It’s official. I have caught up with Sheep Guarding Llama. I don’t think that this has happened for at least a month now!
I had a new book arrive from Amazon today: The Photographer’s Eye. Andy has been doing so much photography lately and talking to me about it that I have been really excited to be out taking pictures myself. I ordered a new Tamrac backpack today as well. My old Tamrac bag has been too small for my camera system for years but I have always made do with it. My old bag I got in the early ’90s and it was great – just too small for me. I have more lenses now and plan to have even more in the future. I have four right now and although I do have a consolidation plan I also hope to get a really nice super wide-angle lens as well eventually. One thing that I really love about digital photography is the lack of a need to carry any colored filters, star effects, diffusion filters, etc. Any effects or filtering like that can be done in post production. I just have my standard UV filters and circular polarizer as that is optical and must be done at the time of the picture taking. So I carry fewer items but the ones that I do carry are larger.
We also had some new videos and music arrive today. Liesl’s second “The Wiggles” CD came which she will enjoy listening to when we are driving. Also two “The Wiggles” DVD came today including one of their 2008 releases and their brand new one that just released this week: The Wiggles Go Bananas. Liesl will be very, very excited to have a new Wiggles DVD to watch. Dominica and I also just got the 1960s classic Ride the Wild Surf with Fabian, Barbara Eden (from I Dream of Jeanie fame) and Shelley Fabares (famous from Coach to our generation.) along with the double DVD pack of The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow from 1959 – both of which are sure to be awful.
The day was a regular work day. Nothing exciting. Nothing to report. The week has really flow by. I cannot believe how quickly the week has gone by. Today is Thursday. I honestly thought that it was Tuesday for most of the day. This week has really been a blur.
This evening, when I wrapped up with work, we sat down and watched The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. We can’t help but laugh that audiences in the late 1960s actually went to the movie theatres to watch this stuff. Amazing. The movie was truly horrendous but surely must have been the inspiration for the Scooby-Doo cartoon show that would debut just three years later in 1969. Some of the characters are just way too close and the whole movie plays, as many people have mentioned before me, like a dogless Scooby-Doo adventure. Seriously weird stuff.
After the movie, after Liesl had gone to bed, instead of watching something else Dominica set about working on her UNIX Administration class for the University of Illinois. She is down to the very final segment and really wanted to finish it tonight. She worked on it this afternoon for about an hour or so but had not been able to have gotten very far because Liesl did not stay asleep for very long and I had a lot of work to do and was unable to watch her for any length of time.
Do Dominica worked for an hour or more while I ready my new book, The Photographer’s Eye, and at around ten this evening, she managed to submit all of the final work for her class! We are assuming that some of it will be returned and have to be done again. That always happens because the requirements are really vague but that is just how they do it there. You submit, they send it back for adjustments, then you submit again. But all of the real work is done and we just need to wait for them to tell us what, if anything, needs to be changed. Having this coursework done is a major relief. Really significant. This is a four course series that ends in a really big UNIX Administration certificate that will be a major feather in Dominica’s cap when she is in the job market again. It should, in theory, also make a really big impact on how much more she needs to do on her degree program at the State University of New York Empire State College.
It was a really early night for us. Off to bed at a quarter after ten. We were both really tired and just wanted to get some sleep. I went right to bed but Dominica stayed up for quite a while reading on her Kindle.