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Umm...

pee ess. No. That is not Henry.

Sushi at Redfish again tonight. As a dear friend would say… “yummadoo!”. They do this seared tuna thing with maguro steaks hand rolled in a seasoning and then sealed up with a handheld propane blowtorch that is fantastic. Take all the pretension out of seared Ahi and mix that with some sashimi grade fish and some herbal flavoring and you get… well, yummadoo. A couple of rolls and a couple of sakes later and I find myself at the 24 hour grocery looking for supplies resembling food. Grocery shopping is one of the most depressing things a widower can do. It is absolutely a prime environment for bombardment with a myriad of painful nostalgia from a previously happy domestic life. Some isles are more poignant than others. Nevertheless, I survived the ordeal and yet again was amazed at how such little, by volume, crap could amount to so much, by numeric value, money. Grocery shopping, all emotion aside, is a fucking racket. Henry was happy to see that dad brought home more cheese and carrots… both of which he is enamoured with beyond description. I bought a bunch of things that I could arguably do without, but seemed to be necessities at the time EVEN THOUGH I was shopping wisely on a full tummy. That was premeditated. I found these tiny, baby bottles of Gatorade that I had to have. They are good for hangovers (with BC Powder) and refreshment after the sex I’m not having. I worked most of the day pre-sushi, so there isn’t much to say outside of being disappointed in the photography situation. I ran across a sneak-peek link to some pre-Rev3 release stuff coming out next month in EVE, but that won’t interest 99.9% of y’all. Most things I can’t benefit from anyway (like the Black Ops and Tech II improvements), but it’s still nice to know development is ongoing. I am fairly certain I remembered to DVR House tonight, so I’m off to watch that before bed. Toodles.

Every frame I make is a stale attempt at keeping my shutter finger from atrophying. Of all the genres of photography out there, I love each and every one, but the one that gives me the most pleasure is landscape above all else. My fascination with the hidden world revealed by macro photography is ever present. The challenge of capturing the human face and form is a technical adventure as much an art. The nuances of product and still life are certainly intriguing, but landscape remains king. Capturing the beauty of our precious planet remains the most fulfilling for me… emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. I’ve not made a landscape frame I was remotely happy with since long before Erin passed. Much of it has to do with disinterest in life and travel… things aren’t the same for me. I know half the shot is just being there… it always has been… yet I never go. I just look at archived crap and wish things were different.

Why do I bring this up, you ask? Because I don’t spend 200 days in the field a year creating what I love… because I don’t have a single Singh-Ray that I’ve been pining over for 4 years because I would just waste them in a bag on the floor of my studio… because I realized today, when I found Marc Adamus, that I have made zero progress at becoming a better photographer and am humbled by his work. IMHO, by comparison, I suck and I have no one to blame but myself.

(Thanks for the link, Sean.)

My mind is fuzzy. I haven’t stayed up, much less out, until near dawn in a long time. I can hang with the young’ins as well as I ever could… it’s the recovery that fucks me up. Fortunately, this is a three day weekend and I’ve been able to sleep a lot without rushing into the pre-work mode that always rears it’s ugly head Sunday night. There is a sniglet for that, but I forget. Friday I had a nice, low key dinner at Bistro Provence. Saturday ended up being an all nighter. There was a party at The Big Easy amidst a great live blues band that moved to taqueria Tapatia when we closed the joint down. I think it was close to 5:00 when I made it to the sack. Sunday was a day of recovery. I ended up buying some new BluRays and spent the evening making assprints on my couch with a remote nearby. I naturally stayed up later than I wanted to because of all the sleep that day trying to mend myself… this in turn made me sleep in today (an observed holiday this year in the floating pool) which means I’ve not accomplished anything. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I need coffee. All of which I plan to fix as soon as I can drag my arse into the shower and get dressed.

Oh look… a photo from the libations depicting my newly chunky hair not yet documented here:

Barrett, Jennifer, and me

anolis carolinensis - 65mm, 1/250s, f/16, 2:1 (via extension), ISO100

My first macro attempt post-op on the eyes. I’ve tried few times to make some frames, but my right eye always feels a little strained afterwards (I am right eye dominant and use it primarily through the viewfinder). I just need some more time. I met Ed for a bite to eat last night before going over to my neighbor’s for poker night. Henry, although not back to 100%, he’s on the up and up and I think he’s feeling much better. I’m looking forward to the 3-day weekend. Columbus Day just happened to fall into the rotation this year, so I’m off Monday. The thought of this makes it hard for me to concentrate on work. The weather is incredible. One step outside and you can just feel that autumn is upon us. The fall is my favorite season of them all. I’m going to call the mechanic today and see how far out to expect the clutch work on my motorcycle to be… the cool morning air is calling me.

I’ve been aloof. I know. A couple of nights ago, Henry started acting unusual. By the next morning, he was not himself at all… lethargic, coughing, reverse sneezing, displayed trouble eating, etc. I thought he was having an allergic reaction to something… perhaps a plant in the yard he decided to taste? I drive him to CVS and picked up some Benadryl and administered with hopes he would come around. By the evening, he was still looking miserable and we were off to the vet. Happy that he could see us on short notice and so late in the day, I just wanted him to say everything was going to be ok, but he couldn’t find the problem. Since all the procedures to dig further into a diagnosis at this point were not only complicated, but also slightly dangerous, we opted to treat the symptoms first and then see if things changed. Soooo, $120 in three types of meds later, we started drawing our calendar to help daddy remember what was given, at what time, on what day. Fast forward a couple of days into treatment and he seems to be in better spirits, but still not 100% himself. I’m going to just keep an eye on his behavior as we finish out the pills over the next week. I don’t want any unnecessary poking and prodding going on that can be avoided. I try to think about what Erin would do and not what I would do. It’s easy for me to see another person’s child with blood squirting out of a severed artery and just say, “squirt some Windex on it”, but when it’s your own baby, my natural tendency is to the be the knee jerk reacting parent flying in the specialist from Helsinki. Other than snuggling my mending little man, I’ve pretty much still been busy with work. I hit 100% of my annual quota just before the third quarter ended, so I’m on the gravy train with biscuit wheels the rest of the calendar year. Anything above plan is bittersweet as far as I’m concerned… short term earning potential, but long term quota stick in the pooper come January 1. I’m just happy to have hit my goal early. My eyes are doing great… better than I would have expected for having laser beams shot into my eyeballs and vaporizing flesh. I have a small hematoma on my left eye (in the white part) that looks like I got in a fight and someone popped me with a hook. It seems to be slowly shrinking, but maybe I just want it to and am seeing what I want. I know, logically, that it is healing, but it is taking a long time. It helps strangers know I got LASIK… because everyone I meet says, “ewe… what happened there?”. Hehe. Conversation piece that hurt less than a Great White taking 15 pounds of flesh from my abdomen and leaving a huge scar (of course, the love handles wouldn’t be missed and the popular cliché is ”chicks dig scars”). 

What a terrible day to not be an Aussie. I feel hormonal.

“Strangest thing… there was a cat on my face this morning when I woke up.”

“Really? A cat? ...but you don’t have a cat.”

“Yeah. I think it shit in my mouth.”

This past week has been a blur… especially the weekend. There was a nice sushi experience at Redfish with G-Money, lots of work stuff with Micah starting as the new Enterprise SE since I moved to a dedicated SP role, not nearly enough Team Fortress 2 (because it just rawks), iTunes m4a to mp3 conversion frustrations, the comedic circus antics on me trying to assemble my 7 foot Photoflex octodome softbox alone (thanks for the assist, Ed), and various other tidbits I’m too tired to type about tonight. I started America on the Move again as a shot-in-the-dark stab at getting motivated for the gym again when I’m not so wimpy about my eyes… which are healing just fine by the way. Friday night was the Alice in Chains/Velvet Revolver show at the Woodland’s Pavilion. I ended up watching a lot of it from the concession area because the 11th row seat I was ticketed for made my eyes uncomfortable (due to the excessive vibration from the sound waves being thrust upon the crowd by the mountain of speakers… ghey, I know). There were a lot of people at the concert that I knew, but we all didn’t sit together… Barrett, Jennifer, Georgia, Mike, Nikki, Jeff, Donna, James and his girlfriend of the week. AIC was great, but I didn’t really care much for the rest of the show. Afterwards, a small contingent of peops gathered at Boulevard behind Sam’s Boat for cocktails. It was great to finally meet Mike’s girlfriend and see Donna and Jeff again. Good times. I was invited to and attended Johnna and Sammy’s anniversary dinner at Perry’s on Saturday night. I really enjoyed the meal and conversation. It was nice of them to include me in their special day. Anniversaries should be celebrated… you never know when you might wake up and never have another one. Georgia took me to this place called The Howling Coyote afterwards. The had live music (a good thing), cold beer (another good thing), and we were probably the youngest folks in there other than the waitstaff (an unusual treat). Chevelle is playing Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Austin on the 18th. I have pseudo-access to 8 tickets thanks to Ted pulling the trigger as soon as we heard, but I’m not sure how many are spoken for yet. I can’t wait… I lurv those guys. In a stroke of good fortune, I was able to attend the sold-out season finale at Minute Maid Park today. James had two extra tickets to the Astro’s last home game and last game of the year. More significantly, it was Craig Biggio’s last game before retirement. He spent his entire MLB career loyal to the Houston Astro’s and ended 20 years of professional baseball having never played for another club. He was a loved and respected icon in Houston’s pro-sports family. When he rounded the diamond and paused at the dugout entrance for the last time… reflecting for a moment that this is his last trip off the field and down those steps… you could look around and see the tears rolling down cheeks from fans of all ages. It was emotional for even fair-weather fans as it was clear just how much he contributed to the team and the community when witnessing the reaction of the stadium in that moment. Minute Maid booked record attendance today with 43,823 fans turning out to watch B G O retire. I’m tired. I had a busy week and a really nice weekend, but I’m ready for a nap. It’s time.

So this little house up the street from me a couple of miles went on the market just recently. If I had the money, I would buy it. That is all.

Sam came over tonight. It was nice to sit and chat with someone on the couch. I have been so bored recently. Henry and I walked around the neighborhood this evening for the first time in a long while. I’m generally just not happy.

pee ess. Stephen Hawking is the man.

“These are the lost days

Open your eyes the sun is high
Sounds of the highway have kept me awake most of the night
There’s no beginning to the trip that got us here
But now it’s clear we have fallen off the map and here we lay
Liberated, not faded away
In your own skin you’re feeling OK

Second rated, we’re jaded and afraid
But you can make it
Now’s your chance to get away
You can take my car
The tires are good and gas ain’t cheap
Try to keep it between the lines and by tonight you’ll be
Liberated, not faded away
In your own skin you’re feeling OK
Never forget, never regret a thing
Liberated, not faded away

Won’t you open up your eyes
the time is right, the sun is high
I want to beg you, baby
Keep it between the lines and by tonight you’ll be
Liberated, not faded away” - Vaden

Team Fortress 2 was fantastic. It has to be one of the most enjoyable FPS experiences I’ve had since marathon DM17 in Q3A. The new episode of Californication was entertaining. The wine at the bottom of the bottle tasted better.

I need to sleep. Actually… I think I just need.

I went in for a check up today at the center that performed my surgery. I’m 20/20 in my right eye and 20/15 in my left, but my right vision seems fuzzy still (to me) despite testing “perfect” in the chair. I have one more day of the antibiotic drops and 10 days of the anti-inflammatory drops and then I’m done. The only reason for the delay on the latter is they are steroid based and have to be slowly weened away from or the effect is reversed like any steroid treatment. I am hoping that my right eye will heal more closely in performance to my left with time, but I have no room to complain at the moment.

I’m extremely bored tonight, so I’m drinking. This could lead to drunk posting later or simply loss of consciousness on the couch when there is nothing left to watch on television. One option that is promising all depends on bandwidth and time. I pre-ordered The Orange Box. I’ve been waiting for Team Fortress 2 for a long time and by purchasing through Steam, I am able to play beta now during pre-release. Unfortunately, the download is just under 5GB and is going to take a while even if I’m pulling close to 854 big-K tonight off Crapcast.

It’s time to make myself another cocktail and have a pity party.

Big ‘ole Monday shit sangwich. Lots of crap on my “list” today. It’s 8 o’clock and I’ve already been on a lengthy con-call and am jumping into traffic for a downtown meeting to commence as soon as gridlock allows.

I could use a pint or two.

new baby donkey needs a name

My mom and step-dad went to the ranch this weekend to check on things and their Jenny had a baby boy on Friday. She emailed me this photo this morning. They are asking for help naming him, so lemmie know if you have a clever donkey name in your pocket.

I picked up a pair of Maui Jim’s this weekend (I think they are “Hoku”, but not sure from memory)… much easier on the eyes than the little plastic pair in my post-op kit. Too bad they carry a small car payment price tag or I’d order a few other frame shapes now that I can actually wear sunglasses that don’t have to have coke-bottle-bottom correction attached. I slept horribly last night. I’m tired and generally feeling cranky this morning. I am headed off to feed my caffeine habit since Guinness isn’t an option… then it’s time to walk the plank. *honk honk* *beep beep* Yay! Smog!

“By daily dying I have come to be.” - Theodore Roethke

If there were an ancient Aboriginal word for Heather Graham, it would be pronounced “hottie” with some clicks and whirs. I’m a little pissed at the incompetence of the MPAA to allow her and Bridget Moynahan to not only co-exist in a single film (Gray Matters… just rented on the PPV), but to engage is panty-clad passionate kiss with mutually consenting tongues for the world to visually digest on the wide screen. There should at least be some sort of warning label for lonely, single guys like me to spare the delightful agony of such fancies. It did get me thinking about how much I dig La Perla (definitely my fav) or Catriona MacKechnie… or even some of the Agent Provocateur stuff. Anyhoo, I digress.

So, I am not blind. This is a good thing.

I had LASIK surgery performed this previous Thursday and all went well. I was in and out in an hour and most of that was waiting around and not being subjected to the steps of the procedure itself. There are two basic steps… the creation of the corneal flap and the actual lens correction. The most unnerving of the two is definitely the creation of the flap. I went into the surgical suite and laid upon a small, but comfortable table adjacent to the Intralase machine. As previously mentioned, this is the machine that replaced the barbaric blade scraping a slice of tissue off the top of your eye with a more human, bladeless approach. In order for the laser to create an evenly distributed burn of uniform depth, your eye must be motionless, so they secure it with a small plastic device I like to call the “worst fucking part of the surgery”. It is a pseudo-flat piece of plastic that is inserted below your eyelids on the surface of the eye. Once your eye is pointed in the appropriate direction, they apply suction to this mechanism and your eyeball is forcefully arrested into the device with great force. There is no pain, but there is a lot of pressure and psychological discomfort. The instant the suction is applied, the effected eye is blinded temporarily. Blackness. The laser slowly scans the eye, creating millions of tiny vapor bubbles below the surface of the cornea along the way. There is no sound or sensation during this 30 second or so procedure. Once complete, they remove the gizmo and you can see again, but it looks like you are looking through a sheet of bubble wrap. This is repeated for the other eye in the same fashion. I think I almost passed out from anxiety during this step. I wasn’t scared and I understood what was going on, but I was having an involuntary pulmonary response from this procedure that was difficult to wrestle into submission. The next step was the correction itself. This requires going to a different table and getting poked and prodded a bit. The surgeon skillfully uses specialized tools to severe the edges of the cornea representing the perimeter of the gas layer just created by the Intralase system. When this is done, the top layer of the cornea can be manually pushed aside or pulled back (ala “flap") to reveal the innards ready to be zapped. The surface of the eye freshly exposed are dried and aligned with the VISX system’s eximer laser (as opposed to the femtosecond laser used by Intralase). The eye measurements and advanced scans performed during pre-op (like the Wavefront scanner) are uploaded into your custom profile residing on the computer handling the laser guidance. The instant the procedure starts, the laser targeting system performs an iris recognition routine on your eye, plotting several unique points around the iris and acquiring a target lock on each point. During the 30 seconds or so it takes to do the corrective burn, as long as the targeting system maintains iris lock, you have a 97% chance of 20/20 or better. If, at any point, target lock on your iris is lost, the laser is instantly powered down until lock is reacquired. That is some Buck Rogers shit right there, my friends. About 25 seconds into the corrective cycle on my right eye, I smelled burning flesh. My friend, Georgia, told me that when her LASIK was done years ago, her parents were there watching from the other side of a glass wall. They told her that her eyeball was smoking during the burn cycle. Freaky. Anyhoo, I sat up from the table and instantly could see without corrective lenses… the very moment the procedure was complete. I went in the next day for a checkup and everything looked good with the exception of some small scratches on the surface of my right cornea that managed to happen during the flap manipulation stage of the surgery. The analgesic drops used to deaden the eye surface during the procedure have a side effect of softening the corneal tissue thus making it more susceptible to damage. The largest of these abrasions is in the center of my pupil, so I’m effectively looking through the scratch. This blurs my vision slightly and am assured that, once healed, my right eye will be on par with my left. I’ve been doing the timed drops in my eyes (antibiotics and anti-inflammatory) which has urned me into a little clock watcher. I’m ready to get past that stage of the recovery for sure. I also must wear plastic shields over my eyes at night for a week or so to protect them from nighttime bumps and jiggles. I don’t mind that at all except for the residue left by the medical tape. It is difficult to remove and I don’t like being dirty. I was ordered to avoid computers and reading of any sort for the initial recovery… hence the delayed post. Well, that and I’m generally lazy.

Other than freakin’ laser beams being shot into my head, not much else has been going on. I went to see Damon Wayans at the Improv last night… very funny dude. I cracked open a bottle of La Crema pinot noir and am feeling wino-ish. I’m lonely. 

note to self: sign up for guitar lessons. soon.