January 19, 2006

Eric found a really awesome blog today with amazing photography of New Orleans post Katrina.

The sun is shining today although it is still cold. Oreo’s grass allergy has been acting up really badly and we had to start him back on his anti-hystamine medication today. Hopefully that will take care of everything. There has been so little snow this winter that it is really hard to tell how having snow would affect him.

Dominica and I woke up earlier than usual this morning from the dog almost getting sick on Dominica’s head while she slept (he likes to be dramatic.) So we decided to just get up and enjoy the day. It was nice being up a little earlier and getting some sunlight and Min enjoyed not having to rush around trying to get to work on time. She sat in the living room and watched a couple episodes of The Gilmore Girls and knit before heading off to work.

I was scanning in more slides this morning and I am up to 1989. I came across my collection of slides that were from the “A Day in the Life of Rochester” Photojournalism competition that I did that summer. I was thirteen. It was my first photo competition. Kodak held the competition. Everyone was given one single roll of Kodachrome 64 and 24 hours in which to use it. Everything had to be taken around Rochester. It was a lot of fun but I had a really hard time, at that age, understanding exactly what I was supposed to do. Now I am much more familiar with the “A Day in the Life…” Photo book series and know what they are looking for. I also have a much better idea of what photojournalism is. But this competition got me started in broadening my understanding of photography. I did end up being a photojournalist for a little while just four or five years after this so I guess it had some impact. I didn’t win the competition but I did pull an honorable mention! I was very happy. I was especially happy to have done so well with the Canon T90 camera I was using having exposer meter problems so that all of the pictures are very dark.

Going through my old picture I found this old picture of Eric wearing a really dorky watch. Andy was making fun of the watch and we got talking about bad old watches. He remembered this classic story of owning a big Radio Shack talking watch that would tell you the time out loud. What a cool watch for a kid. One night his watch died and wouldn’t stop talking. For an hour it just talked and talked in the middle of the night. He couldn’t get the battery out of it and didn’t know what to do. He attempted to flush it to make it stop. His dad came down and discovered him trying to put the watch into the toilet! (Imagine me almost crying as Andy is telling me this story.) Eventually they just buried the watch under a bunch of junk and let it talk until the battery died. He even found a picture of it…

Radio Shack Talking Watch - Before Flushing

Dad was running errands in the city this morning and Geneseo is on the way from Rochester back to his house so he stopped by a little after noon so that we could go over to the Omega and get lunch.

Not long after we had the story about the French woman willing to kill everyone on a passenger jet in Australia just so that she could smoke we now have the French woman who received the world’s first face transplant willing to lose her new face just so that she can keep smoking. I can’t believe that the French people have to pay into their socialist medical insurance pool so that people like this can get expensive medical care and throw it away. Viva la tobacco.

Apparently in Japan it is popular to have television shows about little girls being attacked by a lizard. I am totally lost as to the entertainment value of this. Now if the lizard actually ate some of them that would be a different story.

If anyone is in need of Ninja advice you can now Ask A Ninja.

Okay, Eric hooked us up with this link to a video of what happens when a water balloon breaks. This short video is AWESOME.

Some of you out there in Llamaland might not be aware of a sport known as “sport stacking” where contestants stack and unstack special plastics cups as quickly as possible. No I am not kidding. This is an actual organized sport. One which, IMHO, makes more sense than many other professional sports. Maybe SGL should sponsor one of these Sport Stackers (read: buy them a t-shirt) to get some publicity. You can check out the sport’s web site at Speed Stackers. What is the world coming to?

I managed to get Episode 42 of the podcast put together and posted before Dominica got home from work. I can’t believe that it has been forty two episodes all ready. Boy time does fly. While doing everything else today I got tons of slides transferred over to digital. The quality of the transfers isn’t that good but I am hoping that a lot of that can be fixed through GIMP or something after the fact. I have transferred all of my slides from 1989-1991 and am working my way through 1992 now. It is really obvious when I finally figured out photography because the quality jump from the 1991 images to the 1992 images is significant. I am pretty sure that that is also the year that I moved from using my dad’s old Canon T90 to my very own, brand new Nikon 5005 with a 50mm Nikkor lens and a 70-210mm Tamron zoom lens. I started using more serious film as well sticking almost exclusively with high end Kodak slide film. I was also working part time with an Olympus Rangefinder. Until fairly recently I was still looking for a replacement for that old rangefinder from the 70’s but film cameras just aren’t useful to me anymore so i am moving on. That rangefinder got left in a hotel room in Arlington, Virginia back when I was seventeen.

After Min came home I made a large spinach salad for dinner and we moved into the living room to watch some Angel before heading to bed. We need to watch quickly because Andy is getting us TNG season three on Saturday. So that we really keep us busy.

Leave a comment