photography lesson*

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?

     vs.     

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.

pixxiefish, egyptian walker

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!

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:


And Loving Boy Meets Evil Dog:

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?



- 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.)



      

- 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.





- 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.




- 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.

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

Guess it's time to bring the patio furniture inside, huh?


We were outside earlier today running errands and it was half-raining, half-snowing, but melting instantly upon hitting the ground. A few hours spent indoors not paying attention to the weather outside, and look what happens!



These lumps of white with green sticking out? Yeah, those used to be plants with really colourful wildflowers popping out all over...

Every year, I manage to be surprised at the first snowfall. But this year is earlier than the last few, for sure.



Our winter tires go on just next weekend. And I suppose I should stop procrastinating, and pull out the winter coats and boots... *sigh* Mon pays, c'est l'hiver. The crazy thing (or not, considering it's Canada and highly unpredictable weather sometimes) is that I was outside on Friday afternoon a few times just in short sleeves! (But then the temperature plummeted just a few hours later, so I should have known.)

Flubbed shot, my a$$

Sorry. Coming on the electronic heels of my previous story (yeah, 6 weeks later, I know), I had to laugh when I saw this:

Tiger Woods flubs shot and gives us the best golf shot you'll ever see.


Read the full story on Yahoo! Sports here.


Freakin' déjà vu. Except I, of course, never saw what hit me. Literally. And I suspect Tiger's flubbed shot was not quite as powerful as the one that hit me, else we probably wouldn't be able to view this picture at all.


Yes, I will post proper news again someday. Someday. Something interesting has to happen first, that's the catch, see?

Meet Bruisie. We're friends.

Take it from me, golf balls and nearby appendages do not mix.





Bruisie brought along a friend, Swelling Sack of Fluid. (You can't really see so well here, but my forearm was quite swollen below the elbow. It was a beneath-the-skin, hard sack of pain.)



From here, Bruisie looks like a giant razz-berry. How cute.



Day 2. Bruisie's new look. Kinda Goth, n'est-ce pas?



Swelling Sack went home sometime overnight, thankfully. I won't miss the little bugger, though he did leave his little brothers Tender and Sore behind to keep Bruisie company.



Golf is a dangerous game.

We had our annual Golf Day at work yesterday. I got hit by a freak shot at the tee-off for the 3rd or 4th hole. We were playing in teams of 4, and after having made my fist non-sucky shot of the day (I made it halfway down to the hole), I retreated to the sidelines to chat with my boss while our last team player, her husband, took his shot. We were off to the side, next to our carts, and somehow Greg managed to totally mess up his tee-off, and winged the ball straight toward us at a sharp 30-40 degree angle. All I remember was him calling, "Watch out!", me turning my head to look down the fairway to see where his ball had gone (yeah, I'm a dumbass), and then WHUMP! -something hitting my arm.* And then burning. And Margo saying, "Are you OK?", and Mary getting an icepack and asking me if I wanted to sit down, which I did, and which were probably the smartest two things I did all day.

Then there was lots of phone-calling (Mary to her husband, who had driven us there and was shopping nearby, to come back to the golf course to pick me up and take me to the walk-in clinic; me to Randal to get him to go home to get the car to meet me at the clinic), driving (from Gatineau to Orleans, which is not that far but we kept hitting traffic and construction), waiting (first at the clinic, which was not taking walk-ins till 3 (thankfully it was almost 2:20 when I got there); then at home, while Randal searched for a new ice pack (he ended up giving me a Mr. Freeze); then at the X-ray clinic; then at Shoppers to get my prescriptions filled, where the pharmacy was the busiest I'd ever seen), and icing, lots and lots of icing.

Thankfully, the doctor called this morning to say the X-ray was clean and there was no sign of a break or other abnormality. I stayed home today, and the arm has gone back to almost its normal size, though I have the strangest little wound ever. Maybe I should get a tattoo?

Oh, and the (somewhat) ironic part? Because my teammate struck me instead of the fairway, and we were playing "best ball" (where you play each subsequent shot based on where the closest ball ended up) MY ball was the best one that round, and so when I insisted they keep playing without me, my teammates continued on my ball.


* My arms being crossed over my chest at the time. I don't even want to think of what might have happened if my arms had not been crossed there.