Wednesday, January 12, 2011

T minus 5-point-5

January 12, 2011

Guess I should stop goofing around on the computer and finish packing, huh?

(Click on the photo to go to the original page to see all the items in their detailed glory.)

Sunday, January 09, 2011

i can haz cheezburger?

January 8, 2011: i can haz cheezburger?

The best photography lesson I've learned so far: let Randal take them. Yeah, sorry; today I am entirely cheating. These are pictures from last night (January 8) of my brother's cat, Wednesday. They were better than any I attempted, so here they are!

Series In Yellow: Cat

CHEEZBURGER!   Evil cheezburger eye   No cheezburger = I ATTACK YOU.   RARRRR.   GAHHH-K.

puppydog eyes

Rion is appalled...

January 5's photo. I like the dark to light contrast. Could have probably fiddled with it - strategically used the flash, etc. - but I like this how it came out anyway.

Then I skipped a couple of days. Trust me; you don't really want to see any of the horribly mundane photos I took January 6-7. (I deleted them all; they were even putting ME to sleep.)

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

So I get home from work and look what I discover...

So I get home from work and look what I discover...
I'm pretty sure one of the minimized windows reads "Daily Kitty".


Busted!
BUSTED!

photography lesson*

January 3, 2011

Ignoring the fact that I obviously needed to crop the photo a little bit more at the bottom, I think this is a much better attempt at Lucky Cat's portrait than my first attempt, which was face-on, and how I take way too many of my photos of objects. Don't you think?

January 3, 2011     vs.     January 3, 2011

Probably higher shadow contrast would have been even better. But I think the 1/4 profile shot makes Lucky Cat look almost, y'know, a little wistful...

* This is my somewhat-daily photo, a day late. I would have posted last night but I started running all my virus scanners and so had to wait till today. Deal with it. This blog makes no claims or guarantees of timeliness.

Sunday, January 02, 2011

pixxiefish, egyptian walker

January 2, 2011

We leave for Egypt in 10 days.* I can't wait to ride the rollercoasters around the pyramids!!!

* Did I mention we're going to Egypt? ...Uhh, we're going to Egypt!

Saturday, January 01, 2011

New Year, Day One

I don't really have any real New Year's Resolutions. New Year's Resolutions are just made to be broken, so I don't want to make any!

However, things I will aspire to this year:

1) Drink more water. (That one is recycled from 2008. It lasted a decent while before I got slack again.)

2) Take better care of myself. (Is that loosey-goosey enough for you?) This will take place on a number of fronts, including food and exercise, plus I want to get more arts-and-crafty.

3) Endeavour to post pictures within a year of having taken them. This one will be a challenge, but I figure if nothing else, it will help me blog more often, the one resolution I have consistently refused to make!


I have also decided that I want to take more pictures. Those of you who are familiar with my GIANT, never-ending Flickr stream of 1,001 photos of the Arc de Triomphe and other vacation stand-by photos, are thinking, "What??? That's not even possible, is it?" But what I want to do is take more photos, and get better at doing so, and including pictures of the everyday. I'm going to try to take at least one photo a day, even if it's stupidly mundane, and many of these, if not all (I have learned to not promise more than I can actually offer), I will post here.

So here, just before the stroke of midnight, let me offer you Picture Number One. However, it's your lucky day. I couldn't decide between two very different pictures, so I am giving you a two-for-one deal.

The Festive:
January 1, 2011

And Loving Boy Meets Evil Dog:
January 1, 2011

New Year, New Blog Post

Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope you all rang the new year in in style. We decided to take it easy and stay home (my brother had invited us over, but we'll go next weekend instead). We ordered Indian take-away, which I went to pick up around 6:45. The excitement of the evening was that when I arrived at the restaurant, I realized I had a purse but no wallet. Gah. So I drove home (luckily not too far) and then back out again. The second excitement of the evening was that, while I was inside the restaurant picking up the food, someone parked and blocked the exit to the parking lot where I was. Double gah. Luckily it was a larger lot and I could exit from another spot. But it was annoying!

And you see - THIS is why I don't blog on a daily basis. But I'm going to try to be better. (No, that is not a New Year's Resolution. If it is, it's DOOMED to be broken.)

Anyway, so we ate Indian take-away - very dee-lish and lots of leftovers await us. We started watching a new (to us) TV show, called Avatar: The Last Air Bender. It's a Nickelodeon cartoon that ran a few years ago for 3 seasons, and they recently made a live-action movie which is apparently terrible. But the cartoon was great! I highly recommend it.

Then it was 9:30, so we decided to watch The Matrix. I hadn't seen it in a year or two, and it's aged quite well. What a great film. We are debating whether to watch the other two Matrix movies this weekend as well...they're not as good...

At 11:58, we managed to get a live Internet feed of the ball dropping in Times Square on the TV via my computer. (Almost didn't make it!) Somewhat anti-climactic, I found. I seem to remember in the past that the ball dropped much farther, for much longer. This was a short drop (yes, still spread over 10 seconds), with a bunch of distracting advertising. Blech. I think I am just turning into a cranky grump.

I called my mom, and then we watched more cartoons. First, another episode of Air Bender. Then, one of the craziest, most twisted things I have ever seen, Happy Tree Friends. I still shudder slightly thinking about it. It stars a bunch of cute, cuddly, happy cartoon animals...and I'm just starting to wonder if this is a show for kids or not...when all of a sudden one of the bears gets pinned on a giant stick and his heart is torn right out. Uh, yeah. Not for kids. Got it. LOL.

After that, we needed something to cheer us up again. We put on a show called Invader Zim, which was bizarre and amusing. But one of the characters sounded just like Kevin McDonald, from Kids in the Hall, another show we started re-watching recently, and it was driving us CRAZY! Turns out, yup, it's Kevin McDonald. Cool.

Anyhow, that was New Year's.

So...I haven't been blogging but I really should have been. I've been busy as a beaver for the last month or so putting up old pictures on Flickr. This was spurred by two things: (1) I felt guilty, and (2) I was worried following a hard drive crash that Randal suffered sometime in November. He has lost most of his photos from Japan onward! I figured if I get them up on Flickr, at least I will always have a copy available in some form.

So what do I have?

Eiffel Tower

- a TON of photos from Paris and Strasbourg, where we went in June 2009. That collection is almost complete, two days left to go! I might blog about some of it separately, at some point. (Don't hold your breath.)



Julie & Rion   Packing up   Camping

- camping at Charleston Lake, camping at Bon Echo, camping at Voyageur. We also went camping at Murphy's Point, but, alas, the photos from that trip were on Randal's hard drive.



Robert and Judy and Rion

- my family proves they are able to do more together than play Rockband, and we all go hiking in Gatineau Park on the Thanksgiving weekend.



Inchy the Neck Worm
- I've also done a TON of knitting, if you're into that kind of thing.



I plan on blogging again later today about my New Year's Resolutions...not that I have any...not that I'm not perfect already...plus what we did at Christmas.