I'd rather not, thanks

Working from home on the weekend sucks. 'Nuff said.

And

The mother-in-law came to visit at the end of last week. It was an excuse to take a stroll around the Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday. I got a few photos, nothing spectacular. But a little time and fun spent in Lightroom can bring to life an otherwise blah photo. (Like the one above of the ampersand from "Love & Loss".)

Life rolls on otherwise. I got the OK to go to the NAB Show in Las Vegas next month. I'll be working the booth, of course, which means four long sole-punishing days of standing and answering questions. But free trip to Vegas, man. The wife plans to fly down at the end of the week and we'll stay a couple of extra days, maybe see Penn & Teller. It'll be good. I need a galdurn break from the routine.

More Photos, also Soup

The Camera Club took yet another walk on Friday, this time to Gasworks Park on Lake Union. Photos from my camera (via Lightroom) on Flickr.

The wife and I have been working on replicating our holiest of holy culinary grails, the lentil soup from The Rheinlander. Working straight from their recipe book may seem like cheating, but it's not very well written and there's a modicum of technique required. That being said, I think we've got it pretty good. Tonight we did our second batch in a new, heavy bottomed stockpot that I bought for the purpose. It turned out well, a little better than the last, but we're still far from replicating the utter perfection that comes from Horst's kitchen.

To be honest, I spent too much on the damn stockpot. It's way too big (we could do a triple batch in it), and it's not even the model I wanted. It was the best match for what I thought I wanted. Almost immediate buyer's remorse when I took it out of the box. Not that it's a bad pot, it just could be better.

The wife correctly pointed out that once the idea of buying a new pot gripped me, it became a mania. Which is all too common an occurrence for me right now. The number of impassioned buying decisions I've made in the past six months are starting to outnumber my available fingers. I'm wondering why I've been so impatient lately- usually I'm fairly reasonable about these sort of things. Am I stressed out? (Probably.) Am I just becoming less patient with age? (Likely.) Whatever the cause, I need to remind myself to stop and breathe anytime I want to buy a new gadget. Life isn't getting better just because I have more stuff. (But the Logitech Harmony One is still pretty damn cool.)

Photographic update

It's been predictably busy but slow lately. That is to say, I'm busy enough lately that the rest of my life seems to slow and uninteresting to write about.

One bit of news- my brother and his wife welcomed their second child last week. She's nameless right now. She was delivered 3 weeks premature, so there's been a long hospital stay; my brother should be taking mom and baby home right about now.

Digressing a bit- I've lost track of how many of my friends and family are pregnant right now. It's a bit ridiculous. It's also put a bit of pressure on me about the whole not-wanting-kids thing; the wife and I had a long discussion about it over dinner last night. I feel a bit weirded out about it, frankly, so I haven't been jumping for joy at the news about my new niece. (My mother, on the other hand, is ecstatic.)

My camera has been getting a lot of use, lately. The camera club at work has been doing more events, and Katie's container flowers and my lemon tree are in bloom now. I've been bad about posting photos (I hope to get some of the recent flower pics up), but I did update the links on the right. New Camera Club photos can be found at Flickr. I also created a new gallery on Picasa for photos from my cell phone. I've posted some of these before, but you might want to poke around there a little, as the phone camera is my go-to device for capturing life's little oddities.