Jess in a Bag

In case you've forgotten, our cat is extremely cute.

Handyman Skills?

One of the annoyances about our apartment is that part of the light in our bathroom was detached and dangling. A very slow, drawn-out process involved me trying to fix it (no dice), our landlord's handy friend trying to fix it (no), and then us getting the go-ahead from the landlord to call a handyman to fix it. Of course, this involves finding someone and calling to set up an appointment, which was taking forever to get around to do. So, I tried again. It turned out the part in question was stripped and pretty much hopeless for screwing back in, so I settled for some electrical tape. I think it looks pretty much OK though.

Also, I made rigged this awesome litter wall to keep Jess from making such a mess. She loves to dig litter out of her box and put it in piles on the floor. Hopefully this will improve the situation.

Cats Like Christmas Presents Too

They come in boxes and have ribbons.

Jess on Red Area Rug

Cats are Helpers

Put the warm laundry on the bed and for the next several hours there was this...

Jess in a Box

Jess likes boxes, even if they're precariously balanced on other boxes.

New Furniture

It seems that one of the things that happens when you get married is that you buy "grown-up" furniture. It costs a barking fortune.

Fancy new couch (or sofa? what's the difference anyway?).

Jess approves of the new mattress & box springs. Queen-size, not double. Getting old am I.

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p.s. If you are as annoyed by Blogger's teeny-tiny edit box as I am, install Mark A. Ziesemer's wonderful Greasemonkey script for immediate joy.

Jess Doing Stuff

Begging.

Sitting in a box which is too small.

Cat in a Box

Project 100, #65.

Cat Grass

Jess has a taste for plants. Her favorite seems to be the spider plants, which make her throw up. Gross! But Erin discovered "Cat Grass", which Jess also loves and which does not make her throw up.

Project 100, #62.

Cat in a Box

One of Jess' major duties is to sit in boxes.

Project 100, #41.

Cat

One of the things I love about my life is that Jess the cat, who came with Erin, is in it. Unfortunately, she's hard to photograph, being a black cat. Here she is sleeping in a sunbeam this morning.

Project 100, #25.

New Digital Camera... Really This Time!

A little while ago, I blogged about a new digital camera, a Canon SX-10 "bridge camera". Well, I sent it back, deciding that it really was the worst of both worlds rather than the best, and I replaced it with a Pentax K200d, which arrived today -- an entry-level DSLR and one of only two DSLRs on the market that take AA batteries (the other is also a Pentax). It also turns out that I could get an 18-250mm lens (field of view equal to 27-375mm on 35mm) and that I can use Erin's old-school manual focus lenses that were hand-me-downs from her dad (and plus, the image stabilization is in the body, not in the lenses as Canon and Nikon do, so the old lenses are stabilized too). Even though it's a beast at 1.2kg with the 18-250 zoom, I think it's a fit. Yay!

Here's a picture of Jess. 1/8 second, f/1.4, ISO 1600, hand-held with a Takumar SMC 50mm, one of the aforementioned old-school lenses. Given that this was taken in very poor lighting (available light at 11pm) and I'm pretty green at manual focusing, yet it's among the best pics of Jess I've ever seen, I'm pretty pleased.

New Digital Camera?

I got a new toy in the mail today, a Canon SX-10 IS. I'm not entirely convinced it's right for me... it's kind of a bizarre bastard child occupying the space between point-and-shoots and full DSLRs. It's three times bigger than my old camera, but 1.5-2 times smaller than a DSLR. It has an extraordinarily versatile lens, 28-560mm (which is fairly wide to huge zoom), and zero-centimeter macro capability (i.e., the subject can touch the glass)... for a DSLR that'd be 3-4 lenses, and at least $2000 and 10 pounds of glass (but higher quality glass, of course).

However, it's way bigger than the P&S that I've been taking on hiking trips so far (36-105mm) and been fairly happy with, and it has the same kind of small, noisy sensor that compact cameras do, and the user interface is rather weird in places. Is the fancy lens worth the extra mass and bulk? I'll contemplate this question over the next few days.

This is a picture of my cat. Believe it or not, it's a 1/2 second exposure, hand-held. Sometimes image-stabilization really kicks ass (click through - it's even reasonably sharp full-size). [Edit 1/5/09 - no, it's actually not very sharp at all.]

Jess the Cat Helps Unpack the Shop Vac

10,000 Reasons Awards Event

As mentioned earlier, one of my photos won an honorable mention in a local photo contest. Today was the awards event.

Here's me with my photo:


I wasn't all that excited by the event itself. There was mingling for an hour, which Erin and I don't really enjoy and aren't too good at, though I did talk to a couple of folks from Friends of the Boundary Waters who were very impressed by my photo.

This was followed by an awards ceremony which was about 30% clapping and 50% giving fundraising awards to organizations participating in the MEF (sponsor of the contest) fund drive. I got a certificate and the foam-core print, which is pretty nice but is on plain paper.

The winning photos are online (and all look much better onscreen than on paper). Apparently, I was the 2nd honorable mention. Of the photos ahead of mine, I thought the 1st and 2nd place winners, and the 1st honorable mention, were very strong. I thought the 3rd-place winner was also very strong except for a severe composition error (a man's head aligns perfectly with the horizon, which looks weird) which IMO should have nixed it.

Also, Erin took a photo on our most recent BWCAW trip which I thought was simply extraordinary and which I believe to be a shoo-in winner next year.

Finally, here is our cat in a box: