I do still cook! :)
I’ve just been kind of lazy on the creativity and/or photography ends. So here is dinner last night:
Just some boneless pork chops, coated in corn flour (from our Mexico trip) and pan seared until done.
A simple box of stove-top stuffing, with some fresh apples chopped and added to add some sweetness.
Fresh green beans, cooked in some oil on the stove-top with salt, pepper, and fresh garlic.
All told – 45 minutes from prep to eating. Take that Rachel Ray!
Graffiti of a different type. Paint stencil on a postal service label. RESIST IMPERIALISM!:
- A great story (via):
- Mixing break dancing with yoga (via):
- Save the Words – for all the words removed from the dictionary. (via)
- I finished reading ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ My first Hemingway. I enjoyed the style of writing, but the story wasn’t terribly engaging to me. Any recommendations from people on other good reading material? We’ve recently decided to disconnect the TV service, so now we have more time for reading. Hooray!
- A thoroughly interesting article about Nicholas Taleb. (via)
Hope everybody has a great weekend!!
Lagging behind with some stuff I wanted to post this week, so here is a general rundown:
Went hiking with Chris on Sunday, had a blast.
We found a sweat-lodge frame:
I got my photo class assignment (portrait) done:
And Chris snapped a pretty decent picture of my goofy-looking self. To be honest I really like the background more than anything. Almost like a painting:
- Ten things we should say more often – everybody could stand to say these things regularly.
- Found a new internet radio station thanks to Drew Gardner. A great mix of genres.
- It’s that time of the year when the tax man sends me a check. Dad is gunning for me to save money… I’m thinking a D90 might be more realistic… Kids will be kids.
- Some nice, and decidedly different, wedding photography.
- Other than that work has been pretty hectic. We had a print server run amok yesterday, so I’m still cleaning up that mess today.
but with all the problems I’ve had at the office today, I’m praying for 5:00.
Except they wear odd costumes, and pretend to be fighting.
(via)
From a hike with Chris this past weekend to Wolf Creek falls:
The creek was flowing the best I’ve seen in a long while, and the camera got a bit wet taking these shots (you can see the water spots in the rocks). We ended up hiking down Wolf Creek / Hassayampa river for about two and a half miles before finding our way back to the road and walking back to the truck.
3 exposure HDR.
It might be a bit too early for my brain to fully digest this article, but I tried anyway. It involves a gravitational wave detector (the GEO 600), which detects tiny changes in the curve of spacetime (gravity as defined in Einstein’s theory of general relativity). It does this (in Tombo terms) by splitting a laser beam, shooting both of the split beams down a long tube, reflecting them back to the source, and then looking at where the two beams fluctuate nearer and farther from each other.
Still here? Okay. So apparently the scientists running this detector have been getting a surprising amount of noise and haven’t been able to find a probable culprit to account for all of it. Well a guy named Craig Hogan has an idea of where the noise is coming from. In fact, he predicted noise would appear even before he knew about the GEO 600 experiment.
He says it is because we live in a hologram… Yeah, for real. Nothing’s definite yet, as more testing is necessary, but it sure is a damned interesting idea. Read the article to find out more.
Monday was a holiday, so we decided to throw the dogs in the truck and head out to the woods. The plan? A bit of a walk through the pines, and enjoying some good ol’ fashioned picnic food. DaNece fried up some chicken, made some egg salad, and packed up a bottle of white zin and off we headed.
Nothing terribly fancy. Just turning off a dirt road right on the outskirts of town, and forcing the 4Runner down a horse path for half a mile. We totally forgot the blanket, so the tailgate made for an impromptu picnic seat (as it often does):
Didn’t take a ton of pictures, as the day was more about enjoying the company than anything else. The dogs had a great time scampering around in nature, and we got ourselves a nice relaxing day.
That’s something to smile about!:
Me and DaNece have a problem. Our problem is stuff. We have an excess of it. So this weekend we started to lighten the load. We began with the books. We both have our own little book collections, which over the years continue to grow and grow. Books we’ve read and liked. Books we’ve never gotten around to reading. Some books that we didn’t like at all.
Finally it was time to cut the clutter. So we went through all the books and decided what to keep. I’m keeping only the books I intend to read in the next year (about 12), and DaNece is keeping about 40 books, mostly Stephen King.
These will all be disappearing from our residence in the coming days:
Thankfully I made it back to town in time on Sunday to meet up with some of the other local bloggers. I even had just enough time to shower before heading into town, which I’m sure everybody appreciated. :)
The whole thing was setup by GrannyJ and it was totally a blast! The locale was Casa Sanchez, which has some very decent Mexican grub, and I was a hungry son of a gun after hiking back from camp a scant two hours prior.
I was pretty surprised by the number of people that showed up. Some were people I had already met, like Rich, Sadira, Dagny, Megan, and GrannyJ herself. Others were new faces to me such as Susan, Ric and Rowena. I also got to finally meet Tony Reynolds who’s blog constantly inspires deep thought, as well as Karolina who’s pictures often make me see my hometown in a whole new light.
Thanks to everybody who showed up, even if I did catch un-ending shit over dropping my camera off a cliff. :) Something I will never live down.
We will be hopefully doing this again next month, hope to see everybody out there again!
Saturday found me and six other guys near Sedona, tromping down a trail along Wet Beaver creek, packs loaded for camping. Four miles in, we decided to pitch camp right over the creek:
The view from our spot was not too shabby:
Once we set our bags down everybody set off to do whatever they do when out in the wilderness. Some went off to read books, others pulled out their fishing rods and set to work. Some started setting up their tent, and I meandered up the creek-way, which exposed some very interesting erosion to the rocks:
After messing around in the canyon for a bit I decided to climb the nearest cactus-covered hill to get a view of the area.
A look down-stream:
And a look upstream (HDR):
Well worth the time and effort of dodging the prickly stuff. :)
Firewood was gathered from dead scrub along the hillsides, and pretty soon we all ended up congregating back at camp. Apparently Chris had found a chalk rock while out, and soon a board was drawn and a game of checkers was in full swing between Perry (Gear Bomb) and Lorenzo:
Eventually Jeff caught a trout, and we all watched as it was gutted and cooked in the fire. As night fell some of the boys started drinking, and eventually both Travis and Jeff fell into the creek. Deciding that the shenanigans were enough I opted for bed, and a nice warm sleeping bag.
Apparently the fire kept on blazin’, because when I woke up all the wood was gone. So, I scampered up the hillside with my trusty headlamp to light the way, gathered a bit more, and got the fire going again:
After some quality time by the fire I decided to go take some morning-time photos of the creek:
After a quick granola bar it was time for me to break camp and hike back. I left a little ahead of everybody else so that I could make it back to town for the blogger meet up.
Overall it was a great trip with some great guys, some I’ve known for a long time, and some I just met. The scenery was beautiful, and the weather was nearly perfect.
From my backpacking trip up Wet Beaver Creek this weekend:
3 exposure hdr, using a wet rock as my tripod. Taken about 20 minutes into dawn, with the ND filter turned on in the G9.
- Microsoft admits that Vista was a practical joke. (via)
- An old dog singin’ the blues:
(via)
- A bike lane that travels with you. Definitely a good idea for the night riders (not Knight Riders) in Prescott.
(via)
Have a great friday everybody!!
A 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air seen downtown:
As DaNece and I meandered around this car taking pictures a courthouse employee who was on a smoke break came over and started talking to us about the old Chevys. Bobby told us about how he used to have a later 50s model, and how if he could sell his current car he would buy another old Chevy in a heartbeat. We chatted about the ever increasing price of well maintained vintage cars, the decreasing number of participants at the local car shows, and about how he sometimes got to work events on the square; essentially getting paid to have a great time downtown.
A very neat car, and a very neat guy.
Star Wars, as told by somebody who has only seen bits and pieces:
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.
(via)
Seriously sweet Mario Brothers T-shirt. Yoshi is a badass dinosaur about to eat some goombas, Mario is hitting up the fireballs onto some seriously mal-adjusted turtles, and Luigi is kicking some biting pipe vine booty:
(via)
The Cadillac WTF. Concept car by Cadillac that runs off of nuclear energy, and has 24 tires.
(via)
Some random bits from life lately:
- The holidays are over, and life can begin to resume as normal. Which means taking our cookie-addicted asses back to the gym. :)
- Rundown of the movies we’ve watched lately:
- The New World – totally sucked
- The Spirit – meh. I was hoping for sin city, and got something else. D liked it though.
- Seven Pounds – Wow! Great flick. My stony demeanor was nearly brought to tears.
- The day the earth stood still – I felt like I got sucked into watching a 2 hour long Green Peace commercial. It wasn’t bad… but it wasn’t great.
- Righteous Kill – Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro together again? What could be better? Well, it was like Heat, but without the awesome.
- We started attending a photography class last weekend. It’s an eight or nine week program that meets on saturdays out in Chino, and seems like it will be a lot of fun.
- I forgot how good the Iron Springs Cafe was until me and Chris went there Friday. Southern fried tuna with jalapeño gravy is SOOOOOO freakin’ tasty!
- We went to Esoji for dinner on Saturday. I only had one sushi course, and I was still amazed!! Every thing that comes out of their kitchen is simply delicious.
- There is a blogger get together this sunday at Casa Sanchez around 2:00pm. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it, but I am sincerely hoping. I will be out camping with friends Saturday night, and will have to contend with them to get back in time.
So there you have it. The life of an IT guy. :)
Even though I know nothing about them, I’m a sucker for hotrods. So when I saw this little Ford downtown yesterday, I couldn’t help but snap a pic or two:
and a bonus shot of the engine:
An example of the greatness is here.
Marvel at the amazing…. balance… of all these women. Yeah, that’s what this particular game show challenge is all about. “Balance”:
(via)
Another old truck HDR. This time an old Ford tow truck:
Pretty need to see these old gears.
3 exposure handheld.
The new Macbook, as only the Onion News Network could:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
(via)
*EDIT* - changed to link instead of embedding because of auto-play driving me nuts.The menu board holder at a local italian eatery:
He used to have a more rotund brother in front of Belvedere's (and later N'awlins), but the brother has been MIA for a few months now.
3 Exposure Handheld HDR.
DaNece needed to drop of some late christmas presents to her mom in Phoenix, so we decided to do a bit of traipsing around the downtown area before heading home.
Of course there were skyscrapers aplenty down there:
But we were more interested in checking out the historic part of downtown, which included the old county courthouse/city hall:
It also included meandering by the 'new' city hall, which has a nice water feature:
And a rockin' sunburst (complete with reflection):
But I think my favorite part was seeing the old Orpheum theatre, right as the daylight started to fade and the lights turned on:
Check out those sweet lights!:
Not the mention the awesome sculpted faces on the side of the building (happy or sad?):
And this little statue, who became the temporary roost for a bird:
After an hour of meandering the light was dropping and we decided to head home to the dogs. We are planning on going back in the near future for some more shots though. Lots of cool stuff down there.
