© 2002, 2008 Dawnne

the base resolution of that old camera was a mere 1600×1200. i interpolated the image a few years ago, i believe using Fred Miranda’s Stairstep Interpolation Pro (the version linked here is not the version i used a few years ago) or onOne Software’s Genuine Fractals. at any rate, what i call the “art version” of this file is 4800×3600.

during our final two years in Camarillo, this image was the face of my business card. except to perform that interpolation a couple of years ago, i haven’t looked at it much otherwise (although it is a little 5×7 we have on one of our walls). for some reason, i came back to it today and did a bit of tweaking on the color; the frame of course was relatively arbitrary. we miss Camarillo. especially when it snows here.

i just don’t miss the rat-race.

Thanksgiving, that all-important, and importantly misconstrued of American holidays, has just passed. One of my brothers-in-law managed not to make it, so I managed not to go out hunting with my other brother-in-law and father-in-law this year. That’s the first time in several years. The Thanksgiving hunts have been a source, over time, of some of my nature photography: the prairie scenes, the pheasants. But I thought it fitting on several levels not to have gone out and shot this year. The absence of Brian from the holiday, plus the fact that I have pulled out of full-time photography in favor of full-time employment as a software quality assurance manager, seemed rather fittingly portrayed by the transportation of a large array of camera equipment that never left the bags and the accompanying feeling of guilt for not having got any work done for the “real” job.

Because I took the holiday and slept. A lot. And read. A book. A big book. About nothing real. With a lot of words and no pictures.

But, I digress. We have our talents….

Copyright © 2004, 2008 Dawnne

So, being caught up in nostalgia-syndrome, and having experienced it enough in this incarnation to know that fighting it simply prolongs the distraction, I touched base with a few old photographs today. Quickly, though, because I still have some weddings to finish up and a lot of software testing to do for my employer, atop teaching and taking TaeKwonDo classes here in a couple of hours. It’ll be a late night.

Peace.

Oh, I guess I’m back, by the way. I’ve missed you.

And….happy birthday, Mom!

the transfer is complete, and dawnne.com now redirects to synthaetica.com. those of you who subscribe to the feed, the feed has been tweaked to point to synthaetica’s feed. the proper feed uri is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Synthaetica though. it’s not a terribly big deals since i’ve pointed the original perpetual dawnne feed through, but you may want to change it someday.

whoo-hoo! this is nice to have done. i think it’ll help keep me saner from now on.

So, what I’ve got to do is import Synthaetic Synapse into here, then forward its domain to this one. Luckily, that’s still do-able because I had thoughtfully backed up synthaetica.com before running the import. The only tricky part is going to be the theme (I’m currently using a custom-made one by milo317 that was designed to complement ShadowMoon. I mean, I paid for it, you know? And not all that long ago, either. On the other hand, what I was really paying for was ShadowMoon and she kinda threw in the theme for Synthaetica for free, so what’s the difference.)

Anyway, that’ll probably take another day or so, because I’m once again in crunch mode photographically and work-wise. I was SO hoping to have this done last night. And moving Synthaetica here isn’t all that easy, as it entails the images and all that. However, I’m going to pull out of that gidgy system I use for the galleries currently on Synthaetica and use another little something I paid for and haven’t had time to deploy yet. Gee, golly, all sorts of changes happening. Man, I’m going to have some late nights!

as some of you know, i’ve been really, really busy lately, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. pretty much every morning, i wake up, look through my blogs, sigh deeply, and shuffle on to work because that was literally about all the time i had to spend on my blogs. all my online presences are suffering.

to make matters worse, i was recently appointed as South Dakota’s State Director of Referee Instruction for the USSF (US Soccer Federation), and this Saturday starts up a fairly heavy wedding schedule just as our fall soccer season begins. if my calendars are correct, I have 9 weddings between now and the end of October, and goodness knows how many games to referee. not to mention the fact i’m in the process of building a website for soccer referees in our state to streamline communications. never a dull moment, aye?

aye.

and with all this stuff going on, somewhat ironically, i increasingly feel the need to blog/vent/write/do something creative in some formative way on a reasonably semi-regular basis. the only real problem is, do i do such things here, on synthaetica.com, otherwhirled.com….where? do i do something one week on one, the next week on another, and continue this incredibly lame process of leaving my blogs untouched for extended periods of time?

no, ironically, there is another option. an ironic option, because it is to reverse what i did over a year ago, when i split my personalities into three separate blogs and created this conundrum to begin with.

so, over the next couple of nights, what I’m going to be doing is combining dawnne.com back into synthaetica.com. the way wordpress works is that the blog itself will only respond to one domain or the other, but the way DNS registries work is that i can force one domain to automatically push to the other, which is effectively the same as having one blog with multiple domain names (even though that’s not technically true). i will most likely simply import “perpetual dawnne” here into “synthaetic synapse” and create a category system to distinguish the wholly personal from the digitographic. so, be warned. at some point this week, those few of you who have remained kind and patient enough to stay subscribed to my rss feeds, it will eventually break and you’ll have to subscribe yourself to “synthaetic synapse”.

i don’t know if i will then combine “synthaetic synapse” with “the otherwhirled”. it’s still a thought: i just don’t know if it would really have that much value for me. doing so would obviously decrease my maintenance time ~ even with Wordpress’s auto-update feature for plugins, doing it across multiple blogs is time-consuming, but combining the blogs at that level of thing, especially since synthaetic synapse currently has a custom template whose target focus is not necessarily the blog, may not really be a good idea. i dunno. we’ll see.

in the meantime, at least, i’m going to reduce at least a little bit of work and get these two combined. i mean, you guys don’t even know that we had Daughter the First here for a week or anything else that’s been going on cool in our lives. i am bad. very, very bad. i do think squishing these two blogs back together will be a good idea.

i may still not have any more time to post than i currently do, but at least i won’t be sitting here not managing to update as many blogs.

(cross-posted to perpetual dawnne)

as some of you know, i’ve been really, really busy lately, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. pretty much every morning, i wake up, look through my blogs, sigh deeply, and shuffle on to work because that was literally about all the time i had to spend on my blogs. all my online presences are suffering.

to make matters worse, i was recently appointed as South Dakota’s State Director of Referee Instruction for the USSF (US Soccer Federation), and this Saturday starts up a fairly heavy wedding schedule just as our fall soccer season begins. if my calendars are correct, I have 9 weddings between now and the end of October, and goodness knows how many games to referee. not to mention the fact i’m in the process of building a website for soccer referees in our state to streamline communications. never a dull moment, aye?

aye.

and with all this stuff going on, somewhat ironically, i increasingly feel the need to blog/vent/write/do something creative in some formative way on a reasonably semi-regular basis. the only real problem is, do i do such things here, on synthaetica.com, otherwhirled.com….where? do i do something one week on one, the next week on another, and continue this incredibly lame process of leaving my blogs untouched for extended periods of time?

no, ironically, there is another option. an ironic option, because it is to reverse what i did over a year ago, when i split my personalities into three separate blogs and created this conundrum to begin with.

so, over the next couple of nights, what I’m going to be doing is combining dawnne.com back into synthaetica.com. the way wordpress works is that the blog itself will only respond to one domain or the other, but the way DNS registries work is that i can force one domain to automatically push to the other, which is effectively the same as having one blog with multiple domain names (even though that’s not technically true). i will most likely simply import “perpetual dawnne” here into “synthaetic synapse” and create a category system to distinguish the wholly personal from the digitographic. so, be warned. at some point this week, those few of you who have remained kind and patient enough to stay subscribed to my rss feeds, it will eventually break and you’ll have to subscribe yourself to “synthaetic synapse”.

i don’t know if i will then combine “synthaetic synapse” with “the otherwhirled”. it’s still a thought: i just don’t know if it would really have that much value for me. doing so would obviously decrease my maintenance time ~ even with Wordpress’s auto-update feature for plugins, doing it across multiple blogs is time-consuming, but combining the blogs at that level of thing, especially since synthaetic synapse currently has a custom template whose target focus is not necessarily the blog, may not really be a good idea. i dunno. we’ll see.

in the meantime, at least, i’m going to reduce at least a little bit of work and get these two combined. i mean, you guys don’t even know that we had Daughter the First here for a week or anything else that’s been going on cool in our lives. i am bad. very, very bad. i do think squishing these two blogs back together will be a good idea.

i may still not have any more time to post than i currently do, but at least i won’t be sitting here not managing to update as many blogs.

(cross-posted to synthaetic synapse)

emphasis on “slowly”….

gah. my weird life. gimme some time.

~d~

what happened was that we….well, i have to back-track considerably, don’t i. bah.

okay, so, like we had an offer on this house in-town, contingent upon the sale of our current house. well, after several weeks, somebody else came along and put an offer on that house, and their offer apparently wasn’t contingent. not nice. so, the only way we could beat that was to make our offer non-contingent (we were pretty confident that the other offer wasn’t for more money than we had offered). the spouse unit and her wonderful credit found a way to remove contingency, and not only that, but provided that we would sell our current house by the end of May, we wouldn’t even have to pay two mortgages at the same time. and even better, with a bridge loan against our current house, we won’t actually even pay the down-payment on the new house until June.

yeah, her credit’s scarily awesome.

so, long story short (for this part of it, anyway), we removed the contingency, making ours the best offer, and we got the house. we’ve already hauled over what could be fit in the mini-van in several car-loads, and already have two of the bedrooms primed for color changes. with the snow having finally melted, we discovered that our house has a pond, which is kind of cool, and the kids have already made friends with some of the neighbor kids. we start the big move next weekend, but the focus this week is on getting some of the rooms repainted (really just the kids’ rooms and my office) before we move stuff in.

AND THEN, we finally got an offer on the current house early last week. a couple from Duluth came out with a family member (for the third time, no less!) and made an offer the following day. we were pretty skeptical at first, as their offer was for $20K below what we were asking. in fact, to a large degree, while we were happy to get an offer, the offer itself really pissed us off. well, as it happened, this other realtor had a client who wanted to see it again, so when she called, i let her know we had an offer on the house, but that we’d love to hear from her client. sure enough, the evening after she came by, we had a second offer. this one was a stronger offer, and cash.

now, when we got that first offer, we pissed off our realtor by not accepting it right away. and we hadn’t accepted it when the second offer came through. as soon as that second offer came through, though, our realtor was on the phone with the realtor with the first offer, and all of-the-sudden, they re-offer for the whole amount we were asking. yup. the whole amount. (and we found out later they were willing to go as far as $1,000 above our original asking price! i guess their first offer was purely speculative. i’m glad they got the house, since they obviously wanted it so much, just as we did when we first moved here. i like keeping the good karma flowing.)

so, another long story short, we close on this house on May 2. i’m still not thrilled with moving. i like the new place well enough, but i’m not happy at all about moving out of here. i guess the challenge for the rest of my career will be to be earning enough and saving enough so that we can move back out to a place like this when we retire. but in the meantime, all those questions are finally answered and our future is a bit more secure. thanks to the way things went with the sale of this house, we’ll make a tidy sum off the sale of this house, beef the kids’ college funds back up, have everything else paid off, and money to spare. i guess it’s a win-win all the way around. i just still don’t want to do this moving-painting-moving crap, but i guess i need to get over it!

because it’s 30 fecking degrees
where i am
and the damn wind
is blowing so hard
there’s snow stuck to the windows
on all four sides of the house
and you’d seriously be most welcome
to shovel the snow out of our driveway
for the thirtieth time this year

I don’t normally get all pissy about stupid photos, but three separate versions of this one are “most emailed”. And if I get another one of those damned emails, my friends, someone’s going to require a colonoscopy to to have it removed from their system.

photo credit: AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye