Crazy stuff

I never know what my life is gonna show me, and sometimes it surprises me. For many years I have guarded my credit rating like a fiend, scrimping and saving to make sure that I got my credit card bills paid on time. I have spent way more than I should have and then worked mad overtime and second and third jobs to cover the bills. On top of that I have been paying finance charges for nearly 25 years now so I guess the companies have made their money back from me and a pretty nice profit too. Last month I gave it up. I let the bills go delinquent and enlisted the services of a debt settlement company. I took the harshest road I could and went for the 2 year payoff. The sad part is that for the last couple years I have been trying to consolidate my outstanding debt and get it paid off, but nobody wanted to help me that way, they were making way too much off the finance charges. Now that I have gone off the reservation they are all telling me about these consolidation deals that they will offer me. Too late dick wads!! Tired of dealing with it all so now you can take what the agency will negotiate, and I am sure that it will be significantly less than I would have paid had you helped me when I was first asking. I never wanted to do this, it just turned out to be the way to get the end that I needed. I have cut up the credit cards and now if I can't pay cash. I don't get it. Pretty simple and it feels good. It will take a while to get used to the lack of plastic for any little thing, but in the end it will be better for me. Good riddance!

trying again...

Once again I am off and running on the weight loss trail. Heaven only knows how well I will do this time around, but I am trying again. Last year I didn't start until April, and I managed to lose close to 65 pounds before the summer was done. This year I am already working at it, albeit a little bit slower.

Sometime in October I tumbled off of my wagon and fell face first into a Large Pizza, it took a while for me to surface and swim through a few bowls of Nachos and pasta, but I have arrived back at shore, and now I am trying again. Immediately following Thanksgiving my pops was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Not really surprising since it runs in the family. He has changed his eating habits quite well, and as much of a pain in the ass it is for me, I am happy for him because he is improving his health. Why is it a pain in my ass? Because it seems that with his new regime of portion control and carb counting, he uses more dishes each day than any four people and I do the dishes around here. Secondly, it seems that no matter what I wanna make for my dinner, his comes first and I have to wait to use the kitchen. Pain in the ass. Oh Well.

Now for me, I have been trying to figure out what exactly it is that causes me to binge so uncontrollably, and I have come to the conclusion that I am, 1) an emotional eater, 2) an addictive eater, 3) a frustration eater and, 4) a social eater. I rarely eat just because I'm hungry, I do happen to eat when I am bored, and I put that under the frustration heading. I also never eat just until I'm full, or just have something in my tummy, I seem to gorge. I eat until I'm feeling stuffed like a bloated hippo. I guess it is because food never refuses my advances. No matter what I look like, what I think or what I have just done, food doesn't judge me, refuse me, or make me feel bad about myself. (While I am eating it, after words I may have a little guilt) So I eat because it's easy.

Easy is gonna kill me if I don't pay attention! The easy food is the worst food for me, and yet I can't seem to get enough of it most of the time. I have to start judging myself when I eat. Once again it is portion control and exercise that is going to help me through this. My goal is to lose 90 lbs. from my current weight. Today I stood on my shipping scale and I saw my weight at 310 lbs. That means when I am where I want to be, I should be somewhere in the 220 lb. neighborhood. I KNOW I can get there, but Man it is gonna take me some real work and discipline.

I'm up for the challenge, because it will make it a lot easier to take pictures, to sleep at night and maybe to find the love of my life. ( I could find the love now, but I want to be a better version of me before I do! )

Ah Fall...

The aptly named Season of Fall is upon us and the leaves are doing their part, and beginning to fall from the trees. The colors are emerging from their summer camouflage of green, and the edges of the forest are beginning to look interesting. The Virginia Creeper is hanging in crimson drapes across the landscape and the purple grapes are showing in the vines. Along the roadsides and in the fields the goldenrod is turning, first brown, and then fluffy white with seed fuzz. The purple asters and tiny daisies are fading away and slipping into their seed faze. The Corn fields are quickly losing the green hues of summer and the stalks are drying out and turning that soft tan color that signals the coming of Halloween. Orange pumpkins lying in the fields are being gathered up and brought to the roadside stands to be oohed and ahhed over by eager children anxious to carve their jack-o-lanterns and put on their masks to go trick or treating. The mornings are crisp and the days are cool, soon the frost will kill of the annual flowers and the perennials will be going to sleep. The Apple trees are loaded with fruit waiting to be picked and the cider mill is ready to squeeze. Soon the flavor of fresh sweet apple cider will mix with the tast and texture of fresh warm doughnuts and it will officially be the Start of the Cold season. Enjoy the smells and the tastes and the feel of the fall. Take some time and walk in the leave and smell the fresh scent that they give off. Revel in the cool evening and build a fire to share with friends. Indoors or out! Get the garden ready for bed with the same care that you get your children ready, and when spring comes it will wake up easier. Gather in the seeds that you wish to save for next season. Cut the grass one last time and don't forget to put some fuel stabilizer in the gas tank before you run it. Get the snow blower ready, before you actually need it. Fill the windshield pisser in your car and get a couple of spare bottles now so you aren't scrambling in the dead of winter to find it to get the salt glaze off of your windshield. Fall is both a time to put things away, and to get things out. Enjoy the season while it lasts. I feel sorry for people who don't have a fall season. They don't know the beauty of the earth getting ready for winter.

My current favorite pictures

As some of you will undoubtedly remember from a few weeks ago, I have a new camera, and I am loving life playing with it! There is just no stopping the ideas flowing through my brain and the endless possibilities that keep popping up before my eyes. I want to try new things and shoot in different ways. and to show my vision of the world. I feel almost like a veil has been pulled from my creative eyes. I am seeing the world once again in a way that makes me glad to greet each new sunrise. I wait for inspiration to strike, and it seems that I never have to wait very long. Today it was a sunset. Yesterday it was a barn fire!
I am always looking to learn something new, and to refine my own picture style. I am steadily getting my comfort level back with the higher-end camera. I have been using the point and shoots for so long that I have to get my steady hand back for the longer lenses, and to see how to capture the images that I want so that they convey the stories that I am trying to illustrate. Each time I break out the camera I learn a little something that I didn't know before. I find new ways of doing things and especially seeing things. I want to show things in a perspective that maybe nobody else has tried. Although today with all of the amateur photographers out there with high-end, pro gear taking great pictures and trying to be the next Ansel Adams, it's all likely been tried. The odds are that what I do will be noticed by my small group of friends and family on facebook, and perhaps a few friends of friends steered by the linked pictures, and not much more than that.
What I would like to be able to do is to sell my pictures and make enough money to travel and take more pictures. I love to take them and to show them and to have someone tell me that they like them. My firemen friends like the stuff I do for them, at their functions, and after I get a few under my belt and get my technique figured out, I will be much better at the fire scenes too. I have been taking pictures of musicians for years, but this is the first time that I have had the gear to get a good ambient light picture of the guys on stage and not needed flash to keep the fingers from blurring.
The one thing that I don't want to be is the guy with the shingle in front of his house who gets the call for the school pictures. Senior pictures! I like doing portraits of people that mean something to me, I want to show them to the world the way that I see them., I want to be able to capture that little bit of attitude and recklessness that I see in these people. I can only really do that with people that I know. My niece is one of those people. I will give you, that she is so photogenic that it is nearly impossible to get a bad picture of her, but it is still a skill to do it without being boring about it. Catching her being goofy, without being obvious about it, and keeping her in a playful mood makes it really easy to get great shots of her. So what kind of photographer do I want to be? Well, I guess that I want to be the one that people call after an event and ask me if I was there taking pictures, because they are looking for something different, or better than what they have from everyone else. They will know that I will have the background pictures, the pictures capturing real emotion and real action, not some staged, gimmicky, "aww" shot. Not the treacly kiddie shots that most parents take with their cell phone cameras, but the picture of the guys doing the work, the grimace of pain and strain, the dust and the dirt of the events. The stuff that shows how the work gets done, and why people were there.
But then again there are always some really cool "aww" pictures too. They aren't all throw-aways. Sometimes you have to be sneaky to get the really cool pictures. I have been called paparazzi on more than one occasion! It helps that I generally know my subjects and they get accustomed to the fact that I have a camera and they never know when I may be shooting. They forget that the glass is looking for a subject to see, and when they are their most comfortable is the best time for shooting. But there are those who are ever vigilant, lest they be caught being natural, and for those subjects it becomes a challenge to get a great shot. Sometimes you can position yourself in the right place and lie in wait for the right time to present itself, or you just become ubiquitous with the camera and sooner or later you get a great shot of that elusive subject. What ever way works is fine by me, I'm not too picky about the how, I'm much more interested in the "how did it come out?" The bonus of digital is that you can take 200 pictures, be happy with 100 of them, ecstatic about 10 of them and toss the rest and be out nothing but time and experience. A person can learn.

Life is about learning, and photography is about capturing, so a photographers life is learning the art of the capture, I guess.

My new toy!

Yes indeed some days you get what you are looking for, and this week I have gotten me a brand new toy, a new camera!! A new camera for me and this is a great big step up from the little point and shoots that I have been using. If you look at this picture you might guess that it takes some pretty nice pics, and you would be quite right! It is a Canon Rebel T1i, 15.1 Megapixel. Since I didn't have a whole lot of money to throw at this, I searched for a while to find the best price I could, and then I saved my pennies for a few months until I could afford the nut it took to make the purchase. I hope that I will be able to sell a few pictures to help me pay for this thing!

I was so tight on the money that I didn't even have the spare to buy the kit with a lens, I had to buy the body only version. Fortunately, and with some planning I happened to buy a camera of the same make that my Father already owns, and he has given me 2 of his old lenses that he no longer uses. ( He spent the money on some high-end lenses, so I can have the hand-me-downs!) One is the original that he got with his own Rebel XSi, an 18-55mm zoom, and the other a 55-250mm zoom. They are both great optics, but they have a drawback that pops wanted to overcome, they didn't have enough apeture to shoot clear indoor, sports, action shots. While I may want to do that occasionally, I am much more about outdoor nature shots. Yes, I do lots of parties and performances, but they are either well lit, or I have no problem lighting them with a flash, so it's plenty cool to use the higher apeture settings for me. Plus I have learned how to incorporate the blurred movement of certain things into my style.

It has been many years since I have had the luxury of a true SLR camera at my utter disposal, and I am feeling my oats with it. I have already taken over 175 pictures and I haven't even had it for 48 hours yet! Of course, they are not all good by any means, but I am improving quickly as I get used to the feel and the features of the camera. I really dig the auto focus, but it takes a little tweaking for a picky pixel hound like me to get it seeing what I want it to see. Fortunately that's one of the big advantages of this particular brand, I can set the focal points where I want them and the camera will heel to my becon call. One of the things that I have missed so much in recent years with the myriad subjects surrounding me, is the ability to get such a great adjustment in the depth of field in my pictures. Since the glass on point and shoot cameras is set up to be pretty much idiot-proof ( nothing ever is, because there are always better idiots waiting in the wings!) it is designed with a very limited depth of field capability, even with an adjustable aperature, it only closes down to f8, and that is still a gaping maw compared to the the f22, 25, 0r 28 that I can get with the SLR glass. Now I can have some fun with depth!

Not only that, but because I enjoy the nature shots so much, sometime it will allow me to get in close and personal with certain skittish critters. Like this little guy! He was hiding in the watergarden and I nearly stepped on him before I realized that he had himself stashed in such a tight spot. But I was able to get a bead on him for a few frames before he decided to dash away. I sure hope he got his dinner first! While I am not a fanatic conservationist or anything like that, there are tons of subjects that I love to get pics of, from the frogs and dragonflies, to the deer and game birds that spend so much time within my visual range. If I am lucky I may be able to get some pictures of some crazy birds this year. Maybe a turkey or a pheasant, and if I'm real lucky maybe I get me a partridge ( pear tree optional!)

So far I am pretty happy with what I can do, and I am looking forward to really pushing the limits of what this camera can accomplish, and as I learn all of it's little quirks and intricacies, I will be able to refine my own style of picture taking. I am not the most creative person in the world, but I do know what I like and what draws my attention. I really want to get back into getting people like I have in the past. I have been compared to paparazzi on more than one occasion, because I manage to get pictures of people and things that people don't even notice. Partly because I so often have a camera that it becomes an expectation and people lose their natural inhibitions to being caught on film, and partly because I have this habit of shooting so much around me that it is inevitable that eventually I get a few good pictures!

I wish I had a real crystal ball to look in and see what it is that I need to do to find that moment when I meet my dream, but since I don't, I will continue to play with the things that draw me in. Oh yeah, one more thing, this particular camera also does video, in FULL HD!! so cool! I have only just tried this feature for a few seconds to make sure that it worked, but as soon as I have my high capacity SD cards, I will give it a try for real! Looking forward to having some fun with that also!

Why are we so scared?

I recently read an article ( and when I say "recently" I mean in the last few months!) that broke down "freedom" by state. Using various legislative and social guideposts, the authors of the sited study, evaluated and graded the freedoms in each state. The conclusions were interesting to say the least, because what they found was that, in general, the states with the highest tax loads per capita had the least amount of personal freedom, and the states with the lowest tax loads had the most "perceived" freedom. Why, you may ask do I put the word "perceived" in quotes? Well, it is because, based on the study, most freedom is about perception,( ask your kids how free they feel when they are stuck in school) but when quantitatively measured, freedom has no meaning.

If a person has a job, and can feed their family and live a life that makes them happy, what freedom are they missing? If this person lives in country that is ruled by a military dictator, or by a democratically elected president makes no difference. If a different person has a job they can't stand, and makes barely enough money to live, and lives on the edge of financial ruin, never finding happiness in their entire life, are they ever truly free? Again, it makes no difference what system they live under.

Taxes that seem to go ever upward, with ever deepening cuts in the services offered, gives a feeling of the loss of freedom. When you can keep more of your wages, you feel like you have more freedom. When you are doing something that you enjoy, more than you're doing something that you don't, you feel free. Ask yourself, do you take a vacation to do stuff you hate? Of course not! Unless you're married and you take a vacation to catch up on the "Honey do.." list, then maybe you are doing stuff you don't like on vacation. See, you don't feel free then, do you?

In America, we spend so much of our time trying to meet our payments that we have lost view of what life is really about. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, were the golden trio described in our Declaration of Independence, but today we give them up for Work, Struggle and the pursuit of the next cool thing. Anybody who has lived a few years can tell you that the continuing struggle for money and belongings has sidetracked us from the real things in life, family, learning and living.

Living is one thing that the rest of the world seems to have on us. Especially the European countries. The European model has capitalism, with liberal amounts of socialism sprinkled in to make life livable for the masses, and not just for the lucky few. Health care is only one place where they have us beat. We have truly lost some greatness in our educational arenas, and our research capabilities too. Thanks very much to the odd religious nutcases who seem to get power, even when they are a minority. Long discussion for a different time.

Just as much, I pursue the dollars and the stuff. I have no time or money to do the things that I really want to do, so I compensate by getting stuff instead of going and seeing like I want to! Occasionally I have the luck and the time to get out of my small realm and see the broader world, and I always love those times. But they are far fewer that I would like, so in the middle times I amuse myself with what I think I want when I can't have what I really want. It is my freedom of choice and I use it rather unwisely!

On a lighter note.....55# gone. I have hit a plateau, but it might have to do with the hole in my back. Small surgical thing that needs to finish healing so I can get back into some more vigorous exercise. Sounds funny to say, but I miss it!

Too many dreams...

Dreams of travel, and dreams of leisure, riches and pleasures. Every day we dream about what could be, and what we feel should be, but mostly what we would like most. Or at least what we think we would like most. Everyone knows the old saying, "Money can't buy happiness." and that is true is many ways, but it can also be a fallacy if taken to be literally true. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy things that help one find their happiness.

I wish to travel and see the world. With money, I could do this much more easily, with lots of money I could also do it comfortably! To me travel is about learning new things and seeing new places and experiencing things in new ways. Part of this is learning new languages. Since I am not surrounded by the united nations I have to seek out ways to learn new languages, and again that can take money. So money doesn't buy the happiness, but the things that bring the happiness.

There is another old saying, "If you find a job you love, you will never work again." This one I think is much more truthful. Who hasn't been doing something that they thoroughly enjoy, and thought that if they could make a living at it, they would be happy to do it all the time. Everyone has something that they like to do, and that the are at least reasonably good at. I love taking pictures. I like travel, and taking pictures. If I could find a way to pay the bills and travel and take pictures, I would be quite content in my work. To me I wouldn't be working, even with a deadline and the need to take certain pictures. As long as it was all that I had to do to get my pay, I would be pretty darn happy.

Sadly, most of the world does what it has to do to pay the bills. People in generally do what they must do to survive, and that means that most people in the world are not really doing what they love. The brunt of humanity survives, and they find happiness in the little pleasures that life hold. Physical pleasure in sex, or the chemical pleasure in drugs or alcohol. The pleasure of the company of friends who think and feel the same way that we do about our lot in life. The pleasure of a day away from work, doing that thing that we true love to do. Laying in the sun, swimming in the pool or the lake, slicing through the water on a sail boat. Playing with the children, turning the soil and tending to a garden. Pleasure is like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. To me mowing the lawn is a pleasure, but to many it is a chore that must be done.

Doing what you must, and doing what you love. It depends on which one can keep you in beer and skittles. Sometimes you do what you must so that you will have the money and time to do what you love. Too many dreams, not enough time to do what I must in order to pay for what I love. Money can't buy happiness, but it can pay for the stuff that makes me happy.