Author: lief

Amelia Mabel Zimmerman

Here she is, Ms Amelia Mabel Zimmerman
Born April 11, 2006 at 06:57 and weighing in at 6lbs 7oz

Amelia Mabel born. Amelia is snuggled into Momma, staying warm and fending off the whole “cruel world” thing.

Amelia Mabel born. Here is Amelia (Emma) under the lights of the inquisition.

Amelia Mabel held by Abigail Elaine. Now her big seester, Abigail gets a chance to hold her baby.

Amelia Mabel held by Abigail Elaine. Abby is going to be a great big sister. She is very tender and has already helped wherever she can.

Of accidents and houses

I’ll get right out with it – Angela was in another car accident. Albeit minor it does stir the mind to think of how many vehicle accidents we have been in recently…that would be four in the past 4 years.
I want mass transit.

We are fully moved in…still unpacking yet but moved in. This is a really nice place and a nice location, still can’t believe the story of how we found it all.

Baby Girl #2 is due May 4th, still no name yet, she will be the first to know and then I suppose us and then all of you. 🙂

Angela has whooping cough for the past week or so which makes for long nights and baby girl isn’t even here yet. Hopefully that will pass soon enough for her to get some rest before delivery.

Abby is adapting well in her new environs. She has a huge bed, a huge room of her own, her very own playroom on the way, her own backyard w/ sandbox and she just discovered the wonders of another musical, Oklahoma. She eats em up and spits em out, can’t get enough of them.

I have a new logo in the wild. Eleganza.com hired a friend to re-do their website and he in turn recommended me to do their logo. It isn’t up yet but you can see it at that address soon, maybe a couple of weeks.

Mom and I went to a symposium at the UW tonight entitled Human Wrongs and Human Rights to mostly discuss the new book by one of my old philosophy professors. His name is William Talbot and after 10 years he still remembered the Philosophy 410 class I was in with him. Anyway, seems like a great book and very accessible philosophical discussion on rights. I am going to order it tonight, straight from Oxford University Press.
Okay, so now we are all caught up. I will get some pictures going here of the new house in the coming days.

Diffuse Dorothy

Inspired by James’ work with Arthur and his posies I resolved to take an ostensibly average photo and attempt to emphasize the expression and the attitude I liked in it for an ostensive expression of art and skill. (How often do you get to use those two words back to back? Did I even use them in the correct order? Anyway…)

What I came up with was this irradiated shot of Abigail in her Dorothy dress from last December.

Abigail as Dorothy 12_2005

If you are interested, I got this affect using Photoshop in the following way.

  • I copied the orig image onto it’s own layer
  • Desaturated the top layer
  • Masked the areas where I wanted the color to come through (Dress, lips, and eyes. I know, I am such a feminist)
  • Some blurring (to take away some grain and bad blurring of the orig photo)
  • Then, the coup-de-grace was Diffuse Glow with settings of 0 on grain, 10 on Glow, and 8 on Clear. That is an expert way of saying that I hacked and monkeyed around with the settings until I got the look that I wanted. Very bright highlights with little loss of detail.
  • Then I applied that to both layers and the mask itself with knocked down the colors rather nicely.

All that ‘desaturation-diffuse-glowing-photoshop-mumbojumbo’ and I still think it doesn’t hold a candle to the natural ability of James and his Picasa. He seems to have a feel for what looks good and I am getting lost in some pretty unintelligible numbers.

I would say we should have a photo Tech-night sometime where we spend a lot of time manipulating photos and goofing with the art that computers allow but that STILL won’t get the point across, just getting the subject to express itself through minimal application of the appropriate manipulation that covers the feeling of the shot. Hmph.

One more thing, if you want to take a look at an exceptional photography site check out www.photo.net. Excellent artists with ‘Photoshopped’ and natural photographs from a wide gamut of photographers. Be aware that there are occasional nude/semi-nude photographs on this site.

late nights and the perfectionist

I am sure I am not getting enough sleep.
When I don’t even question the spelling of a word such as sentimentalist and I don’t even catch it until reading comments on the next post days later.

The perfectionist part enters where I am spending more than 30 seconds caring considering all the other stuff I have to do.

Glad I am not a perfectionist-packer. Angela, if she ever opens any of the boxes I packed in the garage may not be so glad.

Packing and the sentamentalist

We are packing our things and this is usually not a good thing for a sentimentalist. EVERYTHING means something and it slows down the process immensely. As amazingly sentimental as I am however, I find this move easy mentally while difficult logistically. It is hard to know that I have been here almost nine years, it feels like three. Of course Abigail is still a newborn and my new car has been dented twice. While we are at it…
I have had three jobs.
I have been single, engaged, and married.
I have had six couches in this house.
I have hosted two New Years Parties.
I have extended the garage.
I have added a bathroom.
I have plumbed the whole house.
I have retrofit the electrical.
I have re-landscaped…twice.
I have learned to scuba dive.

I haven’t learned how to play pool.
I never got insulation in the walls.
I never cleaned under the stairs.
I didn’t fix the kitchen floor.

I planned on being here between three and five years.
We plan on being there over ten years, there will be a lot more have’s and haven’ts in Talbot. This house off Park has made Talbot possible and our first ‘have’ will be a second baby girl. Not too shabby.

Abused and owned

I got my first comment spam on my blog tonight.
In some way it makes me feel abused to think that this little slice of the web is so easily detectable that a russian online casino hawking viagra and slot machines (coincidence? you be the judge) found me and spammed me.

They are REALLY good at doing that but WordPress is REALLY good at helping me to own them!
1) their post was never published because my security settings didn’t allow it, anyone’s first post has to be approved by me, and comment posts with more than 2 links in them have to be pre-approved.
2) Their comment was marked as spam by me and all the hot button words that usu accompany a post like that have been added to my spammer list to auto-magically put them into comment review.
3) With a flick of the wrist they were relegated to the data graveyard. If I begin to accumulate comment spam I can even turn those “review” words into automagic “delete the comment” words. But then that would mean that regular schmoes like you and me couldn’t make funny jokes about viagra and slot machines in the comments because they would be deleted without a second pull.

WordPress is cool.

Drinking games

So some of you may know that when Abby was very small I held her close once and told her she was “the best toy ever”. I didn’t mean that in a condescending way, really.

  • The best kind of toy is one that you can play with for years and years and rarely get tired of the fun.
  • The best kind of toy is one that leaps up and surprises you with some new abilities you never knew it had and some that you tried painstakingly to program.
  • The best kind of toy is one that, well, is like a small child. They copy you when you are/aren’t looking and they are just the coolest toy.

Who doesn’t love to make their children do and say things that amuse them. Okay, so that’s simple, but you all know that there were caveman fathers making funny faces at babies and teaching their three year old cave-girls how to roar like a cave-bear. So I just enjoy the tradition, passed down through generations upon generations, of coaxing Abby into playing my games and mimicking my movies and…singing my songs. Only cavemen didn’t usually get to listen to it over and over again or pass it around the campfire, or to OTHER campfires, they had one chance. That is where blogs come in, the 21’st century campfire for our relatives in Pennsylvania and for that matter, our relatives in very close proximity.

I hope this thing doesn’t bring down our server. It is a fairly large download at 840KB but if you know ‘The Zimmerman Song’ it is worth every byte. It should play in either Quicktime or iTunes. It may play in other players but I am definitely not a sound caveman. If you have troubles, let me know. I may be able to figure it out but, eh um…no guarantees.

Without further ado…sheesh, I sure can have a lot of “ado” sometimes.
The Zimmerman Song