Birdy – Birdy and Nicky

08 Oct

22 Weeks, 1 Day!

It’s been a while but a lot has happened! Perhaps the biggest news is that the little Nugget that was only a couple weeks old in a previous post has grown! The Nugget is now a 22-week old fetus and is VERY active! I love this little baby so much it’s a bit ridiculous.

During the first trimester, I had some rough times. I lost around 13 pounds and hemorrhage my esophagus. I was vomiting three to five time daily during the worst of it. I ended up dropping one of my summer courses but it all turned out okay. More on that later, though…

With the exception of the very first OB visit, Nick had been with me for every tummy check and ultrasound. He is unbelievably supportive. I literally have no clue how I would have made it through some of the rough parts without him. Nick learned the baby’s gender during our 20 week ultrasound but I have opted to remain ignorant. I kind of love not knowing while he knows…

As for a symptom update, well… it’s all pretty normal pregnancy stuff! I’ve got a healthy, somewhat large, active baby and a body that is changing to accommodate said baby. I’ve got sciatica like a BEAST in my left hip. I pee all the time. My breasts are absolutely ginormous. My round ligament is protesting so much stretching. Fatigue and hunger hound me constantly. AND I AM SO HAPPY!

The baby is due in February and I just can’t wait!

Now I mentioned something about school earlier. I’ll keep this short and sweet…

I GRADUATED!

I am also no longer taking classes this semester because the college made a huge mistake with regards to my degree requirements. I didn’t need to take classes so I dropped and requested refunds. I am getting my refunds and my degree and yay! Not having class is awesome. I can work lots and focus on baby when I need to. The refunded tuition is a nice little boost to our future fund, too!

OH! I also got a new car. It’s a shiny, red 2016 Prius because I’m a tree-hugger. Sometimes I drive my Prius to mommy yoga. Sometimes I drive it to the recycling center. Whenever I drive it, though, one thing is for sure! I’m a hypermiler and damn proud of it!

Lastly, as a bonus, have some photos from random times throughout the summer.

06 Sep

Cricket Edith Anne

Today my darling puggy puppy Cricket was laid to rest. Here’s a generous helping of her adorableness.

04 Aug

Dinner is good!

Tasty Gnocchi with Veggies. I would have totally gotten a picture but I ate it all first. :[ Maybe next time!

Ingredients

Make/buy gnocchi – we used a baggy of homemade spinach and sweet potato gnocchi that Nicky and I made

1 zucchini, chopped into rounds or spears – your choice!

1 summer squash, chopped into rounds or spears!

1 good-sized shallot chopped up

1 glove garlic, minced

Olive oil

Sherry

Italian seasoning

White pepper

Shredded asiago cheese

Directions

Prepare ingredients as directed. Put shallot and garlic in pan with olive oil and sauté on low/medium heat until the shallots are starting to turn clear. Turn heat up and add zucchini and squash. Add Italian seasoning and white pepper. Sauté – allow the veggies to brown to bring out the flavor.

While sautéing the shallots and garlic, put water on to boil for the gnocchi. Once boiling, put gnocchi in water and boil until they float then drain. If store-bought, cook gnocchi per the directions.

Put cooked gnocchi in the pan with the vegetables and sauté. Once gnocchi are lightly browned reduce heat and add sherry and reduce a few minutes.

Serve with shredded Asiago cheese and a light wine. I prefer Leelanau Cellars’ Summer Sunset. Fresh fruit makes the perfect dessert!

Try it out! Mix up the veggies. This dish would go great with carrots, asparagus, and eggplant. Enjoy!

04 Aug

Practice Page 1!

So I’m going to try and learn Japanese (again?) because of reasons. Okay, I should say my reason. My reason is because I’d like to help my kid(s) be bilingual without relying on a romance language. So I’ve picked Japanese because I have more background in it than any other non-Spanish second language.

And for the record, I took Japanese in elementary school! I also took two semesters of it some years ago. I remember a little but not nearly enough.

I’m going to be using textfugu.com, the Genki texts, and lots and lots of podcasts. I’ll try to keep my progress updated here because this type of thing will help reinforce good habits.

kk here’s my practice:

1. Should I bother to learn romaji?

NO!

2. Which “alphabet” is used to write all the “vocabulary words.

Kanji

3. Where did kanji come from?

The Chinese. Again and again and again.

4. Which “alphabet” do you use to write foreign words?

Katakana

5. Which “alphabet” tends to be more “boxy shaped” and “rigid.”

Katakana

6. Do Hiragana and Katakana consist of the same sounds?

Yes

7. Which “alphabets” are you going to learn on TextFugu?

Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji

8. Which “alphabet” would you use to write the “Roma” in Romaji (Roma = Rome).

Katakana

I guess I need to get a Japanese kana thing for this.

WISH ME LUCK!

17 Feb

Feels Post

I’ve had a couple of feels posts floating around in my head. Well, they’re mostly just loose ideas.

This one is going to be about time and maybe coping.

There will be more, I’m sure. About death and nothingness and also about marriage and feminism. And other things. Who knows?

Time is kind of a given. It’s also a human thing, our attempt to quantify a part of nature because we like quantifying. I consider that a good thing. Assigning labels to time and imagining rules that for the most part govern how time appears to work are good things. They mean we can understand a lot about our universe physically.

We can also use these concepts for more abstract purposes – such as coping. Coping, to me, is pretty much handling a situation. I know the definition includes “effectively” but we don’t always do things effectively so I’m just going to omit that part. Instead, coping seems more like a variation on waiting: you wait for an outcome to a situation. You may be involved in determining an outcome or you may not.

So, when we cope, we measure time out in increments. We can see our progress or lack thereof in dealing with something. We can set goals and we can acknowledge changes about us and in us.

A fair amount of things in life involve us having to cope with stuff. Because that’s kind of what life is: one big cope-fest measured out in birthdays and holidays and work weeks and weekends. Seconds, minutes, hours. We can’t really do much about it because these events just keep happening. All we can do is try and keep up and deal with situations as they arise.

Sometimes time might seem like an enemy, sucking away your youth and throwing obstacle after obstacle your way but I think time is just a constant: it doesn’t have an intent or goal. There is no time endgame of vendetta. Time doesn’t owe you anything and it really isn’t on your sides.

Instead, it just keeps on being time.

There’s so few constants in our world. We can’t even be sure of ourselves. We can’t trust the weather or our cars or our jobs. We can’t even really trust our spouses. But we can trust time. No matter what goes on, it will drag you with it. You might kick and scream or you might ride it joyously or you may just get swept away, but no matter what it will not stop for you and therefore you simply cannot stop.

When it comes to coping, trying to “take your time” or “deal with things in your own time” is kind of moot. You don’t have any time, time has you. So sit there and puzzle and mull and dissect situations. Have fear and anxiety over what hasn’t yet come but will. These things really don’t matter. A bad situation will pass, whether or not you conquer your emotions. Time will see to this. It’s a promise.

Go on and cope, but know that while you wait for the situation to be resolved, time doesn’t care. And before you know it, you might have missed out on some really awesome seconds, minutes, or hours.

11 Feb

Updates…

So I’m gonna be adding some fancy photo galleries. They are going to include new photos as well as old ones. I’m going to keep the blog posts from the past untouched, though. Because science!

Or laziness. You pick.

15 Aug

Roar. Grr. Rawr. IR.

So, infrared photography.

Cool stuff, right?

I KNOW!

But man, what a bitch.

Wait, what is infrared photography?

Pretty much, you take a photograph of infrared light. WHICH IS TOTALLY COOL! Our eyes cannot (virtually) distinguish infrared light so when you photograph it, you get some pretty interesting images. Things that are familiar take on new casts and previously nigh-invisible things pop out.

The most notable bit is that after post processing, green things turn white resulting in a surreal landscape of powder-puff trees and snow-grass fields. The sky darkens into this rich blue – so different from the standard “blue sky” shade that we are used to. It is very alien.

To illustrate my point, here is what a properly processed infrared photograph should look like:

Feel free to google more if you find yourself interested! I know I did hence the despair and rage at failPhotos.

To illustrate that point, here are a few of my [failed] attempts. Note: they have not been post processed! But trust me, no amount of Photoshop will save these puppies. They are dead to me.

Oh god, my eyes…

This is totally normal.

This is NOT normal!

Awww, cute…

This would be a very interesting photograph… IF NOT FOR THE RED DEATH AND PEE-COLORED CLOUDS!!

What am I doing wrong?!

I didn’t exactly jump into this subject, mind you. I spent some time reading and trying to understand it before I decided I would take a shot at it. Granted, in a rather un-Birdy like bit of sporadicness I went and bought an inexpensive but highly-reviewed IR filter off of Amazon. I figured for $15 + free shipping, I didn’t have much to lose. I still don’t! Even the time I spent out trying to get the shots was fun. I got to hang out at the park in the sun and feel like a neat photographer with all of my gear. I AM LEGIT BECAUSE I CARRY A TRIPOD!

… only not so much.

Anyway, from what I gathered, here is what I should have done:

1) Get an IR filter or IR-modded camera. I got the filter because I’m too poor to mod my camera and I wasn’t willing to give up my ONLY DSLR to the mod gods for something that I hadn’t even tried yet.

2) Know your settings! Low ISO to keep the noise down, big aperture to keep the focus neat, sloooooow shutters speed to make sure you get enough light through the dense IR filter, and compose your scene BEFORE you put your filter on your lens. Oh, and tripod.

3) Set your white balance to something fancy that I don’t understand and this is a really important part I guess I should figure it out!

See that step 3 right there? Yeah, that’s the kicker. That’s the one that ALL of the knowledge bases just slide right by like you should automatically know what the fuck is going on because since you’re JUST STARTING OUT with IR photography and reading things and watching things you obviously don’t need any further explanation on custom white balance.

Rawr.

The first batch of red death happened without using a custom white balance. I pretty much derped about in Cloudy because that’s what I do since I like things warm. That should work, right?

Nope…

So after I destroy all of the cones in my retinas, I come home and read read read read read.

OH! It seems I have to set a custom white balance. That seems straight forward enough. I just take a picture of something bright green, like grass in full sunlight and then set that picture as the source for my white balance. Easy enough! A quick YouTube video showed me how to do that with my T3i.

Time for photograph excursion #2!

FAIL AGAIN! ROAR!

The first two images shown were from Day 1, with no custom white balance. The next two are from Day 2, with a custom white balance of some bright tree leaves. Why so ugly? WHY?!

It seems that I am supposed to take the custom white balance photo of the bright, green something WITH the IR filter on! GENIUS!

It took a forum thread from 2008 with someone having the exact same problem for me to figure this out. Woo

I can’t tell you how many tutorials I read before that tiny yet very immensely important snippet of information appeared.

Shoot your custom WB photo with the filter on. Magnificent!

Tomorrow is another day. I’m hoping for some sun. I’m going to do it right this time. The aperture is right. The ISO is right. Bulb mode is locked and ready to go. The tripod is quivering with expectation (but will stand totally still when I need to use her). The filter is practically jumping on my lens… and with god as my witness, I will never shoot with the incorrect white balance again!

Then you get to read me rage about post-processing. :3 YAY~!