tales of interest

Extreme fallage

Here are some pictures from two recent hikes. The first was a hike with Carolyn near St. Jacobs a few weeks ago, and the second hike was with Richard in Homer Watson Park today (or, I guess yesterday at this point... I really should go to sleep)

Firey-red maple along the trail in St. Jacobs.

This shot isn't all that great, I'll admit. The tricky thing is that I had a manual-focus lens, and I was nearly able to compose a shot that doesn't look blurry. I like the really short depth-of-field that my 50mm lens gives me.

A fallen leaf along the trail in Homer Watson Park. Again, taken with a manual-focus lens. It's not super-crisp, but I think it came out fairly well.

untitled

Well, Carolyn has up and gone to India with her mom. The only instruction I was given was not to mope. So here I am... not moping...

Hmm... on an entirely unrelated topic, did you know that there are about twenty-thousand minutes in two weeks? And the average resting heart rate for a man is 70 beats-per-minute. So that equates to approximately 1.5 million heart beats.

1,499,995

...

1,499,985

...

*sigh*

Photographs

The HR department at my company (with some encouragement from fellow camera-geek employees) have decided to spruce up our walls with photographs by the employees. We had about a month to post five pictures to a dedicated flickr group, and the photos will be chosen from there. It took me nearly the entire month to sit down and browse through my photos, and many hours to actually choose five... but eventually I did... and I'm still not sure if I made the best choices. Going through the hordes of photos (probably over 10,000) was a truly lamentable task - it emphasized what a small fraction of my photos are actually good. I'd like to think that ratio of good to crappy photos is increasing at the very least, but I'm still a long way off from where I want to be. Having said that, I'm still enjoying my camera, and I'm looking forward to all the things I have yet to photograph, and to all the ways I have yet to photograph them.

Anyway, you can see my pool of photos here. The pictures I posted can be found here.

You don't know Jack

We've had the pleasure of caring for Jack for over two years now, and he still manages to surprise us.

For instance, we woke up in the middle of the night to a strange rustling noise. When we turned out the light, we found Jack had settled quite comfortably in this dresser drawer. Surprisingly he both got up into the drawer (2nd from bottom), and managed to fit inside of it.

Secondly, despite being emasculated years ago, and being a fairly... let's say "leisurely" cat, Jack is still inclined to defend his honour and his territory. When a rogue element was discovered in our yard yesterday, this is the scene the ensued:

We broke up the fight when it got dirty, and Jack was not injured in the melee. But I have a feeling we haven't seen the last of Lord Blacky yet.

On Saturday, we took Jack to the vet to get his annual shots, and of course we got him weighed. He's now in his teens, weighing in at 19.8 lbs! Yay Jack! At this rate he is soon to be featured on the cover of FQ.

The kitchen transmogrifier

I don't know if many of you have one of these, but if you don't, you should get one. They're great! It's this big box that transforms dirty dishes into clean ones! We got ours on Wednesday, and we just love it. All you need to do is feed it small blue tablets, add water and electricity (always a pleasant mixture), and it does the rest. Ingenious.

200th post

Well, I've hit the 200 mark, almost 2.5 years after starting this blog. If I include the 57 posts I had at my previous blog that I started in February of 2005, it seems I'm averaging about 3-4 days between posts. I'd say that's pretty good considering I haven't posted since the beginning of August, right? Cut me some slack.

Anyway, I've been a creative funk for the last little while. Not quite sure why, but camera was collecting dust and I had no incentive to take it for a walk. Then on Friday I got an e-mail saying that one of my flickr photos was being used in an online publication (look at the Tulip Festival photos, top-right corner). Maybe it's a bit silly, but I was flattered and started to feel good about myself. I checked out the picture they chose and I thought: "if you think that's a good photo...". It's particularly funny because I had only recently realized that I still had a flickr account active.

Confidence revived, Carolyn and I took a walk around Old Westmount neighbourhood on Sunday. The weather was perfect and the golden embers of the setting sun set everything aglow. I wanted to keep it simple. I know if I tried too hard, I would just get frustrated. Here are the results: