So during this bout of sick, I’ve been taking the time to fulfill my movie quota. So far today, it’s been Blazing Saddles, Batman, Wanted,  Terminator 2, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.  Not exactly cinematic masterpieces… ok, two of them are by Mel Brooks.  But it’s still a movie.  And with my usually 1 movie a month routine, I’m covered until after International Mike Day.

Speaking of days, International Andy Day is Thursday.  Hopefully I’m not still sick…  not fun to try and play with the nephews while sick.

Started to get the dry nose, the congestion, etc… and it’s not allergy time. The last thing I wanted was a sinus infection, as I don’t get them… and I’m lucky. My brother had surgery to reduce the number of sinus infections he got per year (10+ down to 2, so it worked). But, sure enough, the signs are all there.  Which brings me to the point of this post, a plug for my favorite anti-sicky product. No, not Head-On, the horribly misleading product that makes high schoolers think that prom might not suck… but a NeilMed.  A lovely sinus rinse.

Lovely only in the results.  If you’ve never tried one, I seriously do recommend it.  I have no problem with doctors and pills, but when I can do something non-pharmaceutical, I will.  For the “nose douche” newbies, you mix a pre-measured amount of salt and baking soda into an 8 oz bottle of warm, distilled water, and gently… well, almost make yourself drown.  Takes an attempt or two to get the angle of your head right to avoid rinsing all the lovely junk down your throat, but once you have this down, you might start doing this daily.

I’ve gotten to the point that if I’m starting to feel under the weather at all, I do a rinse.  From chills to bad allergies to sinusitis, I’ve done it, and for the most part, it has helped.  Best 10 bucks I’ve spent in a while.  Gets me 50 uses.  Now, I’m not sick enough to stay home, and hopefully this will keep me from needing to.  But, we will see.

Ok, so this wasn’t a techy, or appetizing post, but hey, it might be helpful to someone.  And I hadn’t posted in 6 weeks.

The story behind this is that, in this condo, the laundry and furnace area are in a shared area in the middle of the building structure.  There are two doors into the area, one being the bifolds to reach the laundry, and another with the vent in the door for the furnace.  This door is ugly…  it was off-center, made any wall art impossible without looking weird on that wall, and… well, it sucked.

It has been replaced…  with the following.  This covers the door, is perfectly centered on the wall, allows the newly created wall art (also shown) to look right on this wall, and, well just looks cool.  Still allows me to access the door behind it (the piece is a french door setup), so I lose nothing.  And of course, it matches the rest of the room and decor.

Sorry that the photo isn’t better. Not a lot of light in here at this hour

Midget, find them.  Hurt them.

Of course, my Dad is very good at building/modeling things, as he is a contractor by trade.  So he was making forklifts (boom lift with raising arm), tractors, trucks with trailers, etc… while I made a crappy airplane.  So tonight, I decided to test myself a bit in my PlayDoh skills.  I was going to make Lightning McQueen for my nephew.

Not perfect, but not bad for a first try.  We’ll see how Jamie likes it…

1. A wide variety of the Canon Digital Elph series. I have an SD850 IS myself, but I’ve used the SD1000, SD400, SD600, and SD700.
2. Office camera, which currently is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7. Has been a Mavica FD20
3. Played around a bit with an XSi…

While I have very limited formal training in my photography, and a little more in my digital image editing work, I’d like to get deeper into this activity. As the nephews grow up, I think a solid camera with more zoom and features might be in line.

So, I started thinking XSi or T1i from Canon… I’m usually a Canon fan, but that’s not saying Nikon doesn’t make good stuff. They do, just a preference thing. But what does everyone else think?

In the DSLR game, what models have you tried/liked?
What lenses are the must-haves? The nice-to-haves?
Anything to avoid?

I’m celebrating step 1…

Oh, by the way, Kanye West is a douchebag.  I’m not much for award shows, but that earned him a full fledged lifetime membership to the Douchebag club.

And yes, I’m bringing back the photo…it’s not totally their fault, but still.

Tonight, I went to have dinner with the family out at my brother’s campsite east of the city.  Steaks, campfires, smores, fresh colorado peaches (one of my favorites) and maybe a beer all while playing frisbee with my older nephew and watching the little one kick and goo around.  In all, a good Saturday night.

Well, it would have been stellar had there not been so much stupid in the campground.  This location has about 70 sites in one ring and 40 more in a second ring.  All connected by a one-way loop of road with speed bumps, recent college grads/students working as “park rangers” of sorts, and a whole mess of motorhomes, pull-behinds, and fifth wheels.  Now while my family has always used camping as a good way to get away from everything (minus what cell phones bring us into and taking a laptop/aircard for radar watching) so we can just relax and play with the kids, a lot of people just gather in large groups to drink very heavily while letting their kids just run around the loop all night.  Bicycles, roller blades, wagons, carts, and whatever else the kids are on all taking the children away from their parents.  Which is apparently exactly what the parents want, very little to do with parenting so they can get drunk as hell.

Hell, the folks next door were so busy yacking and drinking they didn’t notice that their own kids were trying to lock each other in the storage compartments of the fifth-wheel camper they had.  But that wasn’t the worst part.  Right out front of our campsite was one of the speed bumps meant to keep everyone at 10 mph or less on the one-way street loop.  That speed bump was causing quite the trouble for the kids.

1. Brilliant “thug life” wannabe 11 year old thought his skateboard (with 2 inch clearance) could just ride over the speed bump (4 inch high).  FAIL.  And a skinned knee.

2. Roller blading kid…  same thing, skinned hand.

3. Little girl hanging onto the back of another girl riding a bike.  Riding girl decided it would be fun to “ramp” the speed bump and forgot about her sister on her back.  That resulted in dumping her sister onto the asphalt…  and she had a helluva cry.  Where were the parents?  about 1/4 mile away… thankfully a nearby mother helped the girl out in a hurry.

Now, a lot of that is just kids being kids… accidents happen, I’m ok with that.  Kids get hurt.  But what bugged me the most was the fact that the parents were still letting their kids ride their bikes, roller blades, etc… around the campground after it is pitch black minus the moonlight.  The only lights in the campground are those on the structures for public use (shower area, restroom, and that’s about it)  Heck, I had a hard time determining if a marshmallow I had on a stick only 3 feet ahead was burnt or not.  So now the drunk parents have no idea where their kids are, and they are dropping like flies to bike wrecks, getting lost, walking into the wrong campsite, and worst of all, just SITTING ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD WITH THEIR HANDS INCHES FROM BEING RUN OVER!

At one point, a parent (drunk as ever) looked at her daughter who was laying in the road, in the dark, in prime run-me-over position and said “that’s nice honey, play nice”

It was a nice evening worth of food and conversation, but we were sitting there expecting to see a kid get killed.  Thankfully, when I left, no one was dead…. but I’ll call out in the morning to be sure.

Please, if you become a parent, do not discard brain…  and teach your kids to stay close.

As I think I mentioned a while back, I started up another little diet contest with my older brother.  It’s coming to an end.  Not by a time period, but by the fact that both of us are approaching our goals.  I think I have only about 3-4 to go, he’s got about 6-8 to go… I think.  We aren’t really telling each other what we are at.  Either of us could be lying to the other.

Well, I started digging into my routine a bit more, and I found some information on the whole interval training concept.  I’ve spent most of my time just dieting and doing “static cardio”.  Started with 30 minutes of biking or a 3 mile walk (sometimes both, sometimes two of one/both in a day).  Not sure I want to stick with that, as it’s slowing down.  Need to vary my routine a bit more…  so I hit the gym for a brief bit of weights today (not too crazy)… and then you dang people and your 5k’s somehow convinced me that I should try to run a mile.  Now, I’ve never run a mile.  It was always canceled in gym class when I was a kid, and I just never did it on my own.  I hate running…  esp in a circle.  I get nowhere but tired.

I tried it anyway.  Found the executive park in town and decided to give it a shot.  Didn’t have my stopwatch, just my mp3 player and the Blackberry.  Knowing the thing is about 1.1 miles, I took off.  And while I did shave off almost 2 minutes from my AMT machine mile time, I still didn’t break the time I was hoping to.  And it wasn’t a total run.  Run, walk, run, walk, run, walk, walk, walk, run… you get the point.  Imagine me running next time you do a 5k and think what it would be like if I beat you.  Never let that happen.

But I finished the mile, and walked a bit, went to the car, drove home.  That was a mistake.  No water in car, and not enough cool down.  10 minutes later, I’m done with the post-run cough…

Oh, did I mention it’s a 25 mph wind day and half my run was into that wind?  That doesn’t help my cause.

If you guys are still doing 5k’s in say.. 2 years, I’ll join ya.  Maybe seth’s couch to 5k thing will help if I keep going.  But if I get another post-run headache like this, screw running…