This is our cat Aphro. She likes this time of year because of the furnace. When she hears it kick in in the morning she jumps off the bed and sits on the vent. Evidently she likes it at night too.
Poor guy.
Last night I was still hearing bangs at 3:30 am. Meaning Yoshi was still antsy at 3:30 am. Up and down the stairs, prancing around outside our bedroom, coming into the bedroom and walking from one side of the bed to the other, heading downstairs and doing laps of the house. Yeesh.
I am very tired today.
Tuesday night will be bad, and then it should end pretty quickly after that. Tuesday can’t come soon enough.
The big change this year was they had a small consession to raise money for the gardens. Excellent, a chance to get some hot chocolate on a chilly night! Nope. They had coffee, apple cider, and cookies, but no hot chocolate. I was pretty disappointed in that.
Otherwise it was fun to keep Sprout up way past his bedtime, and take him out to see some pumkins. Next year will be really fun to take him there!
Sunrise yesterday morning.
Dandelion seed on my bikes tire.
Near Spinnakers on the way home tonight.
West Bay Marina
This allows me to sign up at any webpage with a different email address, to make filtering easier and to quickly learn if someone is selling my email address if I use a unique email address per signup. My webhost has done this to allow people a basic for of catch all address that isn’t really a catch all.
In theory this sounds great, but in 2 days I have some across 2 websites that don’t support this at all. Dell.com was the first one I found. The Dell site told me they wouldn’t accept the email address. Fine, I created something else to use.
thehip.com did something far worse. They accepted the email address, then mangled it when they put it in a database, and somehow replaced the + with a space. This has very bad consequences when the site sent me an email. So “fred+thehip@muddylaces.ca” got turned into “fred thehip@muddylaces.ca”. When the site sent the email, all of a sudden fred@thehip.com and thehip@muddylaces.ca received the email (that contained my password by the way). This kind of failure is very bad (IMO).
I hope more sites will support plus style addressing. I plan on using it a lot more.
The plot was hilarious, the jokes were great, the swearing was outrageous (I loved Bubbles’ name for a helicopter), and the drug and drinking references numerous.
It was funny to see some of the things they put in the movie just becouase they could. This includes most of the nudity.
I wouldn’t recommend the movie to anyone who hasn’t seen the show, but if you have, and like it, go see the movie. Definitely worth the price of admission, and probably best to see it with a bunch of other people.
Tis the season for pumpkins, so what better destination for a photo club? Today we met at Michells Farm market and headed to the next field up the road, away from all the patrons of the u-pick pumpkins.
The shooting conditions were glorious. Nice sunshine, blue skies with some clouds here and there, and lots and lots of orangey pumpkins on the ground. I chose 10 am as the start time knowing we would miss the nice sunrise light, but that was OK. The light turned out to still be pretty good. Not too harsh, but enough to give some good shadows. The dew was still on the pumkins, and as you will be able to tell, I was enthralled with trying to capture droplets of water.
After attaching my polarizer (to try and enhance the colours and minimize reflections of the dew), I set out to capture what I was seeing.
While we were shooting, a van pulled up to the edge of the road and watched for a bit. They were there for close to 10 minutes I think. No big deal, some people are curious about photographers. Next thing I know this van drives down the driveway of the field, then across the field itself. I was surprised and confused. At the other end the doors opened and everyone got out. They turned out to be pickers, and were harvesting some of the pumpkins.
Later I noticed that just next to us was an airstrip for model aircraft. Barry wandered over to take some pictures there and chatted with one of the guys there. Barry asked if it was OK if he took pictures, and the guy muttered something about it being no problem, but the planes were grounded because the photographers were in the way! The photographers (the rest of the group) were just packing up. As I was waiting for the last person to finish her roll, another guy from the flying club came over to talk to us about where we were standing. He didn’t care that we were there, just that past a certain point in the field, we were in the way of their landing strip and it wasn’t safe. 🙂 I let him know that we were just packing up anyway, so we would easily get out of their way.
All in all it was a very fun shoot. Got a little wet and muddy, but I am very happy with my shots. There was a lot of pictures to take there.
It feels like it has been forever since I have been mountain biking, and I really want to get out, but today just was not the day. The weather was perfect, I just lacked any energy and my head was still congested. Not very good for riding.
Instead I took Yoshi for a walk at Macaulay Point Park. It was pretty good, but even walking slowly I worked up a huge sweat. Still not over this cold. Yoshi had a great runaround that left him panting and tired. I got outside for some fresh air. Almost like riding? Not really.
Sprout seemed to enjoy it, and made some happy noises and squeals every now and then. We played a few different games, and sang a few songs. The next few classses will be more fun now that I know what to expect.
Sox and I were going to switch off for each class, but that was before I withdrew from the Creative Photography course, and before I learned that each class they will be teaching something different. I don’t want to have to learn from Sox what happened, so it seems best that I be the one doing this rounds of lessons.
I decided to finally embark on the light box project. I headed out to Michaels to get some foam board and white masking tape, and left the store without the tape (no white). I zipped to Canadian Tire and grabbed a couple clamp lights, and some bulbs. Then it was assembly time.
I didn’t really follow the directions that I originally read, and in retrospect I should have. There are a couple tips in there about the size, and cutouts for the light clamps. Those are easy to retrofit. Also, once I get some white tape, I can mask off the inside seams. The final one is that I need more light in it. It is a little dark. I may also try getting different bulbs. The ones I got are still quite yellow, and I had to set a custom white balance before shooting.
Here is another tip for would-be DIY’ers. When you cut foam board, make sure the knife you use is very sharp, otherwise the cut will not be smooth.
Here is my end result:
Not bad for a couple hours of time (shopping included).
So, being a rainy day, having a freshly made light box, and having a camera waiting to take some pictures, what is a photographer to do?
Of course it was after I got the pictures onto my computer I saw all the dust marks. I will fix that before my next shoot. For now I don’t feel like trying to edit those out.
The best part is that now I have a place to shoot when it isn’t so nice outside. This will be an insteresting creativity experiment too.
