Tulips…
Before I forget how to blog completely, have an experimental embedded Flickr slideshow of my excursion to the wetter areas of Oregon yesterday.
Back to life, back to reality…
Mornin’ all. Mum and Dad flew back to blighty yesterday and just rang to say they’d arrived safe and sound albeit with no hot water in the house. Atticus is at sixes and sevens searching for missing members of the household. He’s a bit more resigned now but he’s definitely going to miss his hour long ‘come-let-us-adore-him’ sessions in the morning, bracing off-lead walks around the Oregon coast and thereabouts and regular family-sized left overs.
Yesterday I took them to the airport and then caught up on 3 weeks of missed episodes of this (The Office) that (Dollhouse) and the other (Simpsons) on hulu.com. It’s a well handy resource that hulu, though I’d swap it in a heartbeat for full access to the BBC’s iPlayer. I also went to the cinema and saw Gran Torino, which I thoroughly enjoyed and I’m not a Clint fan usually. Gangs are bad and grumpy old veterans are redeemable it appears. Watchmen last week rocked, no matter what anyone tells you.
Today I’m hard at work and catching up on my various social networks. Facebook has reinvented itself in my absence by removing all kinds of useful options like see more/see less of this person’s updates, and “What are you doing” is now “What’s on your mind”. If you’d like to see what’s on my mind and don’t do facebook, my statuses go to the lifestream page here. I still can’t get the hang of twitter. I’d like an option where you can see a day’s activity in one place including both sides of any conversations and in chronological order of the conversations, rather than the present ‘reverse’ view. There’s probably some kind of web app that’ll do that, but I’m not there yet.
Thanks to one of Maryl‘s updates I’m discovering Emiliana Torrini, an italian/icelandic singer songwriter who lives in Brighton. Lovely stuff.
And finally, vfxy.com has featured my little blog as their photoblog of the week which is quite an honour, considering the level of quality over there. Can I interest you in an email subscription?
Streamlining
Nothing like nature taking hold to illustrate that I’ve left it far too long between postings again. I’ve added my Facebook status to my Lifestream page, so that’s a little extra tidbit of information about my online life should you fancy reading it. Facebook seems to be where it’s at at the moment, though once again everyone’s up in arms about the privacy and copyright implications of their latest automatic update to their Terms of Use. Stu reckons he’s been proved right about it being a dark force, I replied:
Weeeeeell, it’s a free service, innit. Anything I upload can get shared around and that’s fine by me. And if they use my info to put adverts about the latest Morrissey album rather than crap about SUVs or pharmaceuticals or summat, I’m happier for it. I’ve even used the thumbs up/down thing on adverts I get served. Now I just get ads for cameras and music and coffee and stuff.
When they release a best-selling book called “Gwyn’s status updates and wordscraper scores 2006-2009” then I might start complaining, but frankly I reckon it’s a bit self important to think anything I’ve ever uploaded to friendface is worth more than bugger all. If they can make some money off it, good luck to em.
There’s a very good article about how to configure your fb privacy settings so your boss doesn’t see all the pictures of you from the weekend. But, to be honest, you shouldn’t have added them as a friend in the first place…
Anyhoo, busy week as ever between L&C, site updates, a pending translation and the demands of a certain schipperke… I’ll be back soon. And if not, click on over to me Lifestream, photoblog or Flickr
Just when you thought it was safe to plant your ‘zuchini’
Luckily this time I read the backs of the packets of seeds and a lot of them could be started indoors then transplanted, so I felt slightly smug this morning when it was whiter than usual outside. Not enough snow to cancel work though, but enough to make the place look suitably festive. Hopefully something’ll sprout soon… and ideally produce vegetables before we move to another timezone
Since it was already snowing when I headed to work today I took me camera in on the offchance there was something photographicable, to coin a word. I submitted one of them to this here Portland blog and they published it. I get the impression they’re not inundated with entries… On Flickr one of the comments was “Best watch where you put the rock salt down.” which I liked.
Step #4, Alligator sandwiches, Navelgazing and Last Thursday
DrSita comes back late this evening and in the meantime, I’m baking bread. Sudarat gave me a bread baking stone and it’s getting it’s baptism by yeast today. When DrSita rang yesterday she seemed to be reeling from culture shock from visiting New Orleans, and this morning I turned my computer on and got this Skype message:
[6:21:11 AM] WIFEY! says: i can’t believe i forgot to tell you: i ate alligator!
I dunno, you let her wander off for 48 hours and this kind of thing happens…
What else? I went to Bertie Lou’s this morning for breakfast, had a long chat with Stu & Anne yesterday, watched Cloverfield last night, Hancock the night before, and life’s pretty quiet all in all.
I got tagged by Colibrí and El Charro Negro for an “upload a photo and say 16 things about yourself” Flickr meme thing, so i have to do that. I didn’t realise it had to be in Spanish though, and thinking of 16 things to say was harder than I thought so I just googled about for ’50 questions’ type posts and came up with the following:
1. When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought?
Jesus, that’s a lot of white hairs in me beard. Time for a shave…
2. What is your favourite ringtone on your phone?
Any of them are fine EXCEPT the one that I used to have as an alarm at 6am meaning it was time to commute to Sunnyvale for Yahoo(!). Still gives me shivers when I hear it.
3. What were you doing at midnight last night?
Hoping DrSita was alright in her haunted hotel in Louisiana. Wishing the Colbert Report would go on a bit longer, and mulling over the implications and repercussions of time travel in LOST.
4. What’s a word that you say a lot?
In English, anyroad
In Spanish, orale
5. Favorite age you have been so far?
23 was a good vintage.
6. What is your current desktop picture?
Laptop: That Ubuntu heron thing
Home PC: Bokeh-y grass
Work PC: Yes we canine. On black.
7. What do you do when vending machines steal your money?
Pump the return me money button, rock the machine a bit, send another coin in after it, swear, weep.
8. Last magazine you bought?
Word magazine. Best music magazine on the planet. If we lived in the same country for more than 10 months at a time, I’d subscribe.
9. Can you cook?
Now and again. I can follow a recipe if it has pictures of what the result’s meant to look like. The House Speciality is Shepherd’s Pie. And right now I’m 6 hours into a bread recipe.
10. Last movie you watched?
Cloverfield, 2 hours ago. Monsters rock!
11. Do you like marmite?
Hellz yeah! ‘cept nowadays it gives me terrible acid indigestion.
12. Favourite crisps?
US: Funyuns
UK: Quavers
Mexico: Lays, amarillo
13. Do you own a donor card?
Yep. Help yourselves.
14. Are you a collector of anything?
We move too often to amass a serious amount of anything, I’ve 11 and a half thousand photos on Flickr though and I think my two dual lens vintage cameras might be the start of something bigger….
15. Do you believe in ghosts?
Nope.
16. Have you ever done anything more self-obsessed than this?
Can I interest you in my blog..? agaveweb.com/blog
Now I have to translate all that…
The Continuing Adventures of Me’n’Mario’n’Ange:
Last Thursday. I shifted my hours at L&C to a bit later so we could explore the area a tad. It was a misty morning & Atticus was full of beans and came with us.
I thought the park by the Sellwood bridge would be pretty atmospheric what with all the fog so we had a little wander round there before heading up to Tryon park next to where I work. We managed a fairly large loop of the trails there, the mist had more or less disappeared but the sun was low in the sky and casting some nice beams through the trees. I also took advantage of having two experienced dog handlers to pass Atticus over to so I could use my TTV contraption. Here’s one I liked:
We walked briefly around the L&C campus then I went to a meeting about the new CMS we’re going to be adopting at the law school. It’s an impressive system and will eventually make everything run more smoothly… but I think the changeover is going to be a little bumpy. Nothing too severe though, and I likes a challenge.
After than we went CD & poster shopping round Hawthorn way. Word Magazine cost 17 bucks. But it’s rarer than hen’s teeth in Oregon so I bit the bullet and paid up. I shall read it very slowly…
In the evening, ‘tapas gringas’ and beer in Clinton with everyone + a Spanish friend of ours.
Lovely. Anyroad, off to try step #5 in Leif’s recipe…
1st International Tapatían Phototour…
Lovin’ it… Busy week ahead 😀
Atticalendar Day 22
is getting erased after Christmas day. The last third of it is anyway…
So… don’t forget to check out day 22…
It hasn’t stopped snowing all day
We’re at about 4 inches of the white stuff now. Absolutely gorgeous out it is, but not good for cameras…
Why, Lord Atticus, only you would be so bold. There’ll be a more minimal version in tomorrow’s advent window.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like Antarctica
I woke up at 7.30, ran to the window to see if it had snowed yet, saw it hadn’t and went back to bed feeling thoroughly crestfallen. An hour later I put the coffee on and saw that flakes of snow the size of old pennies were coming thick and fast and there was at least an inch covering the garden. I waited for DrSita to surface so she could share the sight of Atticus’ first encounter with the elements and then played around for 10 minutes in the garden. La Doctora shot a fair few photos of us which I made into a collage… I chucked a snowball and he pretty much swallowed it whole then started trying to munch through the rest of the garden. Hope he didn’t bury his bone from yesterday too deep ‘cos he’s going to need a pickaxe/ pneumatic drill to get through the earth again.
It was still snowing an hour or so later so I thought, sod it and headed out on me own with me camera, two pairs of socks, pajama bottoms and trousers and two jackets and still got cold. But it was more than worth it, lots of people were out with dogs/ sledges/ kids/ combinations thereof and then I chanced upon a steam train pulling into the station and got a few nice shots. I took a LOT of photos today and don’t want to flood Flickr just yet so I’ll upload them in drips and drabs over the next few days.
We took Atticus out for a walk and let him off the lead in a park which is usually full of squirrels and has cars driving past, today it was perfect because there was nothing whatsoever to chase so he just ran around investigating where the other dogs had been. We fancied another coffee so we dropped ‘Cus back at the house and nipped off to Twin Paradox, the physics-themed coffee shop near our house.
I had to return a couple of DVDs (Man on Wire & Wanted) so I made another trek outside and it’s bloody freezing. Really freezing. Montreal freezing. The news says with the windchill it’s zero F at the moment. Which is… hang on I’ll google it… -17°C (¿¡?!) . Well that would explain why I couldn’t feel my fingers when I got home. I really should have bought gloves… It’s worth it though. I loves the snow see.
Righty, time to do tomorrow’s Atticalendar…
The lambshank redemption
DrSita got a doggy bag of the leftovers of her meal last night. This morning we had the handover ceremony… He took it straight away to his ‘secret’ lair underneath the pine trees outside… We’ll probably not see young ‘Cus for a while…
There’s always his advent calendar though… Today’s is pretty poor (I’ve had a lot of work on), but tomorrow’s should see a return to form. You’re honour bound not to click on it till midnight though.
No snow yet.
Slugz
So far my little tract of land has yielded about half a dozen edible radishes. Lots of kale** and today, the tiniest little cauliflower ever. I’ve failed to break even with the original cost of the seeds (about 6 of your Earth ‘dollars’ altogether). The slugs are having a field day though. I posted the problem on Facebook, and I’ve been inundated with slug serving suggestions from slug salad to mezcal with a slug in the bottom. I’m going to try putting a tin can of beer in the garden and luring them away to their boozy deaths. Nanny would have just put a dusting of slug pellets down and salted the stragglers to within an inch of their lives. That’s Welsh practicality for you.
I went on a nice walk this morning though to take my mind off molluscs and am slowly flooding Flickr with pictures of wintery trees reflected in the Willamette. There was a steam train too, if you’re into that kind of thing. Bloody huge it were. My camera sensor is still giving me gip, I think I’ll have to get it professionally cleaned but I don’t want to be cameraless for 3 days at the weekend, so it’s a good thing that Picasa 3 has a very simple ‘retouch’ button perfect for removing dark areas of dust from your pictures. You only see them in the pictures of sky and water, which is 80% of what I seem to shoot…
** (though I don’t like kale, so it’s purely ornamental. I don’t think I encountered it before coming to the US and I’m not sure it’s available in the Youkay… Anyroad, it was one of the designs I put together for Nourishing Nutrition’s T-Shirts t’other day, get them while they’re hot… The “I dig beets” is my favourite…)
Theys me daps mind
Me daps are falling apart and no longer providing the comfort and style onlookers have come to expect so we nipped out today to Ross (Dress for Less) to get some new footwear. Footware? No. Footwear. Anyroad, on the way back we stopped at Albertsons to pick up some essentials and there was turkey bowling in full swing.
I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate as everyone’s certainly au fait with the minutiae of the sport, but just in case… It was basically a way of collecting phone numbers and trying to get people to sign up for banking. Imagine skittles but instead of a ball, a frozen turkey (in a plastic bag), instead of 9 pins, 10, and instead of a skittle alley in some frozen outpost of a local pub, you’ve got a supermarket aisle with rolls of kitchen towels as buffers. I got 2 strikes and 1 gutterball (Butterball?) and won nothing but did better than the old couple before me who risked their health and well-being for an Albertsons T-Shirt. I’d left me camera in the car I’m afraid so no pictures…
Last night I was coerced into attending a Project Runway Party. Couple of points. A runway in the US is more likely to mean a catwalk than a landing strip. And Project Runway is an American programme in its 4th season or so where designers are deprived of sleep for a few weeks and then bullied by a bunch of European fashionistas into designing and making clothes in some pseudo-darwinian battle of who can sew the fastest. I can usually stomach about 10 minutes. Anyroad, last night some colleagues of DrSita organised this party. Everyone was split up into teams of 2 and then sent off to the charity shop to buy 5 dollars’ worth of materials then put together an outfit themed “Presidential Inauguration 2008” in 20 minutes. I refused point blank to take part. Or be a judge. But found a nice little dive bar near the house while everyone shopped. Yeah, I’m an aguafiestas, but that’s how I roll. I don’t do dressing up or public speaking. It says as much on my CV. In true Portland style, everyone won.
This morning it were gorgeous, fog slowly lifting, heavy dew, a nip in the air. So I took a few pictures and am quite please with this one which’ll probably be tomorrow’s post for me photoblog. (sign up to be emailed a daily e-slice of Portland here.)
I’ve got it as my screensaver at the minute, please help yourself.
And that is the news.
Busyness Cards
I never thought about the roots of the word “business” before. Busy-ness. Just thinking out loud, anyroad moving on…
My photoblog‘s getting revamped at the minute mainly because of the number of people asking about the vintage viewfinder contraption when I’m out. I’ve found a great template for it and have been tweaking it to my liking.
Still to do? The title (“Say Cheese, It’s Gwyn’s Photoblog”) needs rethinking… I need a proper archives page, more straightforward tag system, and to write some updated copy for the About Pages…
Might I implore you to sign up for email updates? Sign up below, confirm, then when I post a new picture it’ll wing its way to your inbox with the description too, never more than once a day. You can cancel at any time… I’m going through some of my older photos at the moment but I’ll soon be posting new ones.
Any thoughts on the site or pictures are, as always, most welcome in the comments here or over at the phlog. And if RSS feeds is how you roll, it’s replete with that kind of nonsense too.
I’d also like to plug Uprinting.com and the Web Resources Depot who are doing all these cards for free ‘cos I won their competition. Once the cards arrive I’ll say nice things in my professional blog too. Though judging by recent news I’m going to be a lot busier soon…
All the news that fits
I’ve been posting about some of my latest projects over at agaveweb.com in the hope of drumming up some business and lending a bit more colour to the CVs I’m sending out to temp companies.
Other than that, it’s been pretty quiet this side of the pond/Rio Grande. It was frosty this morning and has since given way to glorious sunshine. I can see it through the little window in my underground bunker… I nipped out to the park yesterday with the PenDak Chimera and took a few longer exposure shots. I think I’d need some kind of retort stand to properly keep everything still enough for anything longer than 1/5th of a second, but I liked this one…
The next step is learning how to focus more ‘into’ the image, rather than on the border and dust particles. I might have to re-engineer the cardboard and I’m guessing there’ll be something to do with the aperture too.
Sally & Martin arrive tomorrow night. Driving from LA to here in 2 days is quite a trek.
and a quick way to put a couple of thousand miles on the odometer. So we’re thinking of things to do (expect yet more waterfall pictures…) and where/what to eat.
Judging from the pageview stats, no one cares in the slightest about my lifestream… I’m not taking it personally, FSM knows I’m happy enough you keep coming back to read this nonsense. But give it a go, cos if this page hasn’t been updated there might well be something of interest over there. There’s a distinct bias towards photography tutorials and flickr activity, but once I find out how to put my reddit faves in there as well, there’ll be a lot of good stuff.
I won’t mention it again.
Gwyn’s (For-the-love-of-all-things-holy,-Get-a) LifeStream
Probably.
VOTE FOR ATTICUS! please…
I don’t know how the voting works or whether they’ll use you email address for nefarious purposes but there’s all kinds of camera equipment to be won. A few votes would not hurt my chances from amongst the 5000+ entries…
Please click on over to the LA Times and “Vote as Best”…
If you want to enter your photogenic mutt, you can enter too… Details here.
Food, TV, Waterfalls
According to Peter Trigg’s Calendar – “My kind of Somerset”… It’s the first of September, meaning we can look at a grainy picture of All Saints’ Church, Aisholt for 30 odd days. Stateside, we’re at the end of a bank holiday weekend (Labor (sic) Day). And summer is officially over.
On Friday we went out to a Greek restaurant down the road, Eleni’s I believe it’s called, which is muy fancy, pricey and delicious and then after that to our nearest pub, the Black Cat or somesuch… Saturday was a race against time to get both cars emissions tested which took far longer than it should have. They both passed the test, but due to inadequate directions we probably contributed more greenhouse gasses into the environment while we driving two cars around lost for an hour than would be ideal. The next step is going to the DMV to get Oregon plates for the cars. You have 60 days after moving to do this, but Drsita needs them to get a parking permit up at the uni and you feel very self-conscious driving around with California plates as they’ve a reputation for uncourteous, reckless driving. And rightly so, I’ve not heard a single car horn beeped in anger since getting here. And, of course, everyone cycles or uses public transport.
On Saturday evening we went with a couple of friends to El Toro Bravo, a tapas bar would you believe. Again, excellent food. And after that we started on The Wire season 4…
Yesterday we set out early for a new set of waterfalls… Photos abound over here. Incidentally, I’ve started flagging any photos with people in on Flickr as “only available to Friends & Family” since I’m a bit wary after Sita’s picture got used in an academic paper and I only found out about it when it turned up on BoingBoing… If you’d like to be added as a Flickr friend let me know, it’s one level above ‘contact’ and you’ll get to see people as well as waterfalls and skies.
After the waterfalls we went to a farmers’ market and there I took my favourite picture of the day:
Pylon logo
Flash was asking for a simple logo for her (international) Pylon Appreciation Society in her blog yesterday and I happened to have p’shop open… behold!
Today we went to Santa Cruz for a couple of errands and managed to fit in a walk round Wilder Ranch, still as gorgeous as last time we were there a few years ago, only they’ve fenced off the rosemary fields, still I got a fair few pictures in. I thought I’d cleaned my camera sensor, but evidently not as there’s still a telltale blob in most of the pix (except where I cropped it out), I don’t love any of them enough to go clone-tooling…
[flickr]photo:2694443158(medium)[/flickr]
Right now I’m waiting for some craigslist people to show up for the sofa, they’re late… and that’d better be because they’re waiting for their own burly team of 3-tonne-settee movers.
10,024 items / 54,505 views
I just passed the 10,000 photos mark on Flickr. Here’s photo #10,000 from Guanatos Gwyn’s Flickrstream…
It’s from last Sunday morning’s impromptu Flickrtour in Guadalajara looking at the architecture of GDL’s own Luis Barragán in the Chapultepec area. Here’s the full set. I’d have rigged #10,000 to be a bit more interesting had I known… but I’ve uploaded worse and no mistake.
Day 4, involved the Tianguis Cultural, El Rincon de los Becerra where José got his mobile phone nicked/misplaced and a well nice birthday/bienvenido/it´s a Saturday party round Karla´s new mansion.
I spent the night at Amour Fou and headed straight for the Flickrtour a few hours later…
Day 5, Flickrtour, Chelas, Siesta, Pozole, Lucha Libre!, La Cava…
Anyway, many thanks to my 157 contacts, 52 friends and 2 family members and all of you who’ve encouraged my amateur photo shennanigans along the way with your comments, testimonials and kind words. Life would not be the same without Flickr, I’ve met so many great people and spend a good while every day enjoying their photography. Here’s to the next 10,000. Cheers!
Here is my “most interesting” set, and here’s the least interesting. Flickr’s the most fun $24.95 can buy… Enjoy!