Movies are great but they do not consume me, there is one woman in my life who might have loved me enough to get over more of my flaws if I would have gone to the movies with her more, but I could never do it. The movie stories are sometimes great, clearly the imagery is often great, though there is something I don’t like about sitting passively with strangers and taking in other peoples most personal thoughts and experiences. She wanted me to love the movies as much as her and I didn’t and it left her wanting, if only that was it but like always there was so much more. Before and after me this woman saw almost every movie out there, and she loved it. Like some other things I wish I did want to see those movies, much like I wish I liked sports enough to watch sports on TV or could believe in god, movies just don’t compel me like that. That aside when I sit down to write, when I play the stories in my head they seem to play out like movies, I can see the scene and the dialog, just no music and the credits aren’t ever there. Driving down Ravenna Avenue the other afternoon I saw two young guys walking through the grass divider. It’s a wide divider maybe 40 feet across, covered in grass with trees lining both sides. They were walking in that way that says sure we are getting somewhere, but the enjoyment of life and this conversation and this friendship means way more than walking anywhere. That’s the scene I always want to fill with dialog. There is another that I constantly look back at. When I lived in Irvine we would take the bus to the ocean. Sometimes four or five of us would go, when it was in groups like that it would be the normal joking and dick sizing, sometimes just my friend David and I. That hour that it took to get to the beach was a pain in the ass but it was time to talk, to make fun of things, to revel in friendship. With surfboards shifting during the ride, with people getting on and off there was always so much to talk about. I want to fill those moments with the dialogs of my childhood but with the insight of my life right now. So much work to do.
I thought this all through yesterday, I wrote this in my head as I was driving. Walking to work this morning I was wondering what it was about since I couldn’t remember the great idea I’d had the night before, I started to worry that I couldn’t write or wasn’t built for it since I didn’t push hard enough. Writing this made me happy. Maybe this is all that I get from the idea, maybe it’s far as it goes, but I enjoyed it.
One foot after another and repeat.

This plant in my front yard is cool for so many reasons;
a-- it's jasmine and it smells great.
b--my mom helped me plant it.
c--it reminds me of my childhood eating dinner in the back yard of the irvine house where there was a ton of night blooming jasmine and the smell would wash over us during dinner and it was amazing.

"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught, and in which we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit."

— Pema Chödrön (quote from When Things Fall Apart)

I was in a band for two months or so. We were going to be called Seed, the cover art (we were thinking ahead, always thinking big). I was playing guitar (barely), Mike Vallely was playing bass and singing, a friend of Mike's that he met on tour played lead guitar. We tried to get Ed Templeton to play drums, but oddly I remember Deanna's brother convincing him to play guitar instead, but we didn't need another guitarist, we needed a drummer.
We played really loud in the extra bedroom at Mikes house, which was really Marty Jimenez's house that Mike was renting. We played loudly, and we had four songs down. One night O came over to listen to us play. He was so kind, he could have torn us aparrt, instead he just hgave us tips. I remember him telling me to strum instead of always playing down strokes. I don't remember much more. But I do remember having a great time. I think the friend went home, I wish I could remember his name, and we sort of just stopped playing. The entire time I was in knee brace because it was right after I had gotten home form breaking my knee cap in Eugene.
So many things lately have been bringing me back to youth, but it's been in great ways.
Today it all came back when I saw this flower on front steps.

I pointed the biggest lens I had at the moon and tried to hold still, tripods are for sissies (or people who want sharp images.)

Flat cloudy light, dark clouds above with windy skies yet a very comfortable temperature. We were walking along the coast, looking for san dollars, flat rocks and anything fun. It was fun. Bella was running everywhere jumping from the sandy part to the grassy part of the dunes, running out to the water and back.

I've experienced so many different experiences with oceans and yet it’s always a calming place. I’ve run away to the ocean to think, I’ve had others leave me to go to the ocean to clear their mind, I’ve made big decisions walking along the oceans, had hard conversations, had giddy conversations, talked about nothing and everything. Been happier than ever before bobbing in the water with a surfboard under me watching waves come in and dolphins swim by. So many great times at the beach, and I’m open to so many more.

I’m alternately torn here between two song lines here
“No one ever wants to hear your dreams” and
“I want to see movies of my dreams”

Last night in an odd parched night of sleep I had a very odd dream. I was flying in a commercial jet, a big one, maybe 737 or something, and it was mostly full, but the back looked like a convertible, it was open on top but had sides that came up to about hip high and some folding chairs were spread about it looked more like a cruise ship than a plane. Forget about cabin pressure, noise or wind it was very pleasant out there, and no one was smoking. I sat next to some lady and we spoke about work and I think horses. Eventually the pilot announced that we were ahead of schedule and so we were going to fly lower so that we could see more wild life. All of sudden we were taxiing at speed along a road in the middle of no where, and there was a dear and a caribou (are dear and caribou really friends an hang out together?) on the side of the road but then a car was coming at us and the place took off again and landed once it passed, then the sides of the planes was more of a jungle, and I saw a tiger run by. It was super cool, then more cars came and we had to start flying again…

That’s it, I don’t remember anything else.

Two mediocre photos for the price of one.
I've been busy and happy, hard to go shoot photos. These photos were better in my head than when I looked at them at full size.
Ohwell.
Tomorrow will be something better.

This photo was taken after dinner with one of my favorite people (Jenn) and an enjoyable restaurant (35th Street Bistro), then I ended up on the block away from the first place I lived in Seattle, and two blocks away from another place I lived, and a block away from one of the best designed houses in Seattle(all around the corner from Jenn's), and there was a great sunset.
A night of greats. Plus, Bella was really funny when I got home, she is learning to play fetch better and better.

I've been meaning to build some sort of planter outside the kitchen window, and then I figured out a beter way to do it.
Now I have a new bunch of herbs growing away within reach of my kitchen. It's a good thing. You would know that too if you've eaten food made with just picked herbs, which of course you have if you are reading this.

I see ghosts of Don Skirvin all around Seattle. Not just in Ballard where I picture him, but all over... Fremont, downtown, and even around Green lake, where it would be preposterous to see him, since he would have to walk, and he wasn't much of a walker. It’s never him, but it always makes me do a double take. If you see me looking at overweight bearded guys you now know why.
Don was a manager of mine at Adobe. He is a good guy, a talented composer, and a hell of an arguer, but he likes security, safety and repetition, and that wasn’t what I was interested in when I worked for him. I was working on a small feature that was going to be dropped into a a big product. The lead developer and I would talk and expand the feature or make changes and take on new bits and it was working great, and then we got the bigger team involved and it went to hell. Don didn’t want to take any fixes or add anything because that meant risk. Most people view the risk reward thing as a tradeoff, you get rewards for giving users a feature that works well and does what they expect, but sometimes you have to take risks when you take fixes or make changes. Don just argued that risk was bad. He often won, and Chip and I learned to work around him and not tell him what we were doing. After two product cycles like that I had a pretty healthy dislike of Don, but then the manager on my happy little team left and the team was in chaos, so I started looking for a place to go. I fell into Don’s lap. He said I’d get to do fun work and he’d give me a lot of room. It seemed fair. Sometimes that happened other times he kept me on a short leash. Don was so controlling he asked for status reports to be submitted only in a specific font, and it was courier, which was nuts. I like Helvetica a lot, but I couldn’t imagine demanding that people resend work in the right font. Some of his control stuff was easy for me to blow off and avoid by just doing things in the way that worked for him and ignoring the overly controlling stuff that was going on. I also did a lot of work that was just never mentioned, I would help people out with weeks of work that I would never mention to Don because he would tell me I didn’t have time to do it, but I always did. He left eventually, because the work was too stressful.
While Don and I didn’t like each other much, he one offered me a promotion while he was yelling at me, I refused it, he did do some good things for me. He did a great job protecting his people and creating a fiefdom of his own, which was good and bad.
I have no idea what he’s doing, but I hope he is doing well and is finding success with his music and is doing something that brings him more joy than making software did.

As I pulled out my computer to post todays photo there was a spider sitting there. He moved right off, now he's half way across the room, I can still see her on the carpet. I know I should get some paper and scoop her up and take her outside, but I'm content sitting here indian style on the carpet. I'll get her in a bit.
Good morning.

PS -- I did get her, scooped her up using Netflix envelopes and put him outside.

Funny that in photography just like life when times get hard (or in this case the photos get bland) we head back to what we know. I pulled out the macro lens and started looking at plants... I was sitting on the deck in the afternoon and the whiteness of the seed pods on the garlic chives (a taste more like onions and chives than garlic) looked interesting to me, but it didn't come across through the lens in the same way.
I don't invision photos and then take them like some do, I look through the lens and then see what comes to me and move it about until it matches whatever that "er" estetic is in my head. Anyway, back to plant photos for a while.

I've been having trouble getting images that I like enough lately. I'm not sure what it it, maybe it's because I've been busy, or happy, or who knows what, but it's been a challenge. I'm not sure if I should focus on it more or less. Sometimes it seems that if I think about it less then more good things happen. But other times it seems that focus makes things happen in a better way. Hard to know which to do. We'll see.

Two guys I work with are bike geeks and love bikes, but they are obsessing about fixed gear bikes, instead of multi speed bikes. Fixed gear bikes are like the bikes you grew up on, the wheel turns when you turn the pedals, when the wheel turns the pedals turn, there is no coasting on a fixie, the pedals go when the wheels move, forward and backwards. It's been like learning to ride a bike again.
Bella freaks out when I was wiring around the school, but it's really fun.
The Bike came about when the two bike geeks were talking about new bikes and one of them spend a huge amount of money on his new fixie, all build form fancy bike parts. I challenged them to build one for 200 dollars. I didn't really want a bike, I just wanted to see if they could do it. They didn't really put one together for 200 dollars, mostly it was Todd's old stuff and then Isaac bought a bunch of new parts, which was where the 200 dollars was spent.
Either way it's been entertaining.

Two trips to Harvest Vine in two weeks. THe food as always was great and like La Carta the service is so happy and enjoyable and honestly working on creating a good dining experience that it's great.

The photo is off two eggs, the tops were removed to serve a custard in a couple of weks ago, they've been sitting in the kitchen for a while, and this morning I thought that they would tie in for Spanish food since Dali, was Spanish, and very obsessed with eggs and fertility.

Hoew would Morrissey's Suedehead be written differently in the internet age?