Winter 2007-2008
My recent reply to a friends LJ post about all our snow:
I love the snow. Even the horrible driving tonight and the fact that I almost got
helloheather's car stuck twice in a span of 10 minutes...I still love it.
The worst winters are the ones where all you see is brown grass and brown dirt.
This winter has been the winters of my childhood. I want more.
Photographic Goals – 2008
I've been unable (or rather, unwilling) to go on many photography walks during my lunch hour. (The cold and a slowly-dying camera are my excuses.) However, as both will eventually be "solved" I think I need to come up with some goals for my photography for 2008.
One thing that is noticeably lacking when browsing cetan.org is the absence of images without color. Put more succinctly: I want to shoot more black and white photos. And, in the digital world this means shooting in color and learning how to better convert to black and white. But this means that, just like with film, I need to learn how to "see" in black and white before shooting. I need to train my brain to convert tones before pressing the shutter button.
Second, of course, is to get out walking as much as possible. Even though I've covered almost everywhere I can on foot, these areas are constantly changing. And with additional riding on the El, I could certainly expand further.
I would also like to start doing more photography on the weekends. I seem to abandon any ideas of photo projects on the weekends and that's been bothering me for some time. I want to better explore my little area of the country.
The 800 lb gorilla in the corner, though, is lighting. I don't really understand it and I certainly need to learn more. But really, the idea is so very daunting. I follow, somewhat sporadically, the resource that is Strobist, but only until I feel very very overwhelmed. This happens rather quickly. The only thing I've figured out so far is that 1) I probably need an off-camera cord and 2) I probably need the Canon 580 EX flash. Everything else is just too much.
So that's it for 2008. We'll see how well I do in 10 months 
What is life but a completely unfair crock
Three years ago a coworker was diagnosed with cancer.
He fought and fought and won. He beat cancer into submission. He returned to work and even had the opportunity to travel to Japan.
Yesterday he suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. Today he passed away.
What more can be said?
Hitting home.
With the housing market clearly favoring buyers, helloheather and I took a tour of two homes for sale back in December. The first was empty, as it was being sold by a relocation company. It was decent enough but did not strike us as the right fit.
The second, however, was still occupied but had a pending foreclosure. As we walked around, four young girls and their smiling parents stared at us from photos on the mantel and walls. The artwork of these girls decorated the fridge and their bedrooms. The family's cats sniffed us as we went by.
Our tour of the house threw my conceptualization of the problems in the housing marking right out the window. I find it hard to describe the feelings I had after we left the house, but depressed was certainly one of them. I don't know the details behind the foreclosure, nor do I want to find out. That's not the point. These four girls are innocent victims of something they had no control over.
What if something happened to my job and helloheather and I were unable to make house payments? What if we were faced with a foreclosure? The loss of our home, as a concept rather than a thing, would be (to me at least) devastating.
Perhaps I'm wrongly projecting my feelings of our home onto this family. Maybe they don't even like where they live. I rather doubt this, but I suppose it's possible.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I found a compassion for this family that weeks of statistics on the radio and online had been able to hide. I had become numb to the reality of this situation because the numbers being thrown around are too abstract. This experience has given me pause and my heart goes out to all those families that have been similarly affected.
Polaroid film to be gone forever
I have written about the demise of certain types of Polaroid film before. The company that purchased Polaroid a few years ago has been slowly and surely eliminating film types.
But now it seems that all remaining film lines will be no more.
Though Fuji still makes their instant film, they certainly have never had the variety that Polaroid offered. The article and one from the AP states that Polaroid would be interested in licensing their film to another manufacturer, so perhaps a line or two will live on.
http://lnk.nu/news.yahoo.com/ioh
I have many fond memories of being at my Grandma and Grandpa Bernhard's watching (with amazement) the image on integral film take form.
I’ll take the snow over the cold any day
McHenry County and other northern Illinois counties were hit pretty hard with about 14 inches of snow yesterday. I went home early and was greeting by this in the Metra parking lot.
Of course there had been zero plowing (because the company Metra has contracted for snow removal is incompetent) so there was a foot of snow on the ground and a two foot drift in front of my car. I keep a shovel in the trunk for just such occassions and a bit of digging got me out of the parking spot. Getting out of the lot itself was a little tricky but low gear and smart driving won out.
Nathan at 19 months
It's shocking how long it's been since I've written a monthly update about Nate. The last one was back in August.
There's no way I can summarize the time since then, so let me relay a brief story.
In December, after Nate was in the hospital helloheather and I decided to make a list of words that Nate could say. We stopped counting at 75 and we were fairly certain that we'd missed a few. Here at the beginning of February, we could probably hit 150 and know for certain we've missed some. This son of mine is taking to language like the solar wind to our atmosphere. By that I mean: I am stunned by the results.
He says "help please" when he wants help and "Mommy book" when he wants helloheather to read to him. He knows some colors and shapes and boatloads (har!) of animals. By far his favorite word is "yeah." When he climbs to the top of his castle/slide he yells: "Taadaa!" He asks for us to describe everything we can to him.
He says "I love you" to me before going to bed.
Of equal import is that he greets me with great gusto when I arrive home from work. After watching me drive up the driveway he'll be waiting for me to come in from the garage. Some days he'll hug and kiss me and some days he's so filled with excitement that he'll run into the family room yelling all manner of happy noises. At the same time he will stomp his feet and run in circles. I cannot wait to arrive home.
He has turned into a little boy and I'm not entirely certain what to do about that. Here is where the real work begins. Here is where we really begin to Teach. I only hope I know how.