Week Two and More!

I was taking macro shots today when I found this barely noticeable flower.  It was so small, I had to get a macro lens to focus on it, which left the depth of field very shallow.  I did my best to keep it focused within reason.  I also took the image and played a little bit with it in Photoshop.  @NYTrees suggested that I crop the picture a certain way.  I did so to see how it looks.  Needless to say, I have a lot to learn about composition still.  Thank you for the creative suggestion!  I really appreciate it.

This is the second week I have been on my non-meat diet.  After taking various vitamins everyday, I think I have passed the meat-craving stage.  I have been more conscious about things that have meat like it’s second nature.  I am always weary about certain foods and always triple check to ensure they don’t have meat. I can’t say I have felt healthier though.  I half expected myself to feel more energized.  I don’t think I am because it’s not like I am exercising or anything.  I know you get out what you put in.  Working out is something I am definitely not putting in.

Next week is SXSW (South by South West).  I expected to go this year, however there were some snags that prevented me from going.  I had everything planned until late last year when I re-evaluated finances.  I opted out of the trip after having unexpected financial hits and decided to wait and see how things turned out for next year. It’s not like it’s going anywhere.  I still think I am going to miss out this year, but there is always next year.

Lately I have been watching downtime i’ve had at home. Usually I put myself in situations where I am constantly busy with projects of some sort whether they are productive or not.  I’ve toned them down to the following.

• More time with the family (obviously)
• Photography
• Ideas for writing
• Cleaning

More time with the family is obvious.  I can’t say I have anymore more to add to it because it’s been an evolving thing lately.  I’ve been playing more Uno, checkers, and pretend than I think I have ever played in my own childhood (at least it feels that way).  I’ve had evil ‘My Little Ponies’ take over the world while Cinderella comes and saves the day with some penguins. I can’t say I get enough of it, because I do.

I have been working on taking more pictures.  The upcoming daylight savings will make it easier to come home and do some picture work during the week.  With the wintertime, it was difficult because when I got home, it would be dark.  Couldn’t really do much during that time.  Also the end of the school year is coming up.  That will allow the kids to stay up and we will have extra time at the park.  Makes for good practice.

Ideas for writing.  I have a lot of ideas and the urge to write from time to time.  I can never find the motivation to do so. I am using my photography as a window to allow me to write more.  Consider it more of blog writing about my photography.  Excuses mostly.

The time to clean is upon me.  I have an O.C.D. for cleaning every now and then.  I had a bug this weekend to clean and I did. I think I am going to start the deep cleaning part this week.  I am going to throw out basically anything I haven’t seen/used in a while.  I have a lot of clutter sitting around and I think it’s time for a cleansing.  I think it will be a slow process, but in the end, I will end up with less stuff than I care to have.

I was also considering moving the blog for a while.  I opted not to move it at this time because I don’t write enough to warrant a change.  I was looking at Square space to move my blog to.  After evaluating it, I think the only advantage it has was the reliability over this GoDaddy service i’m using.  I know GoDaddy isn’t the best when it comes to hosting Wordpress, however it is working for the time being. Square Space requires the minimum of $8 a month.  I don’t need it right now.  Wordpress is just fine (at least until I get really annoyed by the service at a later time).

I think that’s about it for now.  I didn’t expect the post to go this long, but I guess I had more to talk about than normal.

Luck of the Draw

Yes It’s Real.

I will start at the beginning…

On Sunday Morning I was making breakfast. I had finished cooking when I started buttering the toast that had just popped out.  While buttering the toast, I had become careless at the way I was handling it.  Needless to say I dropped it on the floor. When it landed though, something miraculous happened.  It landed butter side up.  WTF!  That isn’t supposed to happen..but it did!  Talk about luck of the draw.

Breakfast was short lived.  I watched the Canada vs USA Hockey game on the Olympics website. After the game had ended, Annette, the kids and I went to the park.  We had a great time playing in the park and swinging on the swings.  Near the end of the visit, we started drawing on the sidewalk with some chalk.  We drew murals of various things and drew a little but of attention with our drawings of castles, Super Mario and Pea Shooters from Plants vs Zombies. Evening came upon us and we started our walk back.  On the way back, we stumbled upon a clover patch in which we started searching.  Sure enough, we found luck!  Four-leaf clovers were there.  Annette and I then started talking about the day so far… first, you have toast landing butter side up and you find a patch with four-leaf clovers.

With a stroke of luck like that, there is only one thing left to do.

Yep, we bought Lotto tickets.

Though my life, I have been lucky with a great many things.  I have won countless radio contests, I have seen Third-Eye Blind backstage because I submitted a paper to a random drawing.  I’ve had a wonderful family that I have lived with and life is good.  I can’t really complain about anything.  Fortune has been with us one way or another.  I have a wonderful artistic Daughter who is drawing better than I ever did at her age.  I have another daughter who is charming and wonderful with her sense of adventure, imagination and wonder. What else do I need?

The rest of the day couldn’t have ended any better.  We ate, watched some TV and the kids got ready for bed.  I do have to say though, even if we don’t win the Lottery, two out of three ain’t bad.

Pic of the Day

We went to the park.  We had a great time using sidewalk chalk and playing. Annette and Kyra started playing hop scotch and taking turns playing. This is a picture of Kyra playing.

Pic of the Day

The picture of the day is an amazing one. No words needed since this picture speaks a thousand of them.

Week One

Well, it’s been one week since I stopped eating meat. This is my experience so far…

1) It’s been tougher than it looks.  I found myself subconsciously reaching for meat the first few days.  No I didn’t eat any, but I had to make a conscious effort to remind myself.

2) I started having dreams about eating meat.  It’s a little weird.  I suppose it’s similar to a smoker who quit.  They have dreams about smoking even though they quit years back.

3) I had cravings for meat (obviously).  I don’t think the cravings were for any perticular type of meat, just meat in general. I think my body is craving vitamins / minerals associated with it.  I need to pack up on some vitamins to substitute this. I eat fish on Fridays however a week isn’t a good enough time to replenish those vitamins. When this is over, I am soooo eatting a double bacon western cheeseburger.

I am doing my best to avoid anemia.  I am eating my spinach though so hopefully I am combating that ok.  I just don’t want to become sick because of this diet. I don’t want to combat a cold/flu at this time.  That would be horrible.

In conclusion though, this has been a very interesting feat.  I know I have lost weight, however I don’t know how much.  I don’t have a scale readily available to me so it’s hard to tell.  I don’t have the “I-Ate-Meat” comas.  I don’t find myself dragged down as often anymore.  So far so good…

Anika’s Individuality

Anika is growing up to be a fantastic and wonderful person. She is smart, intelligent and very knowledgeable in many subjects. She’s highly adaptive, and learns quickly with problems. She even beat me the other day in checkers. I lost all my pieces when I only took 2. Yah, she’s that good.

I am used to her coming to us (her parents) when she has a problem. I always think of her being young and very child like. I think every parent does. When something was wrong, always corrected the issue. Parents are caring and nurturing like that. As part of raising her, We make her aware that she has choices in things, and she has the freedom to pursue those choices. She can choose what she wants to eat, what she wants to wear, what she wants to play or do. If we make a decision, we ask our kids their opinion. It’s our basic freedom in this country. I want them to know that.

When she decides to keep things from us, it’s very unsettling. It’s her right but the parent instinct wants to take over. Annette tends to get information from her, and resolves situations as they stand. Sometimes I get information and assist in resolution to issues as well.

The point at hand is, she is becoming a grown up. She is starting to develop issues and she realizes that she has the right to do whatever she wants. I do my hardest to make her realize that as a parent, we are there. Sometimes, things may be foggy and she has a hard time realizing it. That may be the downside to things, but at the end of the day.. she knows we are there.

I applaud her knowing that she is a remarkable individual. She is capable of doing so much. It’s sometimes hard watching her grow up. Especially when I am used to her being so young.

Wordpress

I am considering the transfer of this blog to the wordpress.com domain. More to ponder..

Firefox vs Chrome

I know Chrome came out a long time ago. I am aware of the countless Chrome vs Firefox articles out there. I am not a tech journalist. I just don’t have the brains for that sort of reporting. I am writing this as a home user. A normal person who used Firefox everyday and switched to Google Chrome for that everyday use. Here is my story…

I have used Google Chrome’s browser for about 2 months now. I switched from Firefox because I had a performance issue regarding the browser. Here are my thoughts so far…

I first tried Chrome when it came out. I was really impressed with the browser itself, however I really didn’t see why I needed to switch at the time. Chrome was fast and very efficient with what it was capable of doing.

Firefox of course had been in the wild for years upon years. I was used to it and I think it was more of a “I had been using this for years, why switch now” attitude. I rarely used any Firefox plugins. If I did, they were very small and mundane sort of things. I really didn’t save any bookmarks because I am used to formating my computers every few months anyway.

During the last few months however, I had been using Firefox and noticing a lag in performance and load times. It’s not like I made any great change to my computer. It just started having problems. When a change like that effects my normal routine (not like I have a standard one anyway), I have to fix it and pronto. At first, I had un-installed Firefox and reinstalled it. The change proved to have no effect. Instead of trying to fix the problem, I just installed Google Chrome and switched.

1) [Good] Chrome is fast – The load up time is not comparable to Firefox. The usability inside Windows is also very speedy. Firefox seems to take it’s time to do things, but Chrome just does it. It reminds me of Apple’s Safari. It just does it.

2) [Good] The kids can play their games – The kids play a variety of kids games over the internet. I have had very few issues during switch over of browsers. I think only one browser required either Firefox or IE, but that was resolved quickly.

3) [Bad] Chrome doesn’t have the spell checker that Firefox has. – That;s the big bummer for me. I find myself selecting words that I commonly spell wrong and when I right click, there are no suggestions. I hate the extra step I have to take to figure out what I spelled wrong. It can be good in it’s own rights (forcing me to learn the new spelling), but I am impatient. That alone would make me want to switch back to Firefox.

Conclusions: I think if there was no problem with performance in Firefox, I would be using it today. I just don’t have the time to deal with those kind of problems. I think the people at Mozilla could learn from what Google has done. Overall I think Chrome is a good alternative to Firefox. All it needs now is the spell checker.

Pic of the Day

I did not take this picture.  My oldest daughter did.  I was teaching Anika how to take pictures and I had set the camera for automatic aperture and let her manually focus.  She got the hang of it (mostly), but this the picture she took.

Pic of the Day

This past Valentine’s weekend, I took the kids out to the Mustard fields and had a shooting frenzy with it.  This is one of the pictures I took out in the field.