Log(pye)

I’d been psyching myself up for the past two weeks for Friday. For it was the annual Wiener Dog Races at Emerald Downs. I think I must’ve read about this event at least half a year ago and scheduled a reminder in Outlook. It just popped up in August and I’ve been working my schedule around it!

Anyway, it was a pretty fun evening… it was great to be out and taking some pictures and winding down a long week. It was sunny, calm, and a balmy 89 degrees – a perfect evening to be outside.

So back to the dogs. I went with no expectations and was rewarded by what I saw… I found out while I was there that the dogs would race two heats, and a final, between the seven horse races of the night. I don’t quite understand horse racing, but it was still nice to try to take a couple of shots of the horses in motion. I definitely found it much more challenging than taking pictures of still life. When the dogs came out for the very first heat, I readied my camera, thinking that I’d have to pan pretty quick since I was relatively close to the track and I’d have to follow the dogs as they run by. Once the gates opened, the dogs were let go of… and they ran in EVERY direction possible. One dog bolted to the finish line, all the others were either busy sniffing someone else’s butt, or as a lady later told me, in search of horse poop on the track! Super duper hilarious!

Couldn’t have been fair not to share any pictures…

All touched up in Photoshop Lightroom 2, using a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet… it was actually pretty fun, but I’m definitely not used to it… My accuracy using a pen on the screen is about half of it is using a mouse to navigate

..eyp; less than a week to vacation time!

It’s almost been six months since I last typed anything of remote value. So what have I been doing in this span of time… Basically just trying to escape work and procrastinate anywhere else I can put time into. Somewhere along the way I got lost, and now I find myself overwhelmed with things to do – pulling myself in all directions, because I took on so many different things to try to find my “out".

Since San Francisco, I only picked up my camera once for a week in Vegas… and nothing else since then. The Blue Angels were in Seattle again for the annual Sea Fair event; so I took the opportunity to catch some sun and take some photos!

I touched up these photos gently in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 (something new I’m playing with). I’ve always thought that Photoshop was a little too heavy for my workflow since I tend only to do slight changes and tweaks to pretty much bring out more saturation here, crop a bit there, sharpen up the shot a bit all-around. Anyway, it seems pretty nice. The UI is laid out pretty well; the common tools are all there; most things I want to do are either one-click or can be saved as a preset. All-in-all it looks promising. I think I will soon put all my photos (at least the newly shot ones) into the Library and see if I can manage them from within Lightroom.

..eyp; Climb on!

Too bad this wasn’t a REAL long weekend… I had to take some vacation days against it… though it was a nice break from the everyday I must admit.

Did quite a lot in San Francisco:

Friday:

• Lombard Street – couldn’t find the price of a property here, but just 1/2 mile west it was $750k
• Chinatown – parking was extremely hard to find, and expensive too
• drove around in downtown traffic trying to get to hotel to check-in, but it took about 30 minutes to go 2 miles
• Alcatraz night tour – this was pretty interesting… having seen Escape from Alcatraz and The Rock; it was pretty entertaining
• Dinner at a pretty small (but packed) French restaurant… quite possibly the BEST warm chocolate cake I’ve had in my life.

Saturday:

• Napa Valley Vineyards – visited Mumm and Merryvale wineries… not that I know much about them…
• Had dinner near the hotel; a mediocre Japanese place… while walking there we took a wrong turn and walked into (and through, and back) the shadiest part of town… extremely memorable!

Sunday:

• Shopping in downtown – our hotel was just a few blocks from Union Square so we walked around downtown going into the posh stores that I could never afford anything in… then went to H&M to buy something I COULD afford
• Crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito for lunch on the patio – bad idea, it was COLD
• Walked around in the main street of Sausalito for a bit
• Backtracked to the lookout point for the Golden Gate Bridge to take touristy shots
• Headed to San Jose for a BBQ dinner

Monday:

• Palace of Fine Arts – I thought this was going to be a snooze; seriously who would want to look at columns? Different story when I got there, it looked so awesome… Spent about an hour walking around taking pictures!
• Pier 39 Fisherman’s Wharf – nothing too awesome, pretty much just a touristy area, reminds me of the shops by the shore in downtown San Diego… Visited the smelly walruses and had some clam chowder.
• Drove to San Jose and stopped off at Santana Row to kill some time and to experience how rich people who drive Ferrari’s, Lotus’s and other fine cars kill their time
• Hopped on a plane back to Seattle

Good times; here’s about 5% of the pictures

..eyp; refreshed, after a much needed vacation…

Can’t believe it’s already been two months since I last posted anything worthwhile. Well, the last post can only be marginally be considered worthwhile. The past two months have been painful at work… Spending too much time, on boring stuff, and worst of all, not being able to concentrate because it’s boring.

Anyway, San Francisco trip this weekend, so I cleared off my memory card on my camera in preparation and found a couple from the past two months that I thought were pretty cool. All taken with my nifty macro.

Since I slept super early last night, I actually NATURALLY woke up at 10AM this morning. That’s quite a feat. I don’t think that’s happened for A VERY LONG TIME

Anyway, lingered around doing nothing during the morning and then went out to Bellevue Square to look for a skinny knit tie. I was more than surprised when I found out about two things: (1) either the sales person did not know what a knit tie was, or (2) the only place which HAD knit ties was Nordstrom, and they had all of 4 of them. A blue with white stripes, and black, red, and green solids. Though that would be a nice set to own, it was a horrid collection to choose from due to how limited the selection was.

Then being a super-star (a bored super-star at that), I was smart enough to bring my gym bag, so I went to the gym. Boy was I surprised… (1) the gym was about 1/3 as populated as it had been last week, about the same time, and (2) it was all the fat people that were missing. So I’ve come to the conclusion that the fat people made an effort last week, but since this is week two of the new year, it’s about time they gave up on their new year’s resolutions. I tried really hard while I was slaving away on the elliptical to think of reasons why everyone wasn’t there. First thought that came to mind was football… That couldn’t have been it, the playoff games were playing last weekend, as was this weekend… What might’ve made a difference was whether Seattle was playing… They played on SATURDAY (and lost ), so that wasn’t it… So rather than hurting myself thinking of an excuse why the fat people ditched the gym, I’m going to give up. I’ve concluded that fat people have decided to stay fat.

Anyway, seeing as though a the B&M search for skinny knit ties has failed me, I’ve taken the liberty to shop online. I don’t understand why I even deal with humans anymore. Humans have limited knowledge. At least I can ask a website to search for knit ties and it’ll tell me if there are any or not; but I would actually run the risk of a human asking me WHAT a knit tie was (this was at Brooks Brothers). When sales people start understanding SELECT * FROM DEALS, my faith in B&Ms is forever scarred.

..eyp; No new pictures today