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I have to say that this year has been the most snow I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s really not saying much since I spent my formative and most of my adult life living in Houston, but I’ve been in winter storms before. I’ve even been in one in Wyoming that had more snow overall than this, but I didn’t stay for the whole thing.

This, however, is the most I’ve ever had to shovel from the driveway by far!

There were over two feet in the driveway – possibly more, since by the time I got around to shoveling, it had packed itself down quite a bit.

I’ve posted a good number of pictures here for all to see.

We did have a brief power outage, but I’m sure none of you noticed since it was in the wee hours of the morning and only lasted a couple of hours.

We’re all right here now, but my back will suffer for several days. Snow is heavy. Very heavy.

Filed under: House, Life News on February 8th, 2010 | No Comments »

But not as bad as last year!

We spent part of the second week of January this year in Nashville for the annual Imaging USA event for PPA [Professional Photographers of America]. We drove the whole way there from Virginia, and while it’s only one state over, it was about a 10 hour drive.

This year, we opted to go to some pre-convention training and it was very good, except that there seemed to be too many people. Once the main event started, it was clear there were WAY too many people – 3000 or so more than there should have been in fact. Almost 10,000 people attended this year, or so we were told. It was incredibly crowded, but even so, there were some gems to be gathered.

This year, unlike last year, we actually fared fairly well in both the Expo and the sessions – not getting overwhelmed by too much information, or buying too much [well, not TOO too much] stuff we didn’t need.

The most important things we picked up this year were several pieces of advice and new flash units for our lights. Oh – and we got a couple of new backdrops for a great price.

The most important piece of advice was “practice, practice, practice”. And I intend to do so with the new lights. If anyone wants to model, just let me know!

Of course, the best part of the conference for us was the chance to reconnect with someone who not only has very quickly become a dear friend to us, but now a mentor who we hope to learn as much as we can from: Angela Carson. In fact, we spent so much time with her on Wednesday morning, that is wasn’t morning anymore – we were supposed to leave at 10AM, but ended up leaving close to 1PM. It was well worth the time, though.

Filed under: Photography on January 26th, 2010 | No Comments »

On the last stop of our journey, we were to stop in Key West for a day of shopping and touring, which I was looking forward to. The coffee on the boat was substandard and I wanted to pick up some good coffee on land. We also wanted to wander the streets and possibly go shopping.

This turned out not to be the case.

When we pulled into dock, it started raining. And not just a little drizzle, but a full-on Gulf rainstorm. We attempted to leave the boat three times but were diverted or blocked each time.

We found out later that the people who made it off the boat ended up wandering in town in knee-high water in what was probably a 100-year flood.

It seems we didn’t miss much. Well, except Key West. Argh.

We then proceeded to head back to Galveston [joy] at full throttle.

Filed under: Travel on January 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

Late Wednesday night of our cruise, we arrived in Nassau, Bahamas – our first shore experience began shortly after. We docked around 9PM and were able to push our way out of the boat a half hour or so later.

Everything was closed.

Well, not everything. The Atlantis resort was open. We all piled in a taxi and went to go see it. I have to say that it is an amazing place and the aquarium is … well, amazing.

After that evening, we got up very early the next morning [breakfast at 5AM is early, yes?] and met our dive boat owner at the front of the docks. She drove us to the other side of the island and we hopped on the boat and went out to sea.

I have to say I don’t think I’ve had another dive as relaxing and fun as this boat trip was. We originally asked for a two-tank dive, but they arranged it so that we had one deep dive and one shallow dive which used up only half of our air. There were quite a few lion fish in the water there – not natively, but accidentally introduced there.

Then, they took us to a spot where we could swim with sharks.

A previous boat had fed the sharks and they were clustered around the boats when we got there. That boat left and we dove in – well, I dove in, while the rest of the team followed slowly.

Some of the sharks came quite close.

I wanted to pet them… well, maybe not, but it was tempting to reach out and touch them.

The dive master said that there were about 30 sharks around us, but only a few were close at any given time.

I really like this one of Laura and our friends. Notice how they are tightly clinging to the rope while the sharks circle behind them…

This  was a dive that I will likely never forget.

Then, we got out of the water and back on the boat. If the rest of the trip could have only been so good!

Filed under: Life News, Photography, Scuba, Travel on December 31st, 2009 | No Comments »

I hope you are all having a wonderful Christmas Day!

Enjoy!

Filed under: Life News on December 25th, 2009 | No Comments »

After a somewhat inconvenient flight to Houston and a very pleasant dinner with my father at a wonderful Mexican place, Laura and I wake up early the next morning to be shuttled to meet Norma, Laura’s mom, for breakfast and the remainder of the way to port.

That breakfast was to be the best we would have until arriving back at Norma’s place.

Arrival at the port went smoothly and easily. We met up with our friends and got quickly on board. What I hadn’t paid attention to, but should have, was the weather. It was foggy at my parents’ early that morning, but I had assumed it would dry up later in the day. It didn’t. In fact: it would grow worse.

Our departure was delayed – and delayed – and delayed, until we even slept hoping to awaken in the middle of the Gulf. In the morning, I rolled over to glance out over the beautiful … port of Galveston. I went back to sleep.

We finally started moving later that day. That fog delay caused us to miss one of our ports of call: Freeport, Bahamas. So instead of visiting Key West, Freeport, and Nassau, we had to go to Nassau first, skip Freeport and hit Key West last.

At least we had a good time in Nassau – and were able to leave the boat.

More on that later.

Filed under: Travel on December 22nd, 2009 | No Comments »

Today, we flew from DC to Houston for the first stage of our journey. It wasn’t so simple as it sounds. For some reason, there was enough terrible weather that we had to land half-way there in Knoxville to re-fuel. A very strong headwind made the trip very slow and costly.

At least I an add a new airport to my list now.

Tomorrow, we drive down to Galveston and board the boat. I’ve never been on a cruise like this before – only river a river cruise and a ferry ride from Vancouver to Juneau, Alaska. Those were cruises, but not like this one: this is a CRUISE. Big boat and all.

We’ll be doing a bit of diving, a bit of photography, and a lot [I hope] of relaxing.

Filed under: Travel on December 13th, 2009 | No Comments »

Some of you may have noticed this morning when the blog was unavailable. As you can see, it’s back now and working properly. I guess that some of the “fixes” I put in place broke things over the weekend and I only now got it back up and running. It as almost completely lost. That would have been bad. At least I had a backup.

Anyway: all is well now with the world and the web server.

Enjoy!

Filed under: Site News on December 7th, 2009 | No Comments »

I bet you didn’t even notice, but we’re now running on Windows Server 2008 R2, which is 64-bit only.

Yay!

This is has been an ongoing project which I started a while back when 2008 came out. I wanted to migrate all the sites from 2003 to 2008. I got bogged down and then R2 was release and I couldn’t just upgrade the new server, so I had to deploy a new one. Presently I have 3.

Soon, there will be only one.

There is still much work to be done, but it won’t be the onerous task I thought it would be… I hope…

Filed under: Site News, Technology on December 5th, 2009 | No Comments »

Yesterday, we received our first photographic backdrop. We’re fleshing out the studio and getting serious about taking more pictures. We’ve already done one shoot this month, but it was outside. Now, we can do good portraits inside. We even have another shoot scheduled for this weekend.

So, without further ado, here is a shot of our new backdrop:

Since we had it set up, we took some sample shots of my friend Raffe:

Now, we’re ready for business!

Filed under: Photography on November 20th, 2009 | No Comments »