Anniversary Day!

I have a most wonderful husband! Look at these beautiful flowers I received today expressing his love. I do love my laughing bouncing nutty lovable huggable Tigger!

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Thank you for being you.

Love is the most wonderful thing

It’s my second wedding anniversary and I’m in Mukilteo, WA, over 2000 miles from my wife. I’ve heard many older couples describe how their love grows deeper with every year that passes. Today, I’m barely into my third decade, and two years married and I feel like that truth is an iceberg that I can only see the tip of. I had an experience last week that really brought this to the forefront of my conscience.

I was hanging out with a group of guys that I used to work with. They are all great guys, and all rich in skills related to the Internet industry. They have their own company that’s doing well and I was sitting around in their “offices”. Watching six guys working away in close proximity with piles of computer equipment all around awakened many fond memories in my past.

For a short time, I reminisced about how much fun those days were. The whole dating thing, a job that was so fun you’d work late “just because”, and chasing all manner of pursuits. However, it didn’t take long to remember the rest of the memories from the bachelorhood era of my life. It was a great time, but I left that era because this new one was calling so loudly.

Today, I’ve been away from Jennifer for seven days. Absence does make the heart grow fonder. I miss her sorely and despite having a great time here, I’m beyond ready to be with her again. I miss seeing her every day when she comes home for lunch. I love her habit of breaking into whatever I’m engrossed in so that I’ll pause and pay attention to her. I miss feeling her next to me as I sleep.

I cannot find enough words to describe all she means to me. She is the one I spent all those years looking for. She is so worth that wait. As I sat there observing “a life in the day of an uber-geek”, I couldn’t help but smile inside. Sure, the place in life where these guys are living is good, but what I have now is so much better, it needs a new category to describe it.

I can see that the future has so many wonderful and rewarding things in store. Jennifer, thank you for being so committed to us. Thank you to being so willing to learn and grow with me. Thank you for all that you are. You are great and marvelous, beyond my understanding. I can’t find words to express how much I look forward to spending the rest of my life with you.

Life isn’t fair

Sometimes you just have to take what life dishes out. Today, I got up and made crepes for Ricardo and I. After breakfast, the sun came out so a command decision needed to be made. This was the warm sunny day we were waiting for so we loaded up the truck and headed for the dock.

We put the boat in the water and puttered around the smooth as glass Puget Sound for a few hours, suffering intensely in the warm mid-day sun. Many others apparently felt the need to suffer as we did for there were quite a few other boats heading in and out.

After spending a good part of the day out on the water, we headed back in. A local fisherman had a sign out on the marina advertising his shrimp so we just had to stop and pick up some fresh shimp. It was quite fortunate as we had been terribly concerned about what our next meal might be.

I’ve posted a few pictures.

Greetings from Seattle

My flight arrived last night in sunny warm Seattle. What a lovely place the Pacific Northwest is. Most of the spring flowers are at the end of their bloom peaks and it’s a lovely sight. This is such a wonderful place to be.

Summer is heating up

The temperatures in northern Michigan are finally rising and for many that we know, their schedules are heating up just as quickly. That is certainly the case for Jen and I. Today Jen leaves for Orlando for most of the week.

She get’s back Thursday and the following Tuesday, I hop on a Jet bound for Seattle for a long week. I’ll be spendng some time out there assisting Ricardo (Jen’s dad) after his foot surgery.

A few weeks later we hop back onto a Jet bound for Alaska for 9 days. There’s also that expense paid trip to a warm sunny Caribbean island that we have to take this year. At least we don’t have to worry about being bored. 🙂

I’m stepping out of Point and Shoot

I’m selling my beloved Nikon Coolpix 995, so if you know of someone that’s interested in a good deal on a great little camera, have them take a look here. This is the camera that I’ve been carrying around for the last two years and enjoy so much. Why would I sell such a great camera?

As you may know, I forsook film long ago and will not ever again touch it. Not because it’s not good, because results can be achieved with film that will likely take at least 5 more years to accomplish with digital cameras. However, I’m a computer guy, so I want my photos to all end up on the computer, and I’m more than satisified with the performance of digital versus 35mm film.

In the digital camera world, there’s two classes of camera: P/S (point and shoot) and SLR (single lens reflex). Point and shoot digicams are ones that do nearly everything for you. You point them at something, push the shutter button and wait while it captures a good picture. SLR are the “pro” cameras. They’re big, heavy, require seperate lenses, and are terribly expensive (thousands of $). You do most of the work, push the button and it instantly captures what you are looking at.

The lower end of the digicam P/S market (~ $200) are selling like hotcakes and you seem then everywhere. They’re cheap, the photo quality is good for the price, but if you ever want to do anything with the photos, like say, print them, you will almost certainly be disappointed in the results. It’s generally accepted that quality is closely related to price.

The midrange of the market is the “sweet spot”. For $300-500 you can get a fantastic P/S camera that takes great pictures, even in the hands of a novice. The 8×10 prints are every bit as good as a 35mm enlargement. That’s the class my Coolpix 995 lives in, a great camera that makes it easy for photography amatuers like myself to take great shots you can print and share.

The high end of the P/S market pushes from $700-1000 and includes some excellent cameras that take fantastic photos. For the last couple years, I’ve patiently watched these cameras rapidly evolve, anticipating an upgrade when a camera significantly better than mine arrived. This would have been the next logical step in my photography growth.

However, something outside the Point and Shoot world finally happened that changed the rules. In the DSLR (digital SLR) world, the price point finally crossed the high end of the P/S market. Now, instead of spending close to a $1,000 on a high end P/S, I can buy a Canon EOS-300D or Nikon D70 for that same money. These new SLR cameras have nearly all the functionality (and more in cases) of a $3,000 DSLR camera a year or two ago.

What this means is that instead of packing along two pounds and a tiny bag of camera gear on my trips, I’ll be toting along a substantially bigger bag that weights more. I used to shake my head at pro photographers packing 10-15 pounds of photo gear into the outback. To get a photo you can blow up to hang on the wall, that’s the price you had to pay. Fortunately, the newer DSLR cameras are quite a bit lighter and so are the lenses so it won’t be quite so bad.

So, can you expect to see better quality photos on my web site soon? Not because of the camera upgrade. 😉 The 995 is more than capable of capturing excellent photos for that purpose. The studying that I’ll be doing, the books I’m reading, and the time I spend practicing my photography skills will make that difference and my skills will continue to improve.

The difference moving up to the D70 will make is in what I can do with the photos. I have several “Wow, I show those?” photos in my library that are of sufficient quality that I’d like to blow them up and put them on my wall. However, the quality they were captured at is insufficient for this purpose. By stepping up to the D70, the capabilities are enhanced significantly beyond even the most expensive of the P/S cameras.