Excavation

I've hinted at it in several other entries, but I feel like I need to open myself up and be perfectly honest here: I watch Friends. I don't just watch it a little, I watch it all the time. I used to watch it when I was a kid because my Mom liked it. I began watching the reruns due to my wife's obsession with sitcoms, but I realized something in that process: I really like it. Sweet Zombie Jesus that feels good to say! I am liberated!

I think the mark of a good sitcom is the abilities of the writers and actors to create characters so versatile and complex that any viewer watching could see themselves in any number of them.

Side note: A sitcom that accomplishes this task brilliantly is Modern Family. Amazing show and one I will very likely reference again.

Okay, back to Friends. For me, I've been compared to Rachel for my occasional airheadedness and the fact that my nipples often poke through my shirts, to Monica for my reaction to stress and because that one time I had a bit too much to drink and hooked up with my best friend who I ended up marrying, to Phoebe for my creativity (seriously reaching there, but stick with me, I’m going somewhere…I think), to Joey for my prowess with the ladies (pause for several minutes for my friends to collectively laugh at me and catch their breath), to Chandler for my actual prowess with the ladies…and the fact that I married someone WAY out of my league, and Ross for his compulsive need to be right and his love of all things science.

Ross, for those who have been living under centuries of sedimentary rock, is a Palentologist. He has been known to collect dinosaur figurines and have crazy debates about evolution. I’ve already done my evolution debate on here, need I remind you of the cactus?

http://morepointlessstories.blogspot.com/2010/02/never-on-sunday.html

But I thought I would share a little about me today. Like Ross, I too love dinosaurs…but for me, it’s a particular dinosaur…and no, I’m not going to post a picture of someone doing something inappropriate with the dinosaur statues out by Palm Springs…but I’ll keep that in mind for later.

No, THIS is my dinosaur.




I’m kind of into photography. I took a class or two in high school but followed a different path once I hit college. I have now been back into photography for a few years now and my dinosaur helped facilitate that hobby. This is a Gateway Inc. DC-M50. As far as digital cameras go, this isn’t a very good one. It’s big, it’s heavy, has a small screen (and an inexplicably redundant old-school view finder), a mediocre zoom, and a blah lens. It’s bad in low-light situations, it uses power very inefficiently from 4 AAA batteries…even when I spent the extra $ on those fancy lithium ones. Rechargeable batteries are a joke, by the way. Not the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries you find in your cell phones or in better cameras than this one.








Batteries aside as well as camera quality and my strange need for my gadgets to be the best of the best…this camera has been VERY good to me. How can I fault anything that gave me such a fun hobby? I really can’t.

Though the recent acquisition of new post-processing photo software (that and some actual, real-life time) has led me to do some cool stuff with my old photos, my Zen-like and truly mindful moment comes in the click of the camera…be it the fake sound that emanates from point-and-shoot cameras like Dino or from the actual click of the shutter in my fancier (read: but still on the cheap) digital single lens reflex camera. Finding that image in my viewfinder that is at that exact instant perfect and hearing and feeling the click is where you can find my happy place.









And while the Beeper King might tell you that technology is cyclical, we all know that it only keeps getting better. The camera that I used to take these photos is old relative to the DSLRs that are available today. If you look closely at some of these pictures you can see a bit of grain or “noise” in a couple of them…that happens with my current camera at high ISO speeds. I would never have discovered what the heck ISO noise was if it weren’t for my dinosaur.

If it weren’t for my dinosaur, I wouldn’t have taken shots like this.



It was foggy and on pretty much raining when I took this shot. My friends had all walked away as I laid down on the ground and aimed my camera just so to get this. I eventually caught up with them and this picture is framed and hanging in my house. Lots of people take shots like this when they visit Paris, but this one is mine and I’m really proud of it.



This is my friend Colin. This was taken the day he graduated from college. His dad brought cigars and Colin delivered the valedictory address at his graduation ceremony. We heckled him from the stands, but we meant well and were really proud of him.



You can’t take a bad picture in Venice. You look around and there are beautifully composed pictures just waiting for you to snap, you just have to point – and – shoot (see what I did there?)



With that, dear friends, I must be signing off. Microsoft Word has now stretched this out onto a 3rd page and I’m beginning to feel like this pointless story is dragging out a bit too long.




And just so that I can stick with my unofficial rule to always share something silly from my world with you, here is evidence that my habit goes WAY back…also, I took this picture with Dino.





PS