Eden has continued to get marginally better each day this week. There's definite progress being made, as she's actually approaching comfort for a reasonable portion of the day. At this point there's hope that she might be able to go to the new Star Trek movie with friends this weekend, though that's not sure at all. We'll see.
We also got a bit of a surprise today, as Cassie's boyfriend, Nick, showed up out of the blue. Apparently his ship will be down at the marina over the weekend, and he had the day off today. He decided to hop on his bike (which was down in the hold... somehow this just wasn't in my picture of gear for a tourist-based tall ship) and head on over. It was really nice to see him, even for a little while. To some extent, it felt like a piece of reality sliding back into place to have a good friend come visit. Eden and I have been pretty isolated, especially this past week. We just haven't been getting the chance to visit with those we love, and Vancouver is just far enough out of Portland that we don't spend a lot of time down there, other than errands and school.
As for myself, the week has been fairly sedentary, other than studying and taking care of Eden. During spare time, I'm continuing to explore (and study, in various forums, videos, and ebooks) photography. I'm really enjoying it, although the more I learn about how the processes work, the more I'm wishing that I had an obscene amount of money to spend on gear. The camera I'm working with right now falls into the category of "prosumer", which is to say, it takes wonderful pictures and actually gives me a lot of control over manual and semi-manual settings (Even more so with the CHDK hack), but it's a single collapsable lens, rather than a true SLR.
It's very cool to me to be learning this - I can feel it changing the way I look at things, and often, bring out details in scenery that I might otherwise miss (Eden will confirm, I am NOT the most observant person, by nature). It kind of feels like I'm tapping into a creative aspect of myself that I haven't had access to before. I'm sure I'm already driving Eden up the wall with this semi-obsession, but it's just a whole lot of fun to play with. Among other things, it's giving me a full measure of appreciation for the sheer volume of mechanical and mental adjustments our eyes and brains make automatically.
I was lucky enough to have some time today to take advantage of a nice sunny hour or so, as well as a clear night with a full moon. I took the car out just to drive and look for interesting things to shoot. The first stop was a kind of marsh created by a new housing development having moved around spare dirt and tree stumps - the place was just fenced off, apparently until the developer wanted to add another sheaf of houses. In the meantime, a small ecosystem has sprung up. Unfortunately, the numerous birds in the area declined to pose long enough for me to focus, other than one long distance shot you'll see below. After that stop, I found a beautiful abandoned barn up by 189th ave & 87th st. Seems to me that a lot of the damage might be from the incredible windstorms we've had over the last few years. Finally, I spent some time tonight playing with exposures shooting at the moon. Even at full 10x zoom, it didn't fill up terribly much of the image, so the four shots you see below are just cropped down to 800x600. I'll have to wait until I can get a better camera to get more detail.
Exploring 05-07-09
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Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
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