Entries Tagged with photo blogging
May 21st, 2007
I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep. Lately, it just seems so much worse. I feel so agonizingly tired all the time and my fibromyalgia had been getting better but now it’s back with a vengeance. I know what the doctors said — no rest, no ease of pain. I just feel like everything hurts, even my eyeballs.
This morning I finally accepted the truth.
Aloof is a lot to blame for my lack of sleep and something has to be done about it whether I like it or not and whether he likes it or not.
Non-stop for months now he has been on a tirade about his food. I guess it’s just been getting worse and worse since I cut off the cat food ever-dispenser and went to feeding them twice a day on a vet-recommended restricted diet that the vet insisted that he’d get used to. He hasn’t lost any weight though Needy has but Aloof’s attitude has just gotten worse and worse.
How does he tirade? He goes around knocking things off of the furniture, whatever will make noise or spill — he’s figured out that cans sometimes have fluid in them.
So he starts anywhere between 3:30am and 5am and he starts sliding things off of my bed stands and dresser and he’s found other ways to make noise that annoys me too. He’s discovered the right amount of time from when I wake up and yell at him and he runs away to just before I’m about to fall asleep again so I never quite get back to sleep. Clearly he’s learned some sort of sleep deprivation torture from Dick Chenney’s people.
This is why I never want to get up in the morning, why after the animals have been fed in the morning at 6am, I can drift back to sleep, sleep through my alarm and be late to work, and sleep through half the weekend. It’s why I never feel rested through the work day. It’s why my eyes feel so tired that when I blink I feel on the edge of dreaming almost constantly and it’s getting worse.
So tonight, I’m going to start putting Aloof in Pugly’s kennel when I go to bed. Pugly and Needy always sleep quietly through the night or if they don’t, they rest or play quietly near me while I sleep and don’t wake me up until the alarm goes off — or until I start chasing Aloof. Aloof is the one that has to learn that bed time is bed time.
Of course, catching him is going to be the hard part. Catching him more than once, will be near impossible. But I think it’s this or part ways and I’m not ready to think about that.
Tags: the cats, the puppy, sleep deprivation, black cat, retraining a cat, photo blogging, flickr
May 21st, 2007
Yesterday morning, something, crows, I think, brought down my bird feeder. I had been watching birds come and go, but got distracted with the computer for about 10 minutes and when I looked back at the picture window, the bird feeder was on the ground in several pieces.
My neighbor’s bird feeder appeared to be MIA as well so I’m betting it was those rather large crows I saw flying about that morning.
I added it to my Lowes shopping list since I was going that afternoon anyway.
That was a dizzyingly frustrating experience in itself. All I really wanted was to buy a plain wooden door to put between my garage and my breeze-way/dining room. Growing up in New Orleans, we had a hollow brown door there that opened into the house. I really just wanted the same thing, but white. Really, I need it to open into the house, because the garage is a few steps down and it would be awkwardly dangerous to have it open into the garage.
However, what I was told at Lowes is that in my town, the building/fire code is that you have to have a steel fire door there. Currently, there’s just a storm door that was put there by the original owner when the breeze-way was added on — several owners ago. But I have to put a steel fire door there.
And it has to open into the garage because if there’s a fire in the garage, that will make it less likely to explode into the house if the door gets opened.
Oh, and though Lowes installs doors, they don’t install fire doors, which have to be specially ordered. You have to hire a contractor to do that.
So, I came home with a new bird feeder and a pot of Nemesia from Lowes and no door and no order for a door.
I like the two tiers on the new bird feeder. Even more birds can come and visit at one time now. Hopefully this one will last longer than six months, which is how long the last one lasted.
The Nemesia are really pretty sitting on my front porch too.
Tags: bird feeder, crows, Nemesia, Lowes, fire door, fire code, photo blogging, flickr
May 17th, 2007
The Canon PowerShot S3 IS has arrived. The Canon PowerShot SD110 is out. Yay!
I have a lot of buttons to figure out. There’s a lot of features to learn. However, I can already tell just from toying with it even in the dreary, rainy, overcast light we have today that the new camera is 100 times better. It’s going to be so much more fun to use.
Tuesday night my mother pointed out that I was really hard on the SD110. I’m going to have to be much nicer and kinder and carefuller with the S3. I guess that means it might be a few weeks before I start being really daring with it. 
Here are a few of the 100 photos I took in the first day. I can already tell an amazing difference in the quality of the photographs the new camera produces. These were all taken from my living room through my picture window. I used to have to stand about a foot away from my bird feeder very still and wait without breathing for a very long time to get a close up of a bird…and still the photo wouldn’t be sharp enough to really identify the bird.
Tags: bird watching, Rusty Blackbird, Blue Jay, Northern Cardinal, Chipping Sparrow, photo blogging, Canon PowerShot S3 IS, camera, Canon PowerShot SD110
May 17th, 2007
Pugly has managed to catch Kennel Cough again even though he’s been vaccinated. He was up all night the last two nights coughing and yesterday morning, he vomited. So instead of daycare, I took him to the vet. The vet put him on home rest and quarantine. No daycare and no visiting the neighborhood dogs.
However, he doesn’t seem to have lost his energy. He’s been chasing his tail and looking for birds and neighbors to bark at. Nor has he lost his appetite. He’s been on carpet patrol looking for morsels or even things he’s not supposed to eat like plastic or shoes.
In fact, Tuesday morning as I was pulling out of the driveway, I looked into the living room window, I saw Pugly standing on the coffee table. So, there I was stopped in the street, sitting in my Jeep, fussing at Pugly, telling him to get off the coffee table and there he was, staring at me from the living room coffee table through the window.
That probably went on for about 3 or 4 minutes.
And you know he could see me, pointing at him and gesturing for him to get down. And he was just standing there, mocking me, letting me know that when I wasn’t home, Pugs apparently are allowed on the coffee table.
He did get down and run to perch on his ottoman in front of the window before I drove away, but the message had been passed along.
And later that night…he was eating a paper towel…so he can’t be that sick, right?
Tags: the puppy, Pug, dog, photo blogging, Kennel Cough, quarantine, flickr
May 15th, 2007
Yesterday, I was driving down Forest in the right lane and right as I came to The Bike Shop there were about 20 or 30 folks on bikes out front on the lawn. They chose to enter traffic right in front of me at that particular moment and they didn’t seem to be paying attention to oncoming traffic. I generally have no problem with bicyclists as long as they seem to be competent and following the law themselves.
I slammed on my brakes to avoid hitting those guys you see up ahead (in this picture I took later) making the turn onto the side street from the right lane there. My camera which had been sitting on the seat next to me at the time ended up under the gas pedal. There’s now a dent that affects how fast I can change the zoom, which now requires a lot of fiddling as it seems to get stuck quite often, usually in the setting I don’t want it in.
I was planning on buying a new high end P&S camera in July, but this morning I broke down and ordered a Canon Powershot S3 IS. It’ll be here tomorrow. I’m both excited and annoyed.
Tags: bicyclists, road hazards, driving, reckless, dangerous, camera, Canon Photoshot S3 IS, photo blogging, flickr
May 11th, 2007
I’m still unclear why they were walking away from the store with the empty basket.
Tags: photo blogging, shopping cart
May 3rd, 2007
I was looking back over the Project 365 photos I’ve taken so far. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve contributed 122 photos to my Project 365 project out of the 470 photos I’ve uploaded to flickr, which has been a subset of the photos I’ve taken — only the best photos or only the ones I considered not the most horrible in the world.
Looking back over a quarter of a year in photos, I was sort of surprised at the memories they triggered. Granted, I’ve added little mini-blogs with a lot of them. For instance, I knew we had a late Winter here, but now I know we had our first real storm of 2007 starting January 14th. And the day I came down with the Norovirus, I took a photo of a license plate — PEPRONI. I have a photo of the first flower to bloom in my garden even though it’s already disappeared. I have photos of 122 moments that might have otherwise slipped away.
And I’ve had fun doing it.
More
Tags: Project 365, flickr, photo blogging
May 1st, 2007
(Click on the image for a larger version.)
Tags: photo blogging, laptop, paws, flickr
April 27th, 2007
(Click to see larger version.)
Don’t forget to stop by the Friday Ark too.
Tags: photo blogging, Pug, the puppy, Friday Ark, flickr
April 27th, 2007
I ordered a set of Mini Moo Cards today. I picked out about 30 photos from my flickr account and cropped them down to the itty bitty size of 28mm x 70mm. Basically I’ll get about 3 or 4 copies of each.
On the back of each card in orange print, I put the quote:
“Touch magic, pass it on.”
- Jane Yolen
Then my first two initials and my last name, an email address, and my flickr address.
Now, I’ve got about a billion business cards I’ve never handed out. I’ve got to really make the effort to actually use these cards and not let the money go to waste.
If they come out nice, I’m going to order the notecards from them. I think the notecards will be more practical. I wish they’d come out with a postcard version.
Tags: flickr, mini moo cards, photo blogging
April 25th, 2007
According to Flickr’s mysterious “interestingness” formula, this is my 100th most interesting photo today:
(click to for larger view)
As you can see, Pugly is trying to eat that tree. He’s such a nature-loving, quirky, silly little dog.
Tags: photo blogging, Pug, the puppy, flickr, interestingness, 100th interesting photo
April 25th, 2007
When I moved into my new house, Fall had pretty much set in real good. The leaves were long gone from my crabapple trees in the front yard and my lilac trees along one side of the house. There were two bushes at each end of the front of the house, which I’m told are rhododendrons, and a bunch of really dead looking plants in the front garden.
I’ve been looking forward to Spring and the possibilities of a garden since January and then the snow finally hit Maine and just. would. not. go. away. It lingered like a relative who doesn’t know he’s outstayed his welcome, borrowed too much money, and eaten all of your stockpile of junk food. And then he had two really wild parties two weekends in a row before taking off until next year — you know, he’ll stay away just long enough that we’ll forget how frustrated we were by this year’s visit.
By the time the snow had gone, I’d given up on gardening. My dreams of a vegetable garden and sunny afternoons planting flowers in the yard had somehow drifted away through the long days of staring at a plain white yard. I’d come to believe that there was nothing but snow underneath all that snow…and even when the snow had begun to melt away and grass began to peak through, it was only a taunt because another Nor’Easter would just cover it up with another 10 or 12 inches of more snow.
But finally after that horrible Nor’Easter April 15th - 17th when first the snow pounded the North East and then the rain and wind came with such intensity and timing that water was pouring down the outside of my chimney and seeping up through the foundation of my basement floor, suddenly Spring arrived, not with a whimper, but with a bang — the beginning of mud season.
More
Tags: garden, flower, bloom, Winter, Spring, Nor\'Easter, crocus, daylily, daffodil, photo blogging
April 23rd, 2007
Pugly had a lazy Sunday yesterday.
(click to see larger image)
Tags: Pug, dog, puppy, photo blogging
April 22nd, 2007
Yesterday was the first sunny Saturday of Spring after a month of false starts and Spring snow snowstorms and Nor’Easters. And while I admit that I understand that Winter came late and wanted to stick around awhile, my Seasonal Affective Disorder was really tired of it all, despite the lovely photographs I managed to take.
So, with Spring literally in the air, while my new neighbors were blowing the remnants of last Fall’s leaves into my yard, Pugly and I hopped in the Jeep and headed down to Portland to the Eastern Prom where everyone and their dog was out and about enjoying the day. Pugly and I took end the sights of the Eastern Prom Trail near East End Bench including The Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad. Pugly saw the beach for the first time and got slapped in the face by a wave for the first time, much to his surprise.
All in all, a great day.
More
Tags: The Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad, Eastern Prom, East End Beach, Portland, Maine, Spring, photo blogging, Pug
February 22nd, 2007
(Click for larger, more overwhelming view.)
Tags: Palm Desktop, to-do list, project365, photo blogging
January 17th, 2007
Normally I have granola in yogurt or peanut butter on whole grain toast for breakfast, but work is getting to me…
But by lunch I was back to my usual semi-healthy fair.
Tags: project365, photoaday, oneaday, breakfast, lunch, Oreos, Pepsi One, Starbucks, Moosewood, photo blogging
January 16th, 2007
I don’t feel well, but I was running low on a few staples like caffeine, bottled water, milk, breakfast, lunch, dinner…Because I wasn’t feeling well, of course, I headed right for the convenience foods. You can’t see that I have oranges and cut up fruit in there but I do. Honest. It’s just hidden behind the T.V. dinners.
Tags: project365, photoday, oneaday, groceries, sushi, comfort food, health food, photo blogging
January 15th, 2007
The icy snow in the air was freezing to my windshield before my defroster and windshield wipers could do anything about it. I was driving at a snail’s pace. In fact, my speedometer doesn’t register the speed I was going it was so slow.
Tags: project365, photoaday, oneaday, photo blogging, driving, snowstorm, Maine
