I am … unhindered by talent

Yesterday (it’s a wee bit past midnight) was Memorial Day here in the States. In honor of the event they had a large array of flags out at the local cemetery. I spent several minutes taking pictures of said flags in various ways, and through some strange and tortuous route I ended up here (among other places - I’m still working through them all).

Suffice it to say that these things are never so simple.

Regardless, thanks to all those who have served.

And, yes, I still owe you all the story of the spontaneous generation of a toad in our compost - hang in there!

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It’s always a shame that the end of the school year coincides with so much of the gardening that needs to be done at the beginning of our fairly short but enthusiastic season. Thus it was (and all too often is) that I finally got the veggie seeds in the ground, although arguably a wee bit later than I would have preferred in a perfect world. On the other hand, I would probably tend to put a lot of things in too early if circumstances allowed, so perhaps it’s just as well.

All that said, today I finished planting this year’s vegetable seeds. A motley and strange assortment of basil, cilantro, peas, beans, sweet corn, and winter squash. I’ve only done sweet corn here once before, and that was years ago, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. It’s also been ages since I tried winter squash, so that’s a bit of an experiment as well. Everything this year is starting from seed (all from the excellent folks at Cook’s Garden), which is a bit chancy with our short-ish season, but hopefully all will go well.

I dug in something close to 10 gallons of nice home-made compost in the process, and scared myself witless at one point. I was scooping compost from the composter we used for the finished stuff into my nifty rubber gardening pail, and the ground below me blinked! It turned out to be a toad that had buried himself in the bit of spilled compost that had collected in front of the composter. I took a bunch of pictures of him, and I’ll most more about that experience later!

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Spring has come, and the flowers are blooming nicely… Above is columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), and below is a wild geranium (the little pink guy on the left - Geranium maculatum), and the red fellows on the right are prairie smoke - Geum triflorum). The vast majority of our garden plants came from the fine folks at Morning Sky Greenery, and these are no exception.

I like taking pictures of flowers - they usually move more slowly than animals or children playing baseball. The prairie winds make a mess of that theory on occassion, though…

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Of course the title really refers to blogging, Flickr, my new camera, del.icio.us, random web surfing, but I pretend that the evil is truly television…

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So I’ve finally broken down and gotten into the digital SLR world. I lived in the (slide) film SLR world for nearly 20 years, and then sold most of that equipment to fund our earliest forays into digital. Up to this point it’s all been (nice) point and shoots (e.g., Canon PowerShot A80) and I kept slightly missing the flexibility of an SLR and the higher res images I saw other people post. Finally couldn’t stand it any longer, and with WeatherGirl’s kind permission, I made the leap.

My new Canon 350D came about 1.5 weeks ago, and it’s been lots of fun so far. I’ve taken a ton of pictures around the house, outside, at graduation, Sub-Evil Boy’s jazz band concert, yesterday’s dance recital (featuring both WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy), etc., etc.

I really love the added level of detail, and the increased tonal range (gotta love RAW!). The image above was taken at night in the downstairs bath (which is now half gutted) on a tripod, and is one of my mostest favoritest pictures of mine at the moment.

I’m currently using an old EF 28-70 zoom from WeatherGirl’s film EOS, and the next big question is lenses… I chose to get the cheaper body because I figured that the camera bodies have essentially turned into computers, and you want to replace computers fairly often. My plan, then, is to spend some of that money saved on some nice glass, in the hopes that lenses will change a little more slowly. I really love the sound of the Canon IS lenses, but that gets pricey fast, and it would be nice to actually try them out before coughing up that much dough.

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It’s been over a month since I last posted, which is a sign of how incredibly busy things have been here. My apologies to anyone who’s actually noticed. :-)

Finals week and graduation are over, and grades are due Wednesday night, so there is light at the end of the tunnel (if a reasonable amount of grading pain between here and there). With a little luck I’ll return to some posting and being a somewhat less pathetic on-line citizen. In the meantime feel free to go visit my Flickr photostream, where there are various bits and dribbles of my life on display.

The quartet of images above are from tonight’s Morris Area Schools end-of-the-year jazz concert, and show Sub-Evil Boy’s first jazz solo. He wrote his own solo and presented it to Mrs. Vick (the excellent director). (We were well in the back of the auditorium, so these are crops out of long shots, and consequently pretty soft.) He did a really nice job, as did the entire band. Pretty amazing given that they’ve only been in jazz band one school year. Well done all!

I again apologize for the long silence, and hope to be “back on the air” soon.

Thanks!

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