Tag: photos

I Could Not Care Less

Today is super bowl Sunday and I really, honestly, truly, could not possibly care less. I don’t give the faintest shit about football, the NFL, or any of it. Really, the only thing for me to look forward to is the aftermath of all of the maga asshole heads exploding the first time they put Taylor Swift on screen during the television broadcast. That is the only aspect of the game that is of any interest to me.

On the upside, it did give me the annual opportunity to crack my dumbest, most over used joke. I was talking to my father on the phone this morning and it went a little like this:

Dad: So, are there any sports on TV today? (He was kidding, of course)
Me: Well the Bruins played last night so no, no there isn’t.

Har har har, I’ve got a million of them. I’ll be here all week, be sure to tip your waitress.

In unrelated news, I got some good cat pics today.

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Robin is in the basket thing. She got in all by herself. No one did anything to prompt her to sit there.

335

I think this week the time will arrive. My second 1970’s guitar, my 1979 Gibson ES-335 Pro, may be ready for it’s trip to the shop. I am going to give them a call and see if they can help me bring this baby back to life. 

I put my ’78 Les Paul Custom into the shop a few months ago to get the frets replaced. I was scared to have the work done, but I should not have been. The results were fantastic. I am so pleased. Now I need to have the 335 looked at. The frets are in better shape than they were on the Les Paul, but they are still pretty bad. I expect it’s time to have them replaced. 

This time there is a second issue at play though. The electronics are in rough shape. The last time I used this guitar at a Lizardfish show the signal cut out and wouldn’t come back. That had happened off stage a few times in the past but once it happened in front of people? Yeah, that’s bad. If you can’t rely on the electronics, what good is the instrument? It may be time to replace the wiring harness. If they can salvage what’s there, meaning clean it up and maybe re-solder some of it, then that is fine. If they can’t save it, then I’ll need it replaced, and hopefully I can get a good 50’s style wiring schematic installed. I don’t want to change the pickups on this guitar. 335 Pros come stock with Gibson Dirty Fingers pickups which are the meanest, nastiest, dirtiest Gibson pickups ever. They are punk rock machines. The wiring and the pots though… we’ll see.

I am planning on calling the shop either tomorrow or Tuesday to see if we can schedule a slot for me to bring it in and see what they can do for me. I am still nervous about this, but given my last experience I am more excited than scared.

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Me playing with Break Even back in 2003 or 2004 or so
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Flickr Turning 20?

Flickr, the photography site that I have been an avid user of since 2009, even though it’s been sort of overlooked and forgotten by most of the social media and photography universe, is going to celebrate it’s 20th birthday next month. The big day is a few days after my wife’s birthday, and a week-ish after my step son’s birthday, which is also my nephew’s birthday.

https://www.threads.net/@flickr/post/C2f3EUUyu8R

I guess Threads embeds still don’t work with wordpress.com. Hmmm…

This might work better… friggin’ zuckerberg…

Anyway, they have a bunch of things planned including some photowalks. I don’t see anything scheduled for Boston and even if they do schedule something it’s 99.9999% guaranteed that I would not join in, even from a social distance. Still… it would be nice, right? Granted, not nice enough for me to try to get something started. No way in hell would Mr Introvert do something crazy like that. No thank you.

Anyway, Flickr’s birthday is February 10th. Take some pictures to celebrate.

Skipping a Year

Yesterday I posted something about how I used to do New Years day posts where I posted one picture from each month as a year in review kind of thing. I said I was still thinking of doing one for 2023.

I just went through my Flickr trying to decide which pics to use for the post…

…and it turns out that most months don’t have anything worth highlighting. It was a nice quiet year but photographically? There are long stretches of time where there’s nothing special to look back on. There are lots of guitar pictures and lots of cat pictures and not a whole lot else.

Oh well. Let’s try to make 2024 a little more visually interesting, m’kay?

Maybe I am just old and uninteresting now. Not that I was ever very interesting to begin with.

Hide

Robin was behind me. She was trying to hide and didn’t realize that humans have the physical ability to turn around.

I took this one around lunch time today. It doesn’t have anything to do with the first picture but I am posting it because my cat is cuter than yours*.

*Okay, so maybe I can’t definitively say that my cat is cuter than yours, but I can absolutely say that at the very least my cat is equally as cute as yours, if not cuter.

How Are We Doing?

Hey folks. How is it going? Are we all doing all right tonight? It’s Friday the 13th, has the universe thrown you any curve balls?

Today has gone okay for me. I found out my nephew has Covid. Sigh in frustration. I hope he’s okay, and I hope he kicks it way faster than I did. I don’t want him to be sick for three weeks the way I was. I have a whole new perspective on this particular plague and somehow it makes everything worse.

I had another one of those empty stomach things that I wrote about last night. Usually it hits about three hours after eating. Today it hit two hours after I finished lunch. I had a snack and thought I would be okay until dinner, but an hour later it came back. Weird. That’s the first time this issue was not predictable. I didn’t eat dinner until 7:00, which was about an hour after the stomach ache came back. We’re going to have to keep an eye on this tonight. I don’t want any weirdness. Unpredictable weirdness is not as fun as you’d think.

Jen and I just watched this week’s episode of Loki. Season two episode two. At lunch today I was poking around news.google.com and I was almost spoiled about seven times. I am going to have to be more careful on Fridays for the next four weeks.

I just checked the weather for the weekend. It is going to be clear at sunrise tomorrow and clear just after sunrise on Sunday. There must be photos this weekend. It’s a necessity. I have a lot of stuff on my agenda and I’m booked pretty solid. Still, from a mental health standpoint a photowalk somewhere must happen. The mornings are getting cold and there are only so many more opportunities left before the winter ruins everything. I have to take advantage of this. Ocean sunrise and maybe some Merrimack River stuff tomorrow and then either around town on Sunday or maybe finally spend an hour or two walking around the city? Boston at sunrise on a Sunday should be easy to social distance, shouldn’t it?

Like I said, there is a lot on my plate this weekend. I need to make time for some creative stuff. I’m still feeling a little shell shocked from the covid journey so my brain needs to stretch its figurative legs a little.

Here’s hoping we can make something happen this weekend. Assuming Friday the 13th lets us through the day, right?

Weekend Photo Plans?

It’s Friday night. I’m sitting in the living room watching some Doctor Who (new series, season seven episode four co-starring the guy who played Arthur Weasley and it’s great to see him) and I am trying to think of where I should take my camera this weekend.

I want to do a lot of music this weekend and I want to spend some time on a work project that’s due on Monday, but I also want to take the camera out shootin’ too.

Boston. When? Sunday morning is supposed to be sunny. That seems like the best bet. It’s supposed to be cloudy around sunrise tomorrow and then clear up later so Sunday feels like the better bet, assuming the forecast doesn’t change or magically become inaccurate.

Where to on Saturday morning then? Downtown Lowell? That train track in Andover? Find another light house? The river walk in Lowell? Minuteman National Park in Concord?

I just don’t know. I don’t know what I want to shoot and I don’t know how to figure it out. I only know that I want to shoot something. Film and digital both. Oodles of photos, that’s the goal. But where?

Three Hours to Go

Three hours left in the work week.

180 minutes.

10800 seconds.

It’s a long weekend for me too. The company I work for puts a cap on how much personal time you can accrue and as your bank builds up you have to take time off to stay below the cap. It’s not as bad as the Boston Bruins salary cap woes right now, but it will get there if I don’t use time regularly. Because of that, I took two days off next week. Monday and Tuesday. That all means that ol’ Robbie has himself a four day weekend coming up.

Sadly, Jen was not able to take the two days off too, so that means I am on my own for the second half of my super long weekend. That means there will be lots of personal creative project type stuff. I checked the weather at the ocean for the next few days and both Sunday and Monday are looking like good candidates for sunrise photos. At least one of those mornings will be Photography Day where I will grab some sunrise at the beach and then hit a few places on the way home. Film and Digital. Bank on it (weather permitting).

There will also be a lot of music. As much as I can stomach. I plan on making gigantic progress on the 50 songs in 90 days challenge. That includes guitar tracking, vocal tracking in the car (because I have a weird mental block that won’t let me sing when people can hear me unless I am playing guitar with a very loud band), and mixing songs as I finish recording them.

There will also be progress on the current Doctor Who series binge watches. I finished season one of the original show this morning, and I am almost done with season four of the current show. So very many more seasons of each show to go. Progress will be made. I fully expect to move from the 10th doctor to the 11th doctor in the new show but I expect to still be on the first doctor in the old show. Like I said… so much Who to watch.

I am also thinking that I will be back on the couch to 5k wagon next week. It’s been a couple of weeks since I stopped. I want to get back into it, even though I am very doubtful I will ever run that mythical 5k. It’s still a goal, I just don’t know if it’s an achievable goal for me.

I have two days off booked in August too. They are for a weekend trip to Maine for a wedding. Bellana will be joining us for that and I expect lots of photos from Acadia National Park near Bar Harbor. Again, film and digital. That include Cadillac Mountain, which is the first spot in the continental United States that sees the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. It would require a SUPER early wake up to see, but I want very much to see it and photograph it. Now that I think of it, I should replace my broken tripod before we leave for that trip. The broken guy is good enough for this weekend, but for Cadillac Mountain? I’m going to need something that works. I’ll take care of it.

Okay, my late lunch break is over now. Time to get back to work and finish off this work week on a high note.

Film Developing Waits

The first time I sent film to Old School Photo Lab, I shipped the film out on Monday August 1st, received an email saying it arrived just after noon on August 2nd, and received an email saying my scans were available just after noon on Wednesday August 3rd.

That turn around time seems too fast to be true. I should not expect things to go that quickly again.

Having said that…

I shipped two rolls of film to them on Tuesday September 6th… does that mean I should expect an arrival email today, Wednesday September 7th, between noon and 1:00pm? It’s 11:30 now, so I should be hearing from them in the next 90 minutes? That would be pretty freakin’ sweet!