A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy.
Tree & Cold
The downtown business association last weekend held it’s annual tree-lighting celebration, where the forty-one foot spruce that will adorn the pedestrian strip in front of City Hall was set to power and all ten-thousand-ish (or so they claim) lights were turned on. Santa rolled the countdown and it was quickly followed by a sparkling fireworks display. Karin was sick, but Claire and I braved the bitter, bitter cold — a chilly and windy minus twenty-five Celsius below zero — and stood out in the Churchill Square with a couple hundred other hearty souls to watch the show. Numb fingers and toes not only prompted me to buy some real winter boots (finally) but caused us to flee the square as quick as we could following the fireworks and dash into the relative warmth of the underground train station. Unfortunately a technical issue left us standing on the platform for near forty-five minutes — a state for which Claire had a patience that started low and quickly diminished as low as the outside temperature — before our adventure netted us a seat on a Southbound train towards home.
Fisheye
This past week was my birthday, a fact for which I raise more fuss online that most other places in my life. My lovely wife and daughter paid homage to my photography addiction and provided me with the simple gift of the Lensbaby Fisheye Optic insert for that Lensbaby system I’d picked up over the summer. Viewers of my photo collection or my (still) ongoing photo-per-day project will very obviously see an uptick in random quality fisheye-style images as I discover the possibilities of the lens through the upcoming weeks of winter photo opportunities.
Dayhome-ish
At the risk of sounding frustratingly vague, I’m going to just say that it’s been a tough couple weeks for childcare and being a rational parent around our house. About ten days ago we were forced to reconcile two very different sets of information and make a significant life decision based on the word of our four-year-old daughter, admittedly (since she has an imaginary friend and believes monsters the size of her finger live in her mattress) is not a beacon of clear and rational thinking at this stage of her life. Ultimately, we deduced that the possibility of some safety concerns she was narrating to us in the evening — which have no place being publicly inventoried here — were more likely to be occurring than not occurring at her day home, and we’d be better off failing on the side of safe parenting by moving her. It’s a heart-wrenching sort of decision to make, and it was not made lightly. And the pieces — so to speak — are still somewhat in motion even now.
Let’s just say it’s been a distracting couple of weeks.
December Plans
It being just a few short days until the last month of this year creeps up on us, and as has been the tradition on this blog in years past (though not last year as I wasn’t really writing at all then) I have a couple of December traditions. The first and most involved of those has been a blog-a-day project that occupies a little bit of random, un-themed and unfocused post-space herein. I’d use the excuse that I’m already doing a photo-a-day project and this seems too much work, but looking back on past years, my December blog-a-day efforts always seemed to accompany a photo-a-day anyhow… so, no difference. I’m thinking I’m not only going to take a stab at maintaining that effort on this blog — a post per day for every day in December — but I’m going to emulate it over at my FooBarn blog (which is likely to be the more difficult effort of the two.)
The second effort of the month, of course, is the annual New Year’s post. I usually start poking at that shortly after my birthday each year and nudge it along over the course of December. Right now I’m reviewing my questions — and I’ve already added three new ones. If you have any suggestions, now’s the time.
