So many things on my mind these days. Surgery primarily. I am scared shitless.
Our garden is failing. The tomato plants that were doing so well on my window sill just shriveled up and died when we transplanted them to the garden. No idea why. The peas are doing good but Blake needs to stake them really soon or they’re going to grown into a tangled mess and the pea pods won’t form properly. Not sure what the carrots and onions are doing because I’m not sure why are carrots and onions and which ones are weeds. I guess we’ll see!
But yeah, veggie garden’s pretty much a bust this year, which is okay because I’ll be having surgery and can’t look after it anyway.
My hanging planter looks HORRIBLE and I dontt know why. I got Madison to deadhead it and we’ve been watering it pretty religiously so I dunno what its deal is. Maybe it’s just too windy where I have it or something, it’s definitely unhappy.
STILL haven’t planted my “fire things” and dealt with the front garden. What needs to happen is for the beds to be raked out, the irises in the front yard dug up and transplanted to the garden in the left of the front of the house, which is where I got them from (originally I was going to try and grow sunflowers in that bed, which is why I transplanted them to begin with), the “fire things” and petunias need to be planted in the front CAREFULLY as not to disturb the milkweed I’ve got growing in the front beds because the monarch caterpillars eat it. Madison’s going to be doing the planting and Blake is going to be doing the transplanting, it’s just a matter of when because we’ve been busy as hell lately and I don’t see things slowing down any time soon.
This Saturday was the Central Ontario Geocachers Spring Fling 8 and the theme was pirates. Because “pir 8″. Get it? Yeah. Arg.
So we did that and it damn near killed me but dammit WE DID IT and we got all 8 event caches and I’m still wearing my event bracelet because for some reason, I usually leave those on for a long time after the vent. I dunno why, I just do it. Like for weeks. I’m talking about those little papery-plastic bracelets they give you at events/concerts/shows. This one’s green and it has the COG logo all over it.
Spring Fling was…an experience. I don’t even know where to begin…I can’t really be truthful and nice at the same time when talking about this so it’s probably better that I gloss over a lot of what happened on Saturday. Let’s just say that these people are REALLY REALLY REALLY into geocaching and while I like geocaching and stuff, I will never be like these people. At something like Spring Fling, I can dress up and play the part and have all my trackables on me and stuff but when it’s over, I go back to my life and my other activities and whatnot, but most of these people DON’T. Geocaching IS their activity, their only one, and that’s definitely not me in any way, shape or form, so I kinda don’t get that. Like the whole “geocaching is my life” thing. I just don’t.
For example, one of the booths at the event was for a store that supplies ONLY things for night caching. You heard me. NIGHT caching. Traipsing through the woods AT NIGHT, looking for treasure using a GPS. That does not sound like a fun time to me! That sounds really really scary and not at all ideal for taking pictures of any kind! But there are enough people in the world who DO think that sounds like a good time to support an entire business dedicated to just that one thing. The people who are into night caching, generally speaking, ONLY do night caching. They’ll pick up caches during the day here and there, but they plan trips specifically to night cache the way we do to day cache.
I don’t get that. I mean, I get it, like the concept, but that being your hobby, sometimes going so far as to say that night caching could be the thing that sorta “defines” them, I don’t get that. Different strokes for different folks & all, I guess but what I specifically don’t understand is that you only have one hobby or activity that you’re into. And that it’s this super nerdy thing. Don’t get it.
That’s not to say that night cachers are BAD in any way or that I don’t like people who night cache, I’m just saying that I don’t understand only having one hobby, essentially. I try to have my fingers in as many pots as I can while still being able to give each thing enough attention to make it worthwhile.
We met a lot of interesting people at the Spring Fling though. We met Fababoo who is the person who made Wonderball, which is my favourite cache so far. He was really nice, he was dressed up as a pirate. He also gave me an orange screw on a tiny gold safety pin. Not really sure why he had that on him (he was trying to be dirty by asking me if I wanted a screw) but I pinned it to my bag. Speaking of my bag, not one single person noticed my trackable patch on my bag. :o( I pointed it out to one woman but she hasn’t logged it yet. I think maybe my bag’s pattern (damask) is too busy and people just don’t see it. I’m going to have to put it somewhere more noticeable.
Wes and Fababoo’s son got along really great all day so they invited us to sit with them for dinner. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
The actual geocaching was pretty hellacious. I didn’t see the piece of paper with all of them on it so I’m not sure what the terrain rating was on any of them but there was one where we were going up and down hills that almost did me in. It was near the end of the day so I was pretty tired to begin with but Jesus fucking christ was that ever awful. I had to keep stopping because my legs were just on fire, my head was throbbing from sunstroke and I was pretty much hyperventilating. Awful. The other caches were pretty easy though pretty far apart. I felt bad because there were some people on the COG forums asking for a ride to the event and some people offered them rides and yay everything’s happy, right? Well no, because if you didn’t have a car, there’s no way you could have done all 8 of the event caches because some were as far as 8km away in one direction and 6 km away in the other direction. You could not have done that on foot, so I felt bad for people who may have come by way of hitchhiking or whatnot and who wouldn’t have had access to a car. I don’t think that was fair. Or maybe that’s just how a Spring Fling works, I dunno, I’ve never been to one.
Blake talked to a lot of people because he’s on this Blackberry group so he knows all these people and talks to them pretty much every day etc. so he knew folks. I didn’t know anyone so I didn’t talk to anyone. Neither did the kids. Oh we talked to Paprika but that was the only person I really knew.
People camped out at the campgrounds (Paprika ran the camp) and some people stayed in hotels. In fact one of the caches was in the garden of the Comfort Inn. It was a wooden pirate ship where you lifted off the top and inside was the log and items to trade. Obviously that cache is probably not going to stay there, all exposed and out in the open like that. It would get muggled for one, but also the wood would warp and stuff. I’m not sure how they’re going to work that one.
The event seemed really disorganized to me, like I didn’t know what we were supposed to do at any given time and neither did Blake so that’s why we just did the event caches. They were all pretty cool. A few were ships, one was a cannon, one was just a big bucket with a lid in the woods full of toys and stuff. No micros that I can think of. One was glued to the bottom of a rock.
My favourite part of the day was sitting down and drinking water. Wes said it was “the best day ever!” and Blake had a good time (not sure about Madison) so that’s what matters. I have to work the next 3 Mondays to make up for taking the day off which sucks, but I’ll live. One down today so yay!
Yesterday I did absolutely nothing. It was a grey day and by the end of it we were having a thunderstorm, but Blake, the kids and Madison’s new boyfriend, Devon, went geocaching yesterday afternoon. They got first to find on both of the caches they went after, which is sort of a big deal in the caching community, especially since it was their first FTFs. They asked me if I wanted to come (I was napping when they left) but I wanted to keep sleeping so I said no. I think if I’d have known they were going after FTFs, I might have gone, but I didn’t know they were doing that so I just kept sleeping.
I didn’t do a single thing yesterday though and I hate that. For me to feel okay with the Universe, I have to do at least one productive thing per day and on days where I don’t do anything productive, I just go to bed feeling wretched. :o( We watched 3 episodes of Doctor Who and Blake says that counts as being productive but that’s input, that’s downloading, that doesn’t count. He doesn’t even know. Only output counts….usually. I do have “download days” where I just decide to be a sponge and follow link after link after link all day and just absorb every piece of new information that comes my way. That counts as being productive because it’ll translate to output eventually. But it has to be purposeful. You have to do it ON purpose. Just casually watching 3 episodes of Doctor Who doesn’t count. (This is Sunny Logic.)
I said this weekend that I didn’t like Amy Pond or Matt Smith’s Doctor. Both are now growing on me and I’ve decided not to give up on the show. Originally I was going to leave it be because they hurt me so badly (you know what happened…I’m trying to stay spoiler free here) but now I think I’ll keep watching. The last episode we watched was something like “The Vampires of Venice” and it was pretty good, admittedly.
I’ve decided that I am going to TRY and do a series of posts about the Holga lenses for the Polaroid 300 camera. I am *not* a photographer. I do not understand how a photo is created or how a Polaroid camera works. All I know is that it’s basically the simplest camera you can buy and that the photo quality is only a little better than shit. I know this because I used it, I shot a few pictures of things without a lens and out of the 3 I shot, only 1 was any good and it was a total fluke. So okay, a Polaroid is like a webcam it needs a lot of light. Good to know! I would write that in my first post about the Polaroid 300 camera! Because that’s the first thing you need to know if you’re going to use these lenses. Using them indoors is pretty much the dumbest thing ever unless you’re going to only be shooting Lego men under a lamp (which could be interesting, do it!) or you have professional studio lights which…if you have those? Why are you even bothering with Polaroid? I’m sure you also have a super crazy expensive camera and lens and flash so…I dunno, I just don’t see professionally lit Polaroid shots very often. That could be pretty cool too, now that I think about it. But I would have to see a scanned in Polaroid shot with a black background. Meaning: place your Polaroid photo on your scanner, then place a large piece of black paper on top of it, kinda like a reverse-mat, a background; maybe sign the black part in white or silver or gold pen or marker(optional), scan, crop as you see fit and then…I dunno, start a blog with the best “fine art” Polaroid shots ever? As sent to you by readers? Or a Live Journal community? I bet that exists, actually. I should check that out. One with the best snapshots would be good too because I firmly believe you get at least one good shot no matter what in every pack of film and seeing those good, likely fluke, shots would be a pretty cool blog too. I’d look at that one when I was bored as well. I’d probably submit to it a lot haha I am FULL of ideas today! Take them, they’re free!
Anyway, I am going to undertake the task of there being SOMETHING useful that comes up if you google “how do I use macro lens holga polaroid fuji” that isn’t just an ad for somewhere you can buy the lenses because obviously if you’re googling that, you already have the lenses. Ideally the “something” that comes up is my present and future posts on the subject, the latter of which would be in more of a tutorial or informational format that will be boring to anyone but me (because yay I get to *finally* play with a Polaroid camera!) or anyone who googles that. And I hope the posts will be helpful to anyone that comes across them because film is expensive and getting shots that aren’t so great really sucks, especially when you’ve invested in buying the Holga lenses.
Plus there’s also the fact that I’d be doing this with or without blogging about it, so I might as well blog about it haha and for that reason my plan is to use the 40 pictures I have here (veeeeeery frugally) for the tutorial post(s) and then buy the 9 packs of film for $99.99 deal on Amazon for the hospital (plus some left over obviously, for maybe more tutorials?) because I think that’s actually a fair price + we can’t find anywhere to buy it locally. Or I’ll just get the 4-pack for $56.40 if I don’t have very much money whenever I buy the rest of the film for the hospital. (I’d just rather pay $1.11/pic as opposed to $1.41/pic though, but what are ya gonna do?)
Unfortunately the weather for the next few days is gonna be kinda crappy so I probably won’t be able to start right away but I definitely want to start soonish. Maybe after dinner (which I’m eating right now, yay one-handed typing! woooo!) one of the children and I will take the Polaroid out and work on the macro filters because those are the ones I was trying to google originally so at least I can do the tutorial on that before I inevitably (according to Blake) get tired of the idea and go do something else.
So I suppose I should finally wrap up this post and finish my dinner! But before I do, I want to leave you with these words from Jax about Facebook and this video which is literally the most beautiful expression of joy I have ever seen in my entire life.
Peace oot!
PS! I totally forgot that everything in my Etsy shop is significantly reduced to help pay for the camera I’m taking to Squam! So check it out!