The cat came back

Pumpkin flakes out on the chair behind me

Around 10:00pm, give or take half an hour, I was woken by my landlord calling my phone looking for her cat. I was pretty groggy and surprised that I fell asleep in front of the computer fiddling with some image software. 10pm? That's like 6 hours before I usually go to sleep.

Pumpkin (the cat) at times will sneak over to visit. I'll let him in to let him lounge around. This was not the case this time. I felt a bit of concern and not being able to get back to sleep anyway I ventured off to the local Shopper's Drug Mart to get some food.

On the way back to the apartment I was joined by the cat who heard me from the other side of the street. He came out from around Andrew and Isako's place. The jiggling of his tags gave him away as I'm sure the jiggling of my house keys alerted him.

I let the cat in where it slept for a few hours on the chair behind me (see photo). When I woke up the cat was gone. Apparently he woke up, pushed his way through my apartment door and went out with the new tenant.

Marshmallows: not extinct

Colored marshmallows in my hot chocolate.

Someone told me a while ago that they though small colored marshmallows couldn't be bought any more. While picking up other groceries, lo and behold, I stumbled across bags of colored tiny marshmallows. I bought a pack so I could throw some into my hot chocolate.

Anyone notice that the marshmallows that come with the hot chocolate powder are so small that they dissolve in the hot chocolate by the time you're finished stirring? Why put marshmallows in at all?

I threw some of the larger mini mallows into the hot chocolate after I completed the stirring process, placed the cup on my desk and forgot about it for a few minutes. When I finally remembered my drink, I noticed that all the marshmallows melted into a mosaic of color (see above) creating a layer of sugar on the hot chocolate surface.

Next time I should just buy a bag of normal sized large marshmallows and stick just one on top of the drink.

Oven time

Pork roast in the oven

Since just before Christmas all my meals that I've eaten at home have been made in the crock pot (slow cooker). While the food was starting to get good, I managed to solve the dry meat issue, I decided today to cook using the conventional oven.

It was a small pork roast with carrots, onions, garlic, celery, potatoes and homemade apple sauce, all submerged in a cheap $7 blackberry merlot. The pork came out great but there was something with the taste I didn't like.

It might have been the blackberry flavor or the potassium sorbate that this particular bottle of wine uses to preserve the flavor or maybe it was the sulfiting agents (whatever those are) that don't seem to be listed on my other bottles of wine.

Let it be known that I'm no wine expert. I don't do taste tastes or look at the legs of a wine. Heck, I don't even sniff the cork. I've only been using wine in my last few batches of crock potting and what I can tell you is that the Merlot from Baron Philippe de Rothschild (france) and the the Little Penguin Chardonnay (australia) taste great in cooking. They are relatively inexpensive (around $10 to $13 a bottle).

My cousin Lance told me you get what you pay for when it comes to wine. For $3 more I could have gotten another Merlot from France. Ah well. Live and learn.

From panties to practice

21:00 Hanky Panky Panty Party


Morgan Lindsey models at Club Absinthe

It was a pretty crazy busy photo weekend in Hamilton these last few days. All starting with the Hanky Panky Panty Party (say that five times fast) at Club Absinthe. The Hamilton fashion designers of Blackbird studios created a nice collection of evening wear, ranging from sailor themed outfits, bikinis with leopard print, to baby doll outfits.

What makes the clothing line from Blackbird studios unique is their custom silk screen prints. Targeting the punk music and alternative scene there's images of skulls with sailor hats, burlesque dancers, air bombs, and cat women to name a few. For more of their current collection and information on the designers themselves go to www.blackbirdstudios.ca.

There were also three bands that played that night. The Orphans (with Ginger St. James), The Lorrainas, and Poisoned Aeros. I only stayed for the first two bands and missed the Poisoned Aeros. I had to leave before midnight in order to get to the Plucker for Gillian's (Trevor's sister) birthday. Also, truth be told, I wanted to get to the plucker before the kitchen closed. I was starving. Shooting girls in panties does that to us photographers.


Scora Luchadora and Judge Jody man the panty table


Lasha singer of the Lorrainas does the hair whip thing.


The Lorrainas

00:00 Gillians birthday at the Pheasant Plucker

As luck would have it by the time got to the restaurant, ordered my meal, ate my bison burger, and socialized downstairs, then made my way upstairs of the Pheasant Plucker, I found that I had arrived just in time for cake. Lydia's chocolate Guinness super moist cake.


Gillian and Trevor

The socializing didn't last long as my ride to where I was going to crash was leaving. I was there for about two hours but it seemed to quickly rush by. A bunch of hurried good byes and I was off to Mel's place.

02:00 Mel's place

At first it seemed like I was going to fall to sleep straight away but around 4:00 found myself getting up for water. I had wobbled into the kitchen to land smack in the middle of some conversation between Rebecca and Noel. Something to do with Police and parking tickets or maybe it was speeding tickets. It's all a big blur. The conversation drifted, Rebecca managed to sneak out of the room, and conversation I had with Noel incorporated the subject of crows, the universe, and we humans not being that perfect or intelligent or something to that effect.

Just when I thought I was getting back to sleep I heard someone wondering around. It was Steve who while looking for his shoes. White shoes. He woke up Meg. From 9:00 to 11:30 my sleep was disrupted by Meg blabbing about getting a grilled cheese sandwich. There were other voices that were added to the din of her cheese sandwich mantra mostly for her to be quiet and go back t o sleep. In the end the grilled cheese won.

11:30 Cat's cast off


Mel's cat in the process of getting it's cast removed

At 11:30 everyone in the house was awake or at least groggy enough to feel awake. We watched, while I photographed, Noel taking the cat's cast off while Melanie held the cat in place. The procedure took 15 minutes. Noel was gingerly taking his time as he didn't want to freak the cat out more than he had to, that or cut the cat's foot off by accident. By the end of the procedure the cat seemed okay and started licking his foot.


Rebecca uses the cat hair band-aid as a moustache

13:00 the Pheasant Plucker


The Humongous breakfast at the Pheasant Plucker

By 13:00 we had made our way to the plucker where we ordered breakfast. I had the Humongous breakfast (that's what it's called). It had eggs, bacon, some kind of pancake thing, rye bread, a roasted tomato half, fried potato cubes, refried beans, something that looked burnt (was it blood pudding?) and haggis. Yes haggis! It's the reason I ordered the humongous breakfast.

For those that don't know haggis really isn't that exotic (at least not in this day in age). It actually tastes like liver pate. At least that's how it's prepared at the Plucker. It's quite yummy on bread. The black burnt thing was another story. It was very dry. I mixed it in with the beans to get it down. Otherwise I recommend a tall glass of water.

By 14:30 we had finished eating and Melanie and the rest left to go back home to go to sleep or to the bus station to go back to Toronto or Burlington. I stayed behind. After all in two hours I was going to be picked up by Mean Little Mama to go to Mainway at 16:30.

I was tired and time seemed to pass really slow. I caught myself napping with a hot chocolate in front of me. It seems I was just awake enough to order one every now and then. There was some TV show on bald people or hair on the CBC. There was no sound or sub titles so I could only guess what was going on. Then Jeopardy. With no sound I couldn't take part and could only read the questions. The same with Wheel of Fortune. I couldn't believe that show still airs.

16:45 Mainway - Deathrow Dames Meeting at 17:00

We arrived at Mainway early. Little Mean Mama bought some food and before long the rest of the Deathrow Dames showed up moving the meeting into a less noisy room. A cold but less noisy room.


Miss Carriage tells the other Dames that clawing the opponents face is bad.

Hah! Actually I don't know what Miss Carriage was talking about. I think they were talking about shirt design or something. At that point I had been going in and out of consciousness.

19:00 Practice at Mainway


Super Dave over sees the skate drills

Practice started at 7pm, taking up the Gardens and the Forum areas. The Gardens had the Death Row Dames where as the Forum was being used by the Hamilton Harlots. At 8pm the drills were consolidated into the Forum where the travel team was doing the drills.


Dicey does some jumping

I shot a few hundred random photos of the girls skating jumping and what not and before long it was 9pm. I hitched a ride back to Hamilton with Dave and Amanda and made it in time for the 22:00 GO bus.

22:00 GO bus

It was there I bumped into Rebecca who by coincidence was taking the same bus ride back to Toronto. She was armed with a coke and two bags of chips. I rememeber helping her eat some of the chips and fell asleep for most of the ride back.


Rebecca and I on the GO bus back to Toronto

I got home just before midnight. Because of the nap I had on the bus I spent the next four hours sifting through photos.

Boggle at the Only

Our game of Boggle

Met up with Neil and Darryl tonight at the Only Cafe. It's a bar on the Danforth that's been around forever. About 19 years ago I got hammered on my first beers. At the time it had been located across the street from my friend John. It was also around that time I realized I wasn't a beer drinker. Too gasey a beverage. I'll stick to the hard stuff in large glasses with the umbrellas and fruit.

I'm not sure why Neil picked this place as it seemed like a random choice but it didn't matter. While the large selection of different beer brands was lost on me I did like the fact that they had a section next to one of the tables with a bunch of board games. The standards. Scrabble, dominoes, cards, boggle... Boggle!

We played a few rounds with Darryl pretty much dominating the score for each round. For those that aren't familiar with this classic, it's a word scramble game. A grid of 4x4 letters are presented in front of you and within a minute you must find as many words, 3 letters or more, in them. It's rather a fun game that you don't see much of anymore.

WarCrafted Out

A last look at my warcraft character.

My subscription lasted for two months and expired today or maybe tomorrow. There's a command that you can type in the command line '/played' that will tell you how much you've been playing or how much time you've invested in that character. You can have more than one character at a time.

Most of my time was playing in the realm (server) ShadowSong with the Charm city ref Justice FeelGood Marshal. The grand total came out to 11 days 21 hours 23 minutes 35 seconds with my character making it to level 50. Kind of scary if you consider the average person sleeps for 20 of those 60 days. The game really is so huge in that I've only explored 10 of the 70 sections and I don't even own the second expansion pack. Crazy.

Thanks to the great programmers at Blizzard and the detailed virtual world of warcraft some of the things I've done include catching over 500 fish, hugged a squirrel, made dragon breath chili (where burbing causes damage to foes engaging me in hand to hand combat), rode a robot ostrich (or maybe chicken), beat up a troll to death armed with a 17 pound fish, fell over 65 yards (and lived), base jumped off a dam, figured out how to fight unarmed, with staves, with daggers, and swords, taught myself how to create portals to different cities, earned 500 gold pieces through the auction houses, and interacted with real people from around the world (the real world).

While I love to play the game for all the little details and exploration I have to put it aside to get stuff done in the real world. So to all my warcraft friends "Adieu"

...for now at least.

Photo day on the Island

The Toronto skyline during the icy winter month of February

The first day of february which also happened to be Super Bowl Sunday was the day we went off to the Island as part of a photo meet up group. The time to meet 10:15am. The ferry to the island was at 10:30am and every hour after that.

Paul and I were the only two that showed up. Probably for three reasons. It was early (especially for a sunday), possibly the superbowl, and it's winter. Not a lot of people may think going to a frozen snow covered island for a few hours would be fun. Photography equipment gets cold, batteries don't work as well, a chance the shutter will be affected, might fall into water. Who goes out in conditions like these? It seems only two of us.

As it turned out, the weather was actually quite warm (at least while the sun was up). Once the sun went down my boots froze from all the water the leather absorbed during the day walking through puddles and knee deep snow. During the day the sky was clear and cloudless sometimes giving harsh shadows but otherwise mae for a great photo day.

I shot in the range of about 800 photos ranging for kids playing ice hockey on the lake, to a bunch of ducks being herded by geese, to th toronto skyline. Throw in some miscellaneous nature shots and ice formations and you've probably got our day covered.

We stayed on the island shooting until just after the sun went down (at 6pm) and after that walked swiftly back toward Ward's island to catch the hourly ferry. Once the sun went down ice formed along the road back. Think of march of the penguins but instead replace the cute penguins with two guys and a bunch of camera gear wobbling in the dark towards the ferry dock.

Thankfully a guy who walked by us earlier told the guys on the ferry to wait up for us for an extra minute. We heard the horn toot a few times and a voice coming from the boat saying to "Hurry up.". For the last few meters it was a mad dash across ice hoping gear didn't spill out of the bags. We made it.

The photo above was taken on the way back sailing through the ice towards the downtown core.

Piece by piece

a Super Mario Kart lenticular puzzle

For the last few days I've been rearranging the bunch of stuff that is known as boxes in my apartment. Primarily to make room for doing photography indoors while the weather is cold and snowy outside. People that know me know that this is no minor task as it involves moving some boxes of laserdiscs and other boxes of junk that I've been hording for years.

Some may think the term "Pack Rat" but I'm more fond of the "Saver" label. While they mean the same thing in the end the later seems nicer. Here are the pros and cons of going through stuff.

pros

1. You can finally let go of that version of C++ that's been outdated 4 versions ago, 3 versions ago, and 2 versions ago, etc...


2. That's what happened to my (Commodore Pin, Amiga Pin, Back to the Future sunglasses, you get the idea)!


3. You can make your pile of junk smaller if you can let go of stuff.


4. You can find other people's stuff and return it to them. (Robin, I think I found some knitting book of yours, only re-misplaced it by putting it in another box.)


5. There are those that say that if you let go of things you create space for more things or new things to enter your life. Why get rid of the stuff to start it all over again in a few years?
   


6. Less storage space required. Which also means that maybe you might have more space to actually live in.

cons

1. Less stuff also means increased heating and or cooling bills. It's more cost effective to keep solids cold than empty space. This tip works for the refrigerator too.


2. You find things you haven't seen in a while and maybe didn't want to see.
• Thesis notes - Wow! That's my writing? Geez, I was smart! What happened?
• Mold - for example. I have not found mold, just sayin'.
• Photos - of you doing something dumb and/or geeky when your were less fat.


3. Sifting through the junk creates reminiscing which means more time sifting.


4. You wonder why you've been schlepping this stuff around all these years.


5. You find something you haven't fiddled with in years and now find yourself fiddling with that item taking more time to sift.

I found a few lenticular puzzles I had bought at a book sale a while back. The puzzles were only 100 pieces each but were still a good distraction. Instead I could have been working on clearing out stuff.

HCRG vs Queen City

Buffalo, only one hour away from Hamilton

The first HCRG (that's Hammer City Roller Girls) game this year took place in Buffalo. The trip was actually quite nice in that it was short and crossing the border was quite a pleasant experience. It's always the luck of the draw when getting to the border as the guard can be angry and tired. Like most people if you catch them on the wrong day they can really make your day long and miserable, even if it is just getting your ID checked and cross examined. The two cars in front of us weren't as lucky. They were asked to pull over to the little building behind the guard stations probably to be asked more questions.

I think more that the trip was short helped. We left at about 4pm from Hamilton and arrived at 5:15pm in Buffalo.

Mental note: I really have to get more photos of the outside of the venues we go to as the only one I got in Buffalo was of the sign as we drove by it.

Inside the rink was a very dark environment for us photographers. It was brightened up by Kevin, one of the photographers that brought in his own florescent tubes to replace all the colored tubing owned by the rink. In order to shoot at 1/200 of a second I still had to crank the ISO up to 3200 at f2.8. Not very optimal and of course focusing in such a dark environment was tricky. I think this is the year I pick up the 200mm f2.0 lens. Yeessss... (as I tap my fingers together)... Now if only I had a first born to sell.


The Rainbow Rink

While not as retro as the rink in Wilkes-Barre, as it lacked the shag carpeting, it was still a dedicated roller rink that looked like it was from the 70s. Same size skating area for the most part as the one in Pennsylvania and complete with disco lighting. I love these old venues.


Disco lights.


The 2009 HCRG Travel Team

The game between Hamilton and Buffalo ended with a score of 73 to 49. There seemed to be a lot of wipe outs this time round. Most notably Judge Jody flying into the spectators and not getting up right away. In the end she seemed alright.

Ivy Rupted had her finger or fingers skated over. They were taped up so she could continue to play. Were they were broken or not? To be determined... but they were not deformed (as one of the Hamilton paramedics observed).


Judge Jody flies into the crowd head first.


Ivy Rupted with her taped fingers... and EMS person.

If you build it...

There are those that say if you visualize something there's a better chance of it materializing in the real world. (ie. "If you build it they will come") While I have had some luck last year getting my photos published in a magazine (thanks to the fashion editor at FAB magazine, Max MacDonald) and some newspapers this year I'd like to concentrate on getting more magazine work... with a studio budget.

And so with the help of a photo session taken yesterday with Ashley Wolstat, model turned actor, I've created this mock up of what might be seen on a magazine, somewhere, some day.

As a personal assignment it's good to know how to frame up a shot for a magazine cover as you need to compose the shot so that you're leaving room for the magazine's title and barcode spot. The beauty of shooting medium format is that you can just shoot, then later once the slide is digitized at 100 megapixels you and pretty much crop out what you don't need.

Since I wasn't shooting with a medium format, I was shooting with my D700, I had to set up the shot in advance in my head with the thought of where all the magazine text would be floating around.

So now that there's an example of work floating around the web ether we'll see if this affects the jobs I get flowing in. Fingers crossed.

If you're feeling a bit stuck in the new year and need help getting motivated out of your rut check out the motivatorman web site and blog.