles to finish the right side.
Coins in the coin jar
A coin purse! This took me quite awhile to put together. It looked better in my head.
One less robin in the world
Lately, Illy has really been excited to go on her walks. She’ll actually go downstairs to the front door on her own now, which is a huge step for her. I’m of the belief that this is because the baby animals are out now, and she really wants to chase them. Today proved me right.
We took our usual path which leads to a field near our neighborhood. Bordering one side of this field is a forest with deep underbrush. We start walking along it like we usually do when she suddenly perked up and started sniffing around and looking up into the trees. I figured she heard a squirrel (one of her favorites) and kept walking.
We walked to the end and started making our way back. At about the midpoint of the forest border is a little section you can walk into, almost like a cave. Narrow entrance, wide clearing. We stopped like we always do because she loves this area for some reason. After standing there for about 10 seconds, three deer suddenly took off at the back of the clearing, not 20 feet away! Illy took off to run after them but I pulled her up short. She walked back to me doing a full body wag. She sure did love that!
We start walking back again and were nearing the end of the forest border and about to turn to head home when I heard tweeting and a slight commotion. I turn around and there is Illy looking at me with a wing hanging out the side of her mouth, and tail out the front! I told her to drop it and she spits out a baby robin! It started hopping away and Illy went after it again, but I stopped her. The bird stopped hopping and laid there with its wings spread. I stood there for a couple minute, not real sure on what to do. I walked up to it to see if it was still alive and if it would move away. It was breathing but made no effort to move. I guess it was in shock. I don’t know if Illy broke anything; I hope not. From what I can tell, it was a fledgling that was learning to fly, and was still at the "try to glide to the ground" stage. I left it there to let nature take its course cause I didn’t really think I could do anything.
So the walk went from super-exciting to super-sad. We think it may have been the lab side of her coming out as she wasn’t trying to kill it; she was just holding it in her mouth. At least she doesn’t chase the cats.
Two challenges in one!
I just realized I forgot to post the picture for last week’s challenge. So here is the one I took for converging lines. This was a tough one. I made several different attempts with my deck but didn’t really like any of them. I noticed this pattern in the grass when walking Illy one time, so the next time I brought my camera and took several shots. This one is unedited except for cropping.
And here is my "blue" picture. (Michelle is actually wearing a blue shirt) It’s my two favorite ladies. I cropped it and applied the Cyanotype filter.
I’m not too impressed with my pictures this week. Definitely need to try harder. I will use the excuse that I was busy graduating.
A water challenge
Luckily, I went to the beach this weekend, so I should hope I got some water shots. I thoroughly enjoyed my new camera, though it wasn’t all roses. Taking pictures of our dog proved to be a challenge. Spot metering + jet black dog = overexposures. It took me awhile to figure that out, as I usually use average metering.
I definitely feel like I get more keepers with this camera. Maybe that’s in my head though.
As a note, I shoot almost exclusively in aperture priority (Av) due to my constantly changing the aperture while shooting pictures.
Trying to pick a photo for this was tough. A lot of pictures I like, but none I think were really WOW. I kept coming back to this one, so I decided to use it. It’s not edited, just cropped, because I don’t really know how to edit photos. This is Michelle’s cousin’s dog, Archie.
I also liked this one, but it doesn’t show water. I cropped this slightly to take out the blown out sky and used the Aged Photo preset in Lightroom.
And a nice action shot of Michelle, doing what she does best. Cropped and I did the Direct Positive preset. I like what it did to the colors, but not the noise it added to the water.
I was completely not ready for this. Illy and I were walking near the dunes when Illy spotted a crab running around. She started chasing it with her nose right up against it. I was really surprised her nose didn’t get nipped. If only the damn leash wasn’t in the way (and it was more in focus)
