Category: Uncategorized

Pacific Beach

Once again, I have nothing on my mind that is worth sharing with the huddled masses on the internets.

I will therefore share a picture from one of our San Diego trips.

Enjoy!

Empty

I have nothing to say. Literally nothing. I’m just working. Well, I’m on lunch now, but I mean that I haven’t really done anything that involves thought other than work for the last couple of days. There is nothing else even remotely worth mentioning going on in my head.

I want to hit the lottery. I want to go on vacation. I want to own a house in San Diego, a condo in Boston, and an apartment in Manhattan, along with the house we already have. I want Elon Musk’s Hyperloop thing to become a reality so that I can leave work at the end of the business day and pop over to San Diego for an evening on the Pacific with my wife and her kids, and then have us all home in enough time to get a good night’s sleep for work and school the next day.

I want to get paid to write this silly blog, I want to get paid to be a photographer, and I want to get paid to write songs and play guitar, but at the same time I don’t want to be a professional at any of those things. I want the financial rewards without the pressures of the professions. In other words, I don’t want any of those things to be my job and cause me stress. I just want to do them because I enjoy doing them, but at the same time make enough dough off of them so that I can afford four homes. Things that are fun can cease to be fun when you have to do them instead of just want to do them. You know what I mean?

I want to be an astronomer. I want to be an astronaut. I want to be an archaeologist, but only if I can be like Indiana Jones. I want to be an oil baron, but not a Texas oil baron. I want to be able to leisurely take trains all over the country, although I would probably just stick to within a couple of hundred miles of each coast.  I want to own a passenger jet, but I don’t necessarily want to be a pilot.  I want to be a genius physicist and discover something astonishing that turns the entire way we view the universe on its ear.  I want to be George Brett and hit .390.  I want to be as awesome as Gmail.  Yesterday my wife asked me if I could remember something that we haven’t even thought about since 2008.  I went to my Gmail account and had the answer in less than 10 seconds.  That is fricken awesome.  I want to be that awesome.

I want a lot of things, but what I want most of all is for my wife and my step kids to continue wanting me in their life.  That is better than hitting .390, discovering the Higgs Boson, and being able to ride in a pneumatic tube all the way to California in about an hour.

Stars

I did manage to sneak outside last night to watch for meteors. I saw one, clear as can be. I was in the back yard sort of facing South, I guess. Maybe more like Southish. I don’t have much in terms of a sense of direction, you know? Anyway, I saw one just along the tree line. It lit up nicely and moved for a nice distance. I was pleased.

I was less pleased with my camera luck. I took a bunch of 30 second shots in the hopes that I’d get lucky and catch something streaking over head. I didn’t. I brought a table outside with me, focused the camera on a street light down the road, and placed the camera on it’s back, facing straight up. I used the 10 second timer, and set the exposure time for 30 seconds. I was surprised by the pictures as it looks like the stars moved a little. There were trails. I know that happens for long exposures, but I didn’t think 30 seconds was long enough. Either the camera moved a little or I had some wrong information. I’ll have to do a little more research before I try something like that again.

Here’s what I’m talking about…

If you click on a picture it will take you to Flickr. You can see larger versions of each pic there.
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Did those stars trail because of something I did, or because of something they did. Is 30 seconds too long?

Shooting Stars

I have wimped out on going to the beach for a sunrise photo shoot on a number of occasions recently.  I won’t have another shot at that until next weekend.  If the weather cooperates, I might take a shot at it. 

Tonight, however, I might take a shot at seeing some shooting stars.  If I’m awake after midnight, I might go sit outside for a while and see what I can see.  I would say the chances are about one in one hundred, but who knows.

Live Music

We missed a Lizard Fish show last night. It was at a bar that is practically down the street from us, but it was a kid night on the first full day since they came home from camp. I would have liked to have gone, but I would have liked to be home with the kids even more, so we stayed home.

Now that Rush has finished their tour, I don’t have any band to obsess about over their gigs.

Kay Hanley tweeted that Letters to Cleo was going to do something to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their first record. If that somehow fails to include Boston shows then there will be full scale riots in the streets.

Pearl Jam is playing two shows in Worcester in October. I just checked Ticketmaster (irony) and there are seats available for both. They are very high on my list of bands I have to see at least once before I die. Perhaps second on the list behind only Jeff Beck. Maybe that’s something to look in to.