01
Sep 08

Busy weekend

It’s been a weekend that could have easily supported a blog post a day.  But I’m lazy and I really was hoping to get a new photo or two printed before posting…but other things happened and I still haven’t made any new prints.  So here’s the updates instead!

This one will be long with a lot of photos…no teaser photo for the front though.

Continue reading →


29
Aug 08

Being right ain’t no fun sometimes.

Yeah, I admit I like being right.  Most of the time.  But sometimes I really wish I wasn’t right about something.  Like the prediction I made when we bought this house that “Those carport tarps won’t last a year” despite the sellers assurance that “They have a 7 year warranty and are only a year or so old.”  Which of course means – it happened again.

It happened again.

It happened again.

Read on for more details, more photos, and something completely different.

Continue reading →


28
Aug 08

More time in the dark

Still no safelight so I get frustrated quickly when printing, but that should be rectified soon.  Even so I scraped an hour or so out of my schedule to try and crank out another print or two last night.  Results were not quite what I had hoped for:

Better exposure, but neg was damaged.

Better exposure, but neg was damaged.

Continue reading →


24
Aug 08

New negs

Well, with the darkroom functional for printing – though annoying to use without a safelight – this weekend Amy and I decided to work on the other half of the image and expose some film.

Laguna Dam - abandoned sluiceway

Laguna Dam - abandoned sluiceway

Read on for details!

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17
Aug 08

My latest darkroom

Well the blog started with my first darkroom, this isn’t a sign that the blog is ending…but I now have a darkroom again!  Well, kind of.  A new camera store opened up in town and we stopped in on Saturday to check it out.  Turns out they have darkroom supplies, so I couldn’t resist.  We picked up some paper and chemicals and decided it would give us incentive to get a darkroom up and going!  Read on for details about how we’ve pulled it off…kind of…. Continue reading →


23
Apr 08

Freebies and slack

Yep, I’m slacking again.  And once again it’s not that I don’t have anything to blog about, just that I haven’t had time to sit down and do it.  Believe it or not it’s not even that I don’t enjoy this – I do, typing is quite cathartic for me.  Which is kind of the problem.  I enjoy it too much and tend to zone out while writing.  As a result I end up spending more time than I planed on it and instead of feeling unburdened when I’m done I end up feeling guilty that I spent so much time at it when I have so much more I should be doing.  It also doesn’t help that WordPress 2.5 broke the smugmug and lightbox plugins I was using so posting photos is a bit more arduous than I really care to deal with.   The new built in gallery in WP 2.5 is excellent, but I really have little interest in using it as I prefer to keep my photos on my smugmug site, uploading them twice annoys me.

But Amy’s most recent duet of posts on her blog seem worth of mention.  So read on for my thoughts about the fickleness of freebies and whatever else I manage to bang out before accepting I’ve spent enough time and need to get back to using the keyboard for something more productive!

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14
Apr 08

An idea so perfect…

How I never thought of this I’ll never figure out.

Yeah, the amp I made sure came out clean:

Amp on breadboard

But I win zero points for style when compared to this:

http://www.dinosaursandrobots.com/2008/02/in-praise-of-coconut-shell.html


27
Mar 08

Not slacking

Despite the apperance of my blog I have not been slacking lately.  Well, ok.  I have been slacking about updating my blog.  But the reason for that is just about every other aspect of my life I haven’t been slacking lately 😀  That and It just feels wrong to me to blog without photos…but I haven’t had time to take and download any photos of the stuff I’ve been up to the past couple of days.

So I figured I should take a few minutes to slip in a little text only update.  Mainly work has just had me swamped.  I’ve been working on a couple of big projects that are gobbling up every spare minute they can.  I did manage to make a few new food treats lately, and food is something I’ve really been wanting to bring into the blog.  So let’s talk about those. Continue reading →


16
Mar 08

Excuse the dust

I’m giving up on blogger. It’s not that Blogger is bad, just that I much prefer the hack and expand ability of WordPress. As I start to focus in on what I want to do with my personal site when I finally redo it a flexible blog seems more and more important. So I setup a new WordPress blog on my site and am working on redirecting all my traffic to it. So things may be a bit bumpy while some things sort out. Read on for all the details: Continue reading →


14
Mar 08

New Carport Tarp

Last sunday while we were recovering from the previous nights party, Amy and I remembered about the Yuma Bargain Warehouse and decided to go see if we could find a new tarp for the carport. I had guestimated that it would be a 20′ x 20′ tarp…and after measuring the tattered rempains of the original that was looking about right. At the warehouse we found a good selection of tarps, of course the one we liked best (green mesh) they were out of in 20′ x 20′. But they had black mesh, heavy duty white and silver in that size. The black mesh was tempting…but being a mesh we weren’t sure if it would give as much shade as we wanted – and it was over double the cost of a silver or white tarp. The silver we didn’t like the looks of so at $37 the white tarp won out. We also picked up 2 – $2 bundles of nylon rope and headed home. Last night we finally put the tarp up, took a little over 30 minutes. Continue reading →