Pictures
drorzel | January 14, 2016Back in the fall, a note came home with SteelyKid about an organizational meeting for an Odyssey of the Mind team for her elementary school. My father coached this for several years back in the 80's, and one of my sister's teams went to the World championships (held in Cole Field House at the University of Maryland, of all places, which put an odd spin on going there for basketball games when I was in grad school....), and of course, I'm all in favor of creative problem-solving. So we went, and I ended up as one of the coaches of the team.
The kids, to the surprise of the other coaches, voted…
drorzel | January 14, 2016This one's a bit of a cheat, but the only pictures I got Tuesday that turned out well had other people's kids in them, and I won't post those. So here, instead, is a picture from over the weekend, mostly because I want to tell the cute-kid story that goes with it.
On Sundays, I take the kids to the Schenectady Greenmarket, then to lunch at Panera, then to the grocery store, which gets our various errands taken care of and gives Kate a little quiet time. Depending on how they behave, I sometimes require a bit of quiet time of my own after this, and this past Sunday was One of Those Days. So, I…
drorzel | January 12, 2016Having picked up a new phone last week, it seems sort of appropriate to give a photo-a-day to a picture taken with that phone, as a kind of test. Also, I realized while on the way to SteelyKid's taekwondo class that I had forgotten to take any photos with the good camera, and wanted some insurance.
So, here's a shot of the very early crescent moon just after sunset, taken from the parking lot at Panera where we got dinner before class.
Crescent moon just after sunset, taken with my new phone.
Which, you know, isn't too bad, given the kind of difficult lighting conditions. This is, of…
drorzel | January 11, 2016One of my recurring half-serious grumbles about this photo-a-day business is that our neighborhood doesn't offer a clear view of the horizon, making it impossible to get nice sunset pictures. On sunday afternoons, though, we have a babysitter come stay with the kids for a while so Kate and I can do some work, and at this time of year, that window includes sunset. And my work yesterday took me to campus, where there are much better horizon views. Of course, it was grey and dreary for most of the day, but just before sunset, the clouds to the south and west lifted a bit, just enough to be…
drorzel | January 10, 2016I try not to have this be Cute Kid Photo of the Day, but really, when these are the subjects, how can I avoid it?
SteelyKid blowing a bubble toward The Pip, at MiSci.
This is from yesterday's morning excursion to MiSci, where they have added a soap bubble area. This, of course, led to the kids battling with each other by blowing huge bubbles across the table and each popping the other's bubbles. Here's the early stage of a bubble offensive by SteelyKid, shortly to be popped by The Pip.
Another highlight of the visit was the "put yourself inside a bubble" thing, which is a perennial…
drorzel | January 9, 2016When schedules permit, I like to take the kids to home basketball games at Union. This works out well for everyone, as almost nobody goes to the games, so the kids can rampage all over the gym and get good and tired without upsetting anyone, and we add somewhat to the crowd supporting the home team.
(I'm not sure what the players made of The Pip yelling "DAAAAAAAD! You can't tickle me when I'm way up here!" from the very top of the bleachers, though...)
This also gives me a chance to shoot some different subjects, in keeping with the general goal of this photo-a-day business. Thus, a couple…
drorzel | January 8, 2016It seems appropriate to use a power-of-two day for a new digital device, so here's a photo of my new phone:
My new phone on the wireless charger.
Getting and setting this up took up much of yesterday. It's a Droid Turbo, which is basically the Verizon-branded version of the 2015 equivalent of the Moto X I had previously. Yes, I know, Verizon is kind of unpleasant, but I do just enough travel that the better coverage they offer matters to me. And one of the regularly-cited grievances against them, that they don't push out Android OS updates as often as other carriers, actually verges on a…
drorzel | January 7, 2016After a ridiculously warm December, I was lamenting the lack of winter this year. Which led, of course, to its sudden return for at least a few days of blowing snow and single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures. The snow is, at least, kind of photogenic, though:
Crescent moon over the snowy roof of our neighbors' house.
This one took a bit of processing-- the raw image was kind of crooked, as it was a quick photo grabbed between trips ferrying school stuff out to the car. And the just-barely-after-sunrise sky always needs some color correction to make it look right.
Anyway, y'know, winter: cold…
drorzel | January 6, 2016For 11 months of the year (give or take), our Christmas decorations live in plastic storage boxes in the cabinet under the stairs in the basement. Of course, when we stow these away, there's inevitably one or two things that get missed in the initial sweep, and end up outside the boxes. And when I pulled the boxes out a few weeks back, something rolled off the top box, so I had to go fishing around in the back of the cabinet, where I eventually found both the ball I was looking for and this bit of pop-culture archaeology:
An old plastic car I found under the cellar stairs.
This is a little…
drorzel | January 4, 2016One of my Christmas gifts this year was an external flash unit for my DSLR, replacing one that broke a while back. Given that the camera has a built-in flash, you might wonder why I need this extra bulky gadget, so to answer that question, here's a composite of five pictures I took today:
Composite image showing various flash settings. The top is the intentionally underexposed case with no flash. Top left is the direct flash, bottom left direct flash with the diffuser. Top right is indirect flash at a 45 degree angle, bottom right is indirect flash straight up.
I put the camera in full…
drorzel | January 4, 2016One of our Christmas presents for the kids was a slackline kit, which they wanted set up pretty much the instant I got home. So I put it up over the weekend, and on consecutive days got these pictures:
The slackline strung between two trees in the back yard.
SteelyKid's feet bouncing above the slackline.
(I of course also have a bunch of photos where you can see the kids' entire bodies, but for the umpteenth time, I'm trying not to have this be the Cute Kid Photo of the Day...)
Those two seem like they go together, and that catches us up through Sunday. I will try to get back to regular…
drorzel | January 3, 2016After the trip to my parents' for Christmas, I flew down to Charleston, SC to attend the Renaissance Weekend (though none of it fell on an actual weekend day...). This provided some much-needed stress relief, but was not great in photo-a-day terms, as it's a strictly off the record event, so I couldn't exactly photograph sessions I was in or anything like that. But it does provide another nice set of breakpoints to define a collection of catching-up photos, including one bonus shot to make up for the missing day in the previous set.
117/366:
The traditional thing to do when on the road is to…
drorzel | January 3, 2016I'm back after the traditional family holiday and a less traditional trip to Charleston, SC for the Renaissance Weekend meeting. Which means things will start to return to what passes for normal around here, and that means it's time to get caught up on photo-a-day pictures...
What with one thing and another, there was one day in December when I didn't take a single picture, not even a crappy cell-phone snapshot. Not sure how that happened. I'll fill it in at some point with an extra from a day when I got multiple good images, but this catch-up post will be one short of the actual calendar…
drorzel | December 23, 2015It's been a couple of weeks since my last photo-a-day post, for a variety of reasons. First we were in Florida, then Emmy died, then I had some disk space issues that kept me from getting photos off my camera. That's all sorted at last, just in time for me to leave town again...
In an effort to catch up a bit, I'm going to dump several photos at a time into a couple of posts. This one will be a total of eight days' worth of pictures, covering our trip and a few days after. I've got several gigabytes of trip pictures, but almost all of those include the kids, and again, I'm trying not to have…
drorzel | December 9, 2015As noted a couple of days ago, this was a big martial arts week at Chateau Steelypips, with The Pip's first-ever belt test on Monday, and SteelyKid testing for her brown belt tonight. Unfortunately, tonight was also a first, namely the first belt test she's failed.
This was, sadly, entirely predictable, as her teacher has really tightened the requirements for tests of late, and said a while back that they would be required to do not only the form for the belt they were testing for, but the previous belt, as well. And I've been trying for three days to get her to run through the red-belt form…
drorzel | December 9, 2015When we had our vetinary adventure back on Saturday, they drew blood for some tests. These showed that Emmy's kidney function is somewhat impaired, leading to yet more tests, and as of last night an extensive regimen of new stuff:
Emmy's new medication.
That's some new kidney-friendly food (in both dry and canned varieties), a drug for her kidneys, an antibiotic in case she has a bladder infection (something she's been prone to; those test results are yet to come back), and a bunch of different vitamins. This on top of the antacid pills we were told to start giving her a couple days ago.…
drorzel | December 7, 2015It's a big week in Chateau Steelypips for martial arts and cute-kid photos. On the heels of SteelyKid's first competition this past weekend, we have the Pip's first belt test tonight (and SteelyKid is testing for her brown belt Wednesday, so you should probably expect one more kid-martial-arts photo before all's said and done...).
Tonight's test was for the "Little Dragons" class for 3-4-5-year olds, and was kind of hilarious. There was a lot of enthusiasm, but also a good deal of fuzziness on the difference between "right" and "left," and their interpretation of push-ups was simply…
drorzel | December 6, 2015SteelyKid's taekwondo competition was the most time-consuming event of yesterday, but not the most stressful. Before we went down to Duanesburg for the tournament, Emmy gave us a bit of a scare.
Emmy is not by any stretch a young dog-- she was a year old when we got her in 2003, so she's 13-- but she's pretty spry. Over the last few weeks, though, she slowed down very dramatically. Initially, I didn't think much of it-- she was unenthusiastic about eating her kibble, but that happens a lot when we get near the end of a bag, and she kept eating treats. And she was moving slowly and stiffly on…
drorzel | December 5, 2015I feel a little bad that I'm doing two photo-of-the-day posts in a row that are just pictures of SteelyKid, but my day today was dominated by a taekwondo tournament down in Duanesburg, SteelyKid's first actual competition. And she got second place:
SteelyKid with her silver medal from today's taekwondo tournament.
This is somewhat less impressive than you might think, because she was in a division of three. She actually lost her one bout fairly badly, but did slightly better than the third girl in the field, thus getting the silver medal. But again, it was her first time competing, and on…
drorzel | December 5, 2015Both SteelyKid's elementary school and her after-school day care had "book fairs" this week. These include a bunch of display cases full of books at various reading levels, and also a couple of tables of plastic toy crap. One of the marginally less crappy plastic toys was a marker with ink that fluoresces in UV light but is otherwise inevitable, and SteelyKid kept bugging me to get one of those. I eventually caved, because it required only loaning her one dollar to supplement her allowance, and it was worth a buck to me not to have to listen to the complaints that would've ensued otherwise.…