General – Page 78 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Apronicity

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Cynthia and I met up with Allen “King of the Oldies” Hill and his lovely lady, Andrea, for dinner last night. We dined at BYOB Lebanese restaurant called Cafe Mezza. It was our first time to eat there and it was quite good.

Cynthia wanted to make an apron for Allen and personalize it. Since Allen’s primary marketing trademark is a wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes Cynthia came up with the perfect thing:

It’s called the “Allen Hillpron”

Still singing where the weeping willows wave

Acquired a Tamron 18 – 200mm f/3.5-6.3 XR DI-II LD lens for my Sony.
Extremely versatile lens. It allows me to go from a nice wide angle to a reasonable zoom without changing lenses. This will be the perfect travel lens.

Took it out to Terry Hershey Park over off the Beltway. It was just too nice a day to spend indoors. The hike and bike trail extends all the way to Highway 6 and is very pleasant.
Cynthia and I saw many Warblers, a few Woodpeckers and this Mockingbird:

Click image for full size

Aperture: f/6.3
ISO: 400
Focal length: 200mm

The image stabilization in this camera is very helpful at these extended focal lengths.

Like a true nature’s child

More pics here.

Google push pins explained

William

When Cynthia and I took our European vacation in 2005 we decided to take William the Sheep and take pictures of him in front of various sites we visited.

In fact, he has his own subject tag here at baldheretic.com as well as his own photo gallery.

We have every intention of taking him on our next vacation for more photo opportunities.

As I was vanity searching on the web I found an interesting site. It’s an online Russian real estate magazine. One particular issue happens to jump out at me…

That’s William in the hotel bed in Paris.

I know I am usually pissed off when I see someone hot-linking or stealing one of my images…
But this is kind of cool.

You can see the original at www.sob.ru/issue242.html

Frank was just asking ‘what’s new?’

Back in 1995 or so we decided we wanted to have a fish tank.
We did a little research and settled on a 50 gallon freshwater system and got started.
It was cool stocking it with fish and setting up the plants and rock and stuff.
We had plecostomuses (plecostomusi? plecostomooses?) and other catfish, hatchet fish, neon tetras, you name it. We even had some African Dwarf Frogs in there.

We maintained it, cleaned it, added fish when some would pass away. We even nursed some fish back to health after the developed some kind of scale eating fish rot.

During that time we moved twice, the second time being when we bought our house in 1998. The aquarium moved with us and that my friend is no easy task.

After several years our interest and dedication to the tank waned. Fish that passed on to the great beyond were briefly mourned as they were flushed into the hereafter, but were not replaced.

Eventually all that remained were 5 bottom dwellers. Some catfish and a loach.

We were ready to give up being fish tank owners. The problem was that I simply didn’t have the heart to take 5 perfectly healthy fish and just flush them away, but having a 50 gallon tank seemed like overkill for that small number of fish.

I decided to buy a cheap 10 gallon aquarium and transplant the survivors so that they could live out their lives with minimal upkeep in an out of the way corner of the house.

Before long old age took it’s toll and 3 of the five remaining bottom dwellers passed away, leaving us with the loach and a catfish which both survived up until about a year ago.

Now there is just the loach. We call him “Loachy” and on one of his active days he looks like this:

For the most part, though, he tends to literally lay around the bottom of the aquarium on his side looking very dead:

Sometimes, like in the picture above, he is in among his rocks. Other times he’s just laying around out in the open on the white gravel.

Let me be clear, he’s not sick. He’s lazy. This fish has been sleeping or resting on his side since the day we got him oh so many years ago.

He’s the last fish, and when he’s gone we’re done.

I don’t know how long he’s going to live.
I will tell you he was in the original group of fish we bought when we started.

That means he is 11+ years old if you just count the years we’ve owned him.

For all I know he’ll go another 11 years.

Tanksgiving

Every Thanksgiving at our house over the last few years has been a rather relaxed affair.
Cynthia cooks up a very traditional meal, usually a Turkey and all the trimmings and we invite a few friends over to join us for dinner, drinks and conversation.

This year we invited Owen Finn over for dinner. Owen is a recent transplant to Houston from Galway Ireland. He transferred here to our Houston office to take a position that had opened up managing our customer facing services. Services like external tech support for our software and our maintenance renewals.

I had recently gone out drinking with Owen and another co-worker who was visiting from the Galway office. I did my best to keep up with two drunk Irishmen but was completely outmatched.

The evening was extemely fun and as I related it to Cynthia she suggested we invite Owen over so we could treat him to his first Thanksgiving. Owen’s here in advance of his family who will be moving here in January so it was a good bet he would have been on his own that day.

Owen is incredibly funny and a great story teller. He’s got this thick Irish accent and when he says words that begin with TH he just pronounces them with a hard T sound. Thursday becomes Turrrsday and Thanksgiving become Tanksgiving.

We arranged for him to come over at tree minutes to tree on Turrsday for Tanksgiving.

It was a great time. Jim Henkel joined us later on and we sat around drinking coffee and telling jokes and stories.

At one point Cynthia broke out the Book Of Lists which is a compendium of interesting facts and began quizzing us.

One of the questions she asked was “What are the seven stages of drunkenness.”

None of us really knew the seven stages. Well, we knew from experience, but not formally.

Turns out they are:

Verbose
Grandiose
Amicose
Bellicose
Morose
Stuporous
Comatose

After Owen and Jim had left Cynthia and I got to talking and she decided that what Owen needed was the list of the seven stages of drunkenness. And not just a writren list, oh no.
She would immortalize them in cross stitch.

She got some graph paper and drew it out and then dug up her cross stiching supplies and turned this out:

Click image for full size

I’m giving it to him tomorrow.

Freeze frame

I was contacted by Allen “King of the Oldies” Hill to inquire if I might be available to come to the Continental Club and shoot some promo shots for the new incarnation of the El Orbits.

Since David Beebe is about to undergo surgery on his voice box he will be taking a hiatus from the band for about a year.

Thomas Escalante, lead singer for Clouseaux, has already moved in to the lead singer position with David doing backing vocals and playing bass. With David gone the vocals are covered but there is a need for bass guitar. That’s where Allen comes in.

With all these changes there’s a need for new promotional material, hence the request for my photographic services.

Truth be told, I was pretty nervous. I don’t mind going out and shooting casually because there’s nothing riding on the results. When shooting on spec there is an expectation and failure means disappointment for more than just the photographer.

Still, it was an opportunity I wanted to take advantage of and I agreed to do it.

The results were not everything I had hoped for. I don’t own professional lighting gear and they wanted the picture on the stage at the Continental Club and the lighting there is pretty bad.

My current photographic preference is to shoot without a flash. This results in shots that are a tad grainy and “soft”, but look cool when reduced in size. In hindsight I should have shot a few with the flash just so they would have had that as an option.

I sent over the files from the images I thought were most usable and Allen determined that this one would do the trick:

Click image to see full size

In other photographic news I sold another picture at Sig’s Lagoon. I’ve doubled my sales revenue!