I love the idea of going off the grid, particularly for the small electric devices in my possession. I imagine a small wind turbine or possibly a solar array on the roof of my condo building, charging a car battery that charges my phone. Then I think about the condo association and realize that’s not going to happen.
It’s a shame really, especially since the summer months have so much potential.
I think to myself, how stereotypical it is. A six pack of bottled beer in one hand and a pizza in the other. I also think of how the city is very much not the way it usually is. Snow piled up taller than most people. Ice over a foot thick that I commute over. For most of my meals I’ve been cooking since I haven’t left the building. But now, tonight, I’m done with cooking and it’s time for some pizza and beer.
And I’m okay with that.
When I was young, I had a preference for the choose your own adventure series. There were others, like the Time Machine, and Car Wars, but I always remember this time as the time of books that were innovative. Books that tried to be more than just stories, but more engaging somehow to the younger reader than a static path through the same book. There was choose your own adventure and the variants, but then there was the books with actual computer programs in them that you had to debug or hack in order to get to a positive outcome. I still have fond memories of those.
But the Choose Your Own Adventure books were the first.
Of course, I ended up just flipping through them each time and then reading all the grisly ways your character (and in effect you) would end up dead.
With nearly all the endings, you end up dead, or in some horrible situation. They were remarkably grisly for their age bracket. I wonder if my parents would have bought so many for me if they knew how often I would end up washed away by a flash flood, eaten by sharks or woken up by the boa constrictor around my neck.
Bench Melting Snow
I think I may drop the 75mm focal length from the project. Or I really need to rethink how I use it. I have previously used it as a portrait lens, with great success. 75mm gets close without me actually being literally in the subject’s face. I have shot in outdoor, well lit situations where I’ve got plenty of room to move around to use “human zoom.”
In those situations, I’ve gotten great results. On daily walkabout, I only have a few moments to take a picture of something, and by the time I notice something, I can’t really take five steps back to frame it the way I want.
I may move to the 35mm this month, earlier than scheduled. I think that I’ve learned enough from the two weeks with the 75mm, that the experiment was a success, but I really should have scheduled portrait photography if I was going to use it all month. I may try to use it for closeup macro work in a light box.
That’s a dedicated day, though.
The boots I have are black, heavy, with a rubber bottom layer that keeps my feet dry when that puddle is actually six inches deep when I think it’s three inches deep. They are heavy and I have to wear the thicker socks with them, otherwise they start to cause chafing around my ankles from the support they provide.
Getting in to them is a hassle, since I can’t bend my ankles much when I’m in them. Getting into them is a process. First I take a knee to get in the first one, lace and tie them, then I stand up, step into the second boot, and take another knee to lace and tie the other one. Once I start walking in the snow and Ice, I’m glad I have them on. Although typically by the end of the walk I’m glad for the other shoes I keep at the office. Then at the end of the day I repeat the process from morning.
In all, I’m glad I bought them on sale over a year ago, but they are a pain in the ass and impact the daily routine by adding minutes to getting ready to leave.
My snow boots: just another reason why I can’t wait for this snow to be done with.