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friends / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
13
Aug 15

Folded re-discovery

I was looking for my other microphone, my Sennheiser classic, which meant I had to go through this box in that closet and then another box and so on.

What? You don’t have more than microphone at home? The Sennheiser records a better sound than my newer, cheaper microphones.

Anyway, just before I found it I ran across my origami collection in a box of desk supplies. Kelly made these for me years ago. (There’s no medium she can’t conquer, it seems.)

I had always intended to use them here, actually, but as an under construction place holder. I just never really built a site so intense as to make use of them in that way. So I put them in my homemade diffuser box that I’ve been tinkering with recently. It isn’t perfect, but it does help make a neat picture. These are with my phone, even:

adventures / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Aug 15

This nickel doesn’t bend

Easily the best picture I’ll take this week:

Of course it is only Wednesday, but what am I going to do to top that?

You should see the version The Black Cat photobombed. It is a near-perfect head merger.

Tonight I did the thing where you accidentally turn Siri on. Since the device was patiently waiting I gave it a few queries. (Still doesn’t know who John Shaft is.) And then I asked this question. A machine has never made me feel bad for it before:

But, man, I want to go buy my phone some cookies. And introduce it to my old iPod.

I had to pull out a few things from the office closet tonight — an old mixing board, some cables and such. While searching for a particular microphone — What? You don’t have more than one microphone in your home? — I ran across some old coins. I don’t collect coins, but I have a wheat penny and a 1940s mercury dime and a silver dollar from my birth year. Together, I learned tonight, those are worth about $6.51. So there goes that retirement plan. This guy doesn’t add anything to that fund:

Numismatists would turn their nose up at my buffalo nickel. Too much wear. That’s why this coin was on the way out after its 25-year run. The production problems meant almost all of the coins that went into circulation got heavy wear. And, of course, But I say that’s what makes this coin works. We’ll never know how old that coin is. Ever. And, after a certain age (It is from somewhere between 1913 and 1938) isn’t that what we all want?

Also, the buffalo nickel doesn’t do yoga. I read the Wikipedia pages of all three men — a Cheyenne, a Kiowa and an Oglala Lakota — believed to be part of the composite character. Not a single one of them could pull of an arm-balancing split.

photo / running / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
Aug 15

No, that’s just sweat

Happy Tuesday. Allie says hello. She’s busy getting her early afternoon sun tan here. I only decided to take a picture because she made some weird nose and took on an entirely unusual posture. And by the time I had her framed up she moved, looked up and gave me the “What?” look.

You don’t interrupted cat tans around here. She spent all night roaring around the house and will probably yowl the night away to remind me of my transgression.

More school work today. Spent some time at the library and at a restaurant and then wandered through the local “You’re weird? We’re weird! Buy weird stuff here!” If you could put a Who logo or a Star Wars icon on it they have it. If you needed a temporary disc golf goal, skateboard, comic books, vinyl or DVD rental, this was your place. It seems they’re limping along as a brick and mortar generalist just no one else in town is stocking the stuff they are.

Went for a run before dinner. I took a photo every mile, which was silly because it was night time and I chose the darkest route possible. Here’s the first mile:

And here was the fourth mile:

I manage to run around a storm cloud. I ran a big loop and at one point the lightning was in front of me in the distance. Later, on the other end of the loop, the lightning was in front of me again. By the time I got in The Yankee asked me if it was raining. It was not, but it was humid. And I looked like I’d just climbed out of a pool.

A nice, easy five-mile run.

I do not know what is happening.

family / Monday / photo — Comments Off
10
Aug 15

I’m photographing things

Back to work. Back to syllabus writing and lining up assignments and the like. It is a time intensive process, especially so when you’re preparing a new class. I’m taking over an older course and revamping the thing, so it will be a work in progress until the final. (Next year, if I’m asked to teach it again, it will be even better. Until then, it is an almost entire-rebuild.)

So that takes time and daydreaming and emailing and so on and so forth. It isn’t particularly interesting for most people, so there’s no need to get into it here.

Instead, here are a few things I’ve photographed in my homemade light diffuser box. I’m having far too much fun with the thing. I wonder if I’ll run out of interesting things to shoot before the novelty wears out.

Good thing I’ve got a lot of interesting things, I guess.

Here are two of them now. This was my grandfather’s Bible. It is the first one he ever used as a preacher. A friend gave it to him on his 16th birthday. She wrote inside that she hoped he would use it in such a way that she could say “I knew him when.”

He wrote a verse from Isaiah beneath her note.

And while that was my grandfather’s Bible, this was his father-in-law’s pocket watch:

I remember him, one of the five greats- I knew. I can’t find out really anything about this particular watch. It is like a very mass-produced piece, and not even particularly old. But it looks sharp, doesn’t it? That’s not even the diffuser box. It looks sharp in your hand, too. If I wasn’t afraid of losing it I’d buy a chain and start wearing the thing.

And it would be amusing watching the guy teaching a social media class going into his pocket to pulling that out.

adventures / photo / weekend — Comments Off
9
Aug 15

Welcome back

Hi. How’ve you been? I haven’t written anything here in two weeks, but it seems like it was yesterday. Here are some pictures to catch you up on the last few days.

One day it rained. We had flowers in bloom and the petals of this one caught a lot of water. I thought that was pretty, so I tried, and failed, to capture it:

We had great chicken biscuits from Plucked Up, a hipster chicken joint (of all things), a Columbus restaurant on the recommendation of a stranger. She did not steer us wrong:

The homemade biscuit had a spicy pineapple marmalade.

The Yankee made homemade pasta. It was so delicious we dried a little bit for later:

So we’ll be getting a pasta maker soon, I suspect.

I made a small light diffuser box, which was the second most fun thing I did in the last two weeks. The first two or three things I shot in it were cat toys, because they were nearby. Now I’m wandering around looking for small things to photograph.

Here’s an Franklin D. Roosevelt – John Garner pin, from Green Duck Co., Chicago, circa 1933 or 1937. Garner helped push FDR’s New Deal legislation through Congress, but “Cactus Jack” and the president would clash over policy during the Depression. Garner also believed Roosevelt should not seek a third term and challenged FDR for the 1940 Democratic presidential nomination. Dropped by Roosevelt and beaten, Garner left D.C. in 1941 after four hugely successful decades, promising to never cross the Potomac again, and he never did.

And here’s a Unigate milk bottle featuring an ad for a shopping center in South London. It’ll run you about £6 on eBay. I got it because I liked the graphics and I asked nicely at a cafe. Milk bottles, it turns out, have become a big nostalgia item in England.

The most exciting thing I’ve done in the past two weeks was to take a 30+ mile bike ride on my new Specialized which had at least three categorized climbs on it. And I got to do it chasing The Yankee across state lines.

She took these pictures near the end of that ride:

And to wrap up the exercise for July:

If I’m going to eat chicken biscuits with spicy pineapple marmalade I need to exercise more than that.