What is the sound of one geek clapping?

Got some nice photos of some of the family while I was at the folks’ house for Christmas. Love this one of my sister and her family:

And that’s when I saw it. Directly in the middle of the frame, as if I had planned it: a man proposing to his girlfriend. 50 seconds. 10 pictures. A fleeting moment now relive-able.

I love little stories like this. Guy doing something innocuous, manages to get something really cool as a result. And now he’s enlisting the rest of the internet to try to find out who this couple was.

michaeljustinfilms.com (via petapixel)

songs about rainbows?

A friend of mine commented today about how much he missed Jim Henson, stating that he felt Henson “was a wonderful human being who checked out much much too early.” And then he sent me this video.

I couldn’t agree more. This song is one of those things that reminds me that sometimes, I need to have more of a sense of wonder. Also, Willie Nelson does an amazing job with this version of the song.

Olivia is at an age that I’m really starting to love. Not only is she running around on her own two feet and making all sorts of mischief, she’s downright adorably expressive. I took these photos around Memorial Day.

Click here to view a larger version.

Death, taxes, and when you lose your health insurance you get ridiculously sick.

For serious, folks. I will go for years at a time without picking up any kind of illness, yet almost as soon as I lost my job in March, I developed a cold that hasn’t gone away for almost two months. Now, I can deal with a cold. I mean, it’s a cold. I’m not bleeding out my eye sockets or anything; it’s just a bit of coughing. And that’s hardly going to kill anyone.

Except for the fact that this week has turned into some kind of bizarre experiment on the part of Nature to see exactly how much can be done to me before I give up. My cough got worse a few days ago, and then yesterday the lymph nodes in my throat swelled up so much that it interfered with the workings of my tongue and I sounded like I had cotton balls in my mouth. And then, this morning I woke up to find that my sinuses were all clogged up and my left ear felt like it had a fife and drum corps marching around in it.

So I suppose it’s only natural that almost immediately after my chance to sign up with COBRA expires, I get this kind of terrible, horrible, no good very bad sickness to contend with. Murphy’s Law hasn’t let me down in the past, so why should I expect it to do so now?

So, um, hi. :)

They say that the surest way to know that a blog is dying is that it starts apologizing for the length of time that goes between posts. So I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to move right on and try to actually post, y’know, content.

Over the last year(!) since my last post, I’ve had a lot of things happen. The biggest of these is probably that a couple months ago, I lost my job, which has been a somewhat cathartic experience for me, and maybe a little bit eye-opening as well. It’s worth noting that I’ve done a TON of photography over the last year, some of it for fun and some for business. Yeah, that’s right, I said business. As in, I think I’m going to try and make a photography business take off the ground.

I’ve had a REALLY big jump in the quality of my photos over the last year and I’m going to take some time over the next few weeks to upload a bit of it (including some in this post), but it’s worth noting that I’ve purchased a new domain name and it’s going to be the primary focus for a photography portfolio. I want to separate out my personal/family photos from my professional stuff, so I’m thinking that what I’m going to do is either create a second Flickr username for my professional photos, or keep it only on my professional site (which will more than likely contain a photoblog, while this site will be more writing-, family- and life-oriented) and pull the professional stuff out of my existing Flickr pool.

But none of that’s happening just yet. Keep an eye out for the announcement of my photo studio website, but in the meantime, here’s a good cross-section of some of the photos I’ve taken over the last year. I’ll include links to the album pages if you want to look at the other photos from the sets.

from Memorial Day Barbecue
from Seth and Christine’s Big Day
from July 4th at Rob & Ryan’s
from Sailfest 2009
from Takeout/ATICC Fashion Shoot
from Brokedown Serenade, 8/29/09
from I AM Festival 2009

My youngest brother graduated from college this weekend. Naturally, I got pictures, and got some good use out of my new Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.4, which I think may be my new favorite lens.

Next weekend I’ll be back in Vermont for Memorial Day: my sister and brother-in-law are hosting a barbecue. I’m sure I’ll get a ton of photos from that.

Went up to Vermont to spend some time with my mom and the other various family members left in my place of birth. Of course, I got some photos of Olivia, and quite a few of my dad, who happened to be over at the house while I was there. Sunday, I thought I would do something for my mother and cook her dinner, so I set off to the grocery store in search for some swordfish steaks, only to find out that not only was the fish market almost completely out of swordfish, but what was there was also fifteen bucks a pound. I don’t think so. So instead, I got some salmon, thinking that it was a similar type of meat and would cook nicely without changing too many of my plans.

What I hadn’t planned on, though, is that apparently my mother hates salmon. D’oh.

I do have to say, though, that despite that one little snafu, I completely rocked the meal: salmon steaks with lemon garlic herb butter, fresh brussels sprouts and rice pilaf. Three out of four of us loved it. Unfortunately, the one person who didn’t was the one I was cooking for. :)

And now, the aforementioned photos:

Amy came down to Connecticut on Wednesday with the baby, so I went over and had dinner, and took these while I was there.

Drove up to Vermont yesterday to spend Easter with the folks. Got these photos of the niece (and even one of two of my other nieces as well).