PLANET3RRY

Last evening after my run, I couldn’t resist but to break out Stella and take some pictures of the low hanging “almost” full moon. I ended up taking 146 shots in a roughly one hour time that evening and 2 this morning of the Moon out in the daylight., Most of the pictures were crap. Only 42 of them were decent to make it through the intial pass and 13 made it to the album that I have here… and out of these 13, I am happy with none of them, but 1 or 2 are decent.

I took some pictures of my camping experience:

Just a couple of shots taken while walking to dinner…

Wednesday night I actually got more sleep than usual. I was in bed by 11:30 (okay, it was really close to 11:30) and after a couple of games of Solitare on the Palm TX, I was alseep. The Kids woke me up around 6:30, but I got up made oatmeal and then somehow was able to get back to the bed for some more sleep.

So, I am thinking I may have had around 7 hours of sleep. Too bad it wasn’t consectutive.

My foot is much better today, I can actually put just about all my weight on it and instead of being in pain, I can just “feel it”. My finger is better too, so now typing doesn’t hurt and I don’t have to wear a bandaid that mashed extra keys when I type.

It was a fairly straightforward day, I had a decent day trading today and took some profits on some positions. I will be requesting the money that is dogearred for Elijah on Friday, so I can get that sent in.

I threw together an episode of Gravity. Mainly because I had worked on part of it, but thanks to My Lovely and Talented Wife, that has all changed for the fall marathon training. I didn’t want what I had to go to waste, so ir’s a short episode (10 min) and it trails off after the announcement.

Next week, I’ll post what I am going to do since I will be in Dallas next week and then training will start on August 4th for my marathon. I’m not sure how much internet access I will have next week and I wish that I could get my camera phone to send posts to my “secret” blog email and I would MoBlog.

Stella’s lens covers are on order, but not sure if they are going to make it or not. It’s not that I am too nervous because I can always purchase one from the local camera store. You never can have too many Lens covers when your Father in law is involved. Someone asked how that happened. We were talking and I had gotten pictures off of Stella and she was in the chair. He went to change chairs to better see the computer and knocked it off with his butt.

So is everybody ready for Friday?

After cleaning up the carcass of the lens filter, I think that Stella is okay. I can see something in the view finder, but it does not come up on the pictures. I’ve tested most of her features and she seems to be okay. It’s just that right now, she is lens naked and so I better get my lens covers (from Amazon) before we leave for Dallas next week or I will have to shell out an emergency $20 to get a cover for the lens.

I had wanted to have a new all-purpose lens for her this trip to Dallas, but not this year… however, I probably will still be the unoffical photographer for our National Area again. This year was supposed to be the lens and next year was supposed to be the SpeedLite.

Well, at least Stella is okay.

See what My Lovely and Talented Wife’s Father did to Stella last week?

On a side note: Do you like my Mouse Pad?

It may not be much, but Stella just rolled her counter back to 0001 on the continous setting. That means in the 1.5 years that I have had her, I have taken over 10,000 pictures… let’s not try to count which ones are decent.

Here are a few things that I promised that I would blog about:

Picture of the Snake:

(okay, maybe I didn’t promise that one)

My Trip to Utah was very productive, I was there at the Investools Site for an interactive Stocks and Options 3 Day Workshop. It was a really intensive but educational workshop. We did some live example, plus went over some very important things such as money management and trader psychology. I found that I didn’t quite have my Trading Rules as set as I wanted, I was managing my Risk very well nor position sizing… and I had a bad horrible April to show for it. Now that I am back, I back on track. I have my confidence back and have been profitable since returning home. I created a blog for my trading that I plan to try to update that once a day, either in the morning or late at night… I doubt that I will have readers for some time, but that blog is more of a journal rather than a soap box/media tool. It’s at zsgtrading.wordpress.com.

I also thought that I did fairly well in the class as a participant. I knew the core of the material and actually volunteered in class. It did take me a day and a half to approach the instructors on a one-on-one basis, but I was monitoring my actions and trying to catch myself being Aspergian… I did fall into a routine for dinner though, instead of asking the very eager and social Shuttle Driver to take me somewhere, I ate at the Ruby Tuesday adjacent to the parking lot each night. Now, it was pretty dead when I went but I did try to sit at different places at the bar, just to mix things up.

Here are the pictures from Utah.

I am going to do some post production on a few of the pictures and send them to my Flickr site.

The rest of the story…

as part of our Christmas visit last year, I asked my Brother in Law if his daughter (my neice) would be privvy to hanging out and going on a photo safari with me. Now, I had delusions of going to cool country places such as dilapidated barns and broken farm vehicles or even some people shots. Despite not getting to go to these places, we did get to go around the In-Laws house which provided a great amount of subjects to photograph.

I have her the choice of using the 35mm camera which was much older (although same century and decade) than she OR, she could use Stella my sleek Canon XT digital SLR. Of course, the hip chick choose Stella (wouldn’t you?) and so she burned through 200+ pictures in about an hour or so. In our most recent trip to SC, I asked her if I had permission to post her pictures. She’s very good and has “The Eye” for pictures.

So you can see the Hip and Trendy Niece’s Pictures as well as mine in the Web Albums below. I don’t think she reads my blog, but I know she’ll get word if you leave any comments. I’m now in the works on how to get a decent DSLR into her hands… whether she uses the talent as a monetary gain or not… she has the talent and the sooner you can start the better.

Hip and Trendy Neice’s Pictures (221) using Canon XT 18-55mm lens

My pictures (49) using Canon AV-1 with 50mm lens and 70-210mm lens

I do have a few more pictures inside the AV-1, but I need to finish the film and have them developed. If I waited on this post until then, it would be Christmas.

This the view from the top of my subdivision. The subdivision is 20 years old, but one of the last lots was cleared out recently at the top of the hill. I wanted to get some pictures from the pinnacle before they start building. The day that I took these, it was clearer than normal, so you could see the mountains in the background. My next goal is to get some sunrises over the mountains before construction. Any thoughts on how to make the pictures a little more vibrant. I can always potatoshop them post production, but my equipment is bottom of the barrell (i.e. kit equipment)

This was another OHH-OHH moments. Had to run and get Stella. This is an early morning shot of the crescent moon. I didn’t do too bad without the tripod…