September 3, 2005
Cherry Ridge Airport, Pennsylvania

David working on the Piper Tri-Pacer’s brakes. If he were sitting here in ground school class with me while I learn about engine components, he’d nudge me and say, “Hey Gail, were you paying attention when I was tinkering?!?”

Plaza de San Francisco de Asis
Havana, Cuba
December 28, 2006

I’m posting another photo from Cuba as a little diversion from reading about airplane engines for my ground school class tomorrow night. This is the busiest time of the week for me: reading for class on Wednesday, work, race home, straight to class, three-hour class, arrive home late (11:30ish), work, therapy group, and then TGI FRIDAY.

Finding time to eat is a bit of a challenge, so sometimes I eat in the car. Thursday nights don’t require prep but they’re a heavy two hours. By the time Friday rolls around I’m so grateful for the weekend! It reminds me of when I was a full-time student in addition to my full-time job (2001-2004) — eating habits slid downhill, sleep became precious. I’m not afraid of hard work — in fact, I usually relish it — but it does tend to take a toll on such things as healthy eating habits and enjoyable pastimes. It takes more effort to strike a balance.

One reason why I enjoy photography so much is because it naturally slows me down. Take for instance this photo, which I took one windy evening. The clouds were moving very quickly, obscuring the moon in an eerie way. I wanted as much cloud as possible, but of course no-one has any control over that. It’s a waiting game, a timing game, but more often than not it’s luck and a practised shutter-button finger. In the “old days” of film it meant bracketing and crossing fingers and toes that at least one of them turned out, but it was an unknown quantity until the roll came back from the lab. By then, of course, it was far too late to reshoot. The digital age has reduced the need for educated guesswork with more sophisticated chip sensors and image editing software, but the goal is always to capture the picture in-camera as you see it with your own eyes.

Photography is an exercise in patience and persistence. I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for birds to make up their minds whether to take off or not, how many photos of the kidlets I’ve taken before I settled on one expression, how many clouds I waited to pass across the sky to achieve the highest brightness and longest shadows, the number of intersection lights to turn green so I could shoot car headlights in motion blur, the aerial shots I wasted trying to focus through a spotty airplane window, and oh boy, the many shots I missed entirely because I couldn’t change the batteries fast enough or I filled up the memory card to capacity with lots of dud pictures!

When I think of how many shots I discard, keep, try to fix, and eventually upload the ratio is something like 10:1 or worse. In film terms, that would make photography a prohibitively expensive hobby. I’m glad I belong to a generation when I can remember film as the norm and appreciate digital for what it’s been able to afford me: practise. I can continue to learn without breaking the bank. It couldn’t come at a better time, really, because flight instruction has become more costly than ever before!

Speaking of which, I should get back to reading about engines…

I was supposed to go ice skating at Nathan Phillips Square yesterday, but it didn’t quite work out as planned. When I drove home on Friday night I noticed one of my headlights was out, but I decided to postpone changing it until the morning. When morning came ’round, I popped the hood and tried to pry out the old bulb but I couldn’t get the spring out of the way to pull it out. I’d never actually changed the bulb on the Ford before, but I always did that sort of thing on my old Volvo and I figured it couldn’t be any more complicated on this car. After all, it’s nearly 20 years newer and a domestic make.

Man, did I struggle with that silly spring. It’s hard to see anything because it’s inside a well, but I could not for the life of me disentangle the spring from the electric wiring. It was stuck!

Meanwhile, everyone was already skating at the square, but it’s the weekend and if I put this off for too long I’ll never be able to find a shop that’s open. With a big sigh I drove off to the mechanic shop that I went to for my last insurance inspection. They were too busy and I felt foolish even asking for help with something as easy as changing a silly bulb. I’m a DIY person at heart; I loathe the “helpless female” image, but I just wanted to get this done and out of the way. My drive to ground school is over an hour long each way and through the boondocks — the last thing I need is my available light source halved.

Finally, I was able to find a place that wasn’t too busy and one of the mechanics managed to get the spring apart from the wiring and change the bulb, but not without some teasing. I think he didn’t want to believe this was a one-off request, but he didn’t charge me so I kept my retorts to myself.

By the time I got to the skating rink it was nearly 1 o’clock, so I didn’t hold out much hope that the crew of people I was supposed to meet were still there. No matter, I got out my cameras and shot to my heart’s content in the brilliant sunshine of Saturday afternoon. The funny thing is, last night I found out they were there until after 2 o’clock, but I didn’t see them! The rink’s not that big, but I guess it was a combination of people bundled up incognito in winter clothing and my not paying attention.

I watched this little guy on the right for a long time; I was silently cheering him on while I was taking his picture. He fell down countless times and just kept right on getting back up again. I could tell sometimes he felt defeated, sprawled on the ice surface while everyone skated around him, but eventually he’d pick himself up and keep going. His persistence was inspiring.

Bravo!

It was (relatively) warm and I could’ve stayed at the rink longer, but I figured I’d pop into Eaton Centre or Best Buy and look at some hard drives while I was nearby. My PowerBook’s hard drive has been running at near capacity despite regular archiving onto CD and DVD, and my 120GB external drive is completely full.

Herein lies the rub: Best Buy did not have a single external drive with FireWire. Not one. How could this be?!?! I’ve had my PowerBook for 2.5 years — it’s OLD by computer industry standards and it has both FireWire 400 and 800. Well, I wasn’t going to settle for a USB drive, especially since I only have two USB ports and most of my peripheral devices are USB (printers, card reader, etc.). I have a lot of photos and video, which are large files and optimally I would rather archive to a FireWire 800 drive for those. I was also going to move my entire 16+ GB electronic music collection off to an external drive and run iTunes from there. USB 2.0’s transfer rate is just too slow for my type of usage.

With FireWire my choices narrow considerably, basically leaving me to choose between LaCie products. There’s a $60 spread between their USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and 800 (D2). I was very tempted to get the 800/D2 which is $300, but I compromised and bought the FireWire 400 version that will tide me over for the time being. I know this isn’t the end of my hard drive purchases, anyway. When I start getting into RAW photo files, it’ll ramp up my need for storage and by then the 800 version will be cheaper. There aren’t any LaCie rebates floating around right now, so I’m going to keep an eye out for a new product release because that usually means rebates for older models are coming.

I’m sure those last two paragraphs put most of you to sleep. And probably the whole first section on car maintenance. What can I say? I’m not very girlie. When I hear talk about nail polish or skin products, *I* fall asleep.

And speaking of winter, it’s SNOWING again. It looks beautiful but man, I do not want to drive in it!

This squirrel wants anonymity. Is there a Squirrel Witness Protection Program?

A few pictures taken at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. I lived across from here for three months on the other side of Yonge Street and never went in, so I took advantage of a sunny afternoon and had a look.

The cemetery is popular for joggers (and squirrels!), but I didn’t see any other cameras about and only a couple of other cars. I wanted to finish my film roll so I could take it for developing, so I drove down and around the winding narrow roads that criss-cross the cemetery while listening to a very funny CBC radio program and stopped the car whenever something caught my eye.

(There was something incongruous about being surrounded by tombstones and an occasional outburst of spontaneous laughter — suppressed when a jogger ran by — but it wasn’t out of disrespect. There was a time when I couldn’t laugh at all, about anything, so I view this as progress.)

I’m curious about who this Captain Fluke was, but a cemetery is not a museum — there aren’t any descriptive plaques or text elaborating on the history of this individual. As far as I could see, there aren’t even any dates for when he had lived. I suppose that is part of the charm of the cemetery: its mystery.

Technorati tags: cemetery

As I mentioned in the previous post’s comments, I wasn’t actually the catsitter on Friday night, I just tagged along for the amusement. But as far as the cats were concerned, the more attention the merrier.

Well, Jack thought that, anyway:

Taking photos of black cats is a real challenge; usually the pictures show a blob of black with eyes. Whenever I called Jack, I thought of Jack Black (the actor) or blackjack, the game. Jack’s the friendly one.

Toffee, on the other hand, regards humans as a barely tolerable blight on the landscape, necessary only for the purposes of indoor food sources and toilet service. He was also not terribly amused by my red autofocus beam in his face constantly. If he could talk, Toffee would probably say, “If that laser pointer comes my way one more time I’m gonna stick it where the sun don’t shine!”

Feel the love.

Technorati tags: cats, black and white photography

The name’s Toffee. I’m a tough guy. Don’t mess wit’ me.

Yeah, tough guy, how come you need a catsitter, then?

Technorati tags: cat, sepia

February 5, 2005
Philadelphia, PA

I just felt like posting a picture of us together, when we were happy and healthy and could take on anything, together. I want to remember that time, even though it’s gone now.

Tonight was Week #5 of the therapy group, and people passed around photos and talked about their loved ones. Thursday nights can be meaningful and emotionally demanding in equal measure, but how strange it is to describe how rewarding catharsis can be… I suppose it may be compared to running a mile for the first time: out of breath, muscles in agony, and the good feelings kick in after finishing. Until then it feels like a form of punishment, but ultimately we know there is something good to come of it, we just have to be patient.

At the core of it all, however, is that we miss our loved ones. Every. Single. Day. There was never enough time to say everything we wanted to say, do everything we wanted to do. We have to learn to live without them, and it’s hard. And that’s why we’re there.

Technorati tags: therapy, bereavement

… post my itinerary to Vancouver!

(I’m on my first 15-minute break during the three hours of instruction.)

I bought the ticket in the wee hours of the morning because there’s an Air Canada seat sale on, and I thought it might drive up the ticket demand and prices for Easter. It’s a busy time, and with two days off (Friday and Monday), I want to maximise my time out west.

Also, the kids will be off from school!

Cuban kids don’t have Playstations or a basement full of sporting equipment, they all play outside. It was wonderful to see kids engaging in everything from baseball to football (soccer) to basketball to competing with each other to who can do better flips in the air.

This was my first full day in Havana, and I saw these two boys trying to outdo each other in the gymnastic department. I took out my camera and motioned that I would film them and show them their videos so they could see what they looked like. I don’t think they’d ever seen themselves on video before — they were so proud!

Those Kids in Havana Are Sporty on Vimeo

Technorati tags: Havana, Cuba, kids, gymnastics, videoclip, Vimeo

This is a momentous occasion. I haven’t baked anything for a long while, since before David passed away. It was an activity we enjoyed together. We used to bake cookies in batches with the intention of freezing them, then we’d end up gorging on them while watching movies. It was ritualistic overeating when it came to cookies. Occasionally we’d not make ourselves sick by eating them all, and David would take the rest to work. Cookies were lucky to last more than 24 hours in the House of Fielding.

Tonight I had a sudden craving for them, and I convinced myself munching on cookies would make it easier to absorb information from my flight books…

Cookie?

Technorati tags: baking, cookies