…is what i look like when i’m incredibly thrilled about taking a photo of myself after i’ve not shaved for a day and had other things to do.

so in the apparent interest of making myself look as old as i can….{sigh}

only for you, Sherri. only for you….

we’ve been without hot water since Monday morning. we got a company to come over and look at it, but they couldn’t come until Tuesday afternoon, and the guy didn’t come with parts despite having been told that manufacturer and model of the water heater. he did come with some sort of cock-and-bull story about how we’re supposed to have some overflow reservoir in there for the way we’re set up, in order to meet “state code”, and he wasn’t “supposed to leave a house that didn’t have that done.” since he didn’t have the parts or equipment for that, either (in his little 1-ton pickup truck), i generously let him leave without kicking his smug ass.

i don’t know why the Spouse Unit called that particular company, anyway. today, we’ll call the guys who came out and worked on our furnace a couple of years ago. they were cool, and one of their managers is the brother of our next-door neighbor.

but yeah, anyway, it’s sub-20 outside and we have no hot water. brrrrrrrrrrrr…… and i’m going to leave out some serious gripes with this company without elaborating on them in the spirit at least attempting to be positive today.

{there, i got the bitching and moaning done first, because there are some great things to celebrate today}

Celebration #1:

First and foremost, a heartly congratulations goes out to Tramplingrose, on the birth of her baby boy on January 3, 2008. I hope Rachel and Alexander will continue to do well, and will accept my apologies for not getting around to other blogs much of late. In fact, I’ve been really bad about that for the past several weeks, so I’m really sorry Rachel. I hope you’re feeling better. And Jay, go have a beer. It’ll help. Not much, to be honest, but it’ll help. I do know how it feels from your perspective, my friend. Best of luck to all three of you!

Celebration #2:

Yesterday, the Spouse Unit received her first formal job offer for a position that would employ her to perform work here in Sioux Falls, comes reasonably close (very reasonably, I might add) to paying her what she’s worth, and would allow her to continue on in the most recent augmentation of her career track, the usability testing and analysis. Even better, the offer is from a former manager of hers out in California who told me, when that company laid her off, that his next big problem at the time would be to find three people for very little money to even replicate her work for him. In other words, he’s been missing the Spouse Unit as an employee ever since that happened, and literally jumped on the chance to get her to work for his new company. They talked on Friday and the offer letter came yesterday. The only down-side, in fact, is that she’d be having to learn how to work from home, which would almost make us co-workers, at least in terms of proximity. That might really be interesting, though!

Celebration #3:

Well, this isn’t much of a celebration per se. We did have our most successful bridal show ever this past Sunday, however, and it really turned out to be a turning point for me, attitude-wise. I’m looking forward to the wedding season now, instead of dreading the work I’ll probably have to be doing alone again this year. But the clients we booked at the show seem to be really great couples, and the ones we’re meeting with from the show over the next couple of weeks are all in the category of ‘very strong’ leads. It helps that I did a better job this time around in communicating what my services actually are and being candid with how they compare to others. But actually, all my clients thus far this year seem like really great people, and we have gotten along quite well in our meetings. This is going to be a fun year!

We’ve got some minor repairs and cleaning up to do yet before we put this house on the market, but moving from here is something that would be good in many ways, as sad as it will make us to leave here. One of the other oddities in that upcoming move for us is that we’ve never move made a ’simple’ in-town move before. It’s always been from city to city. And with at least one wedding reception at the golf course that’s about a mile away from here, driving past here will be kind of sad when it happens, and of course I’ll miss just looking out the back windows and seeing the hawks. Nothing I can’t live with, of course, but still….{sigh} At least we can now move forward with finishing up this little bit of work (plus the damned water heater, now, of course) knowing that at least one serious (in my definition of that term) offer exists for the Spouse Unit’s (and thus our) future. I do believe we’ll be okay, and maybe even in the short term as well as the long term!

That’s really it as far as catching up with where I’m at. Please go browse my blogrolls here and over at the otherwhirled.

i’ll let the following teaser speak for itself.

visit The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard to see the bigger picture. it’s well worth your time!

as seen on SorCrowTV and TenGrainy Television and OtherVision. watch it. share it.

i was able to captured #1 Daughter’s school Christmas Concert, but where we sat for her Nutcracker performance didn’t really allow for me dragging in one of my decent lenses, and the Moscow Ballet is rather stringent on the “no photography” issue, so i declined to go there. #1 Son, apparently, would not have been very happy with me if i had shot his choir concert, either, but his grandfather did. if those photos are provided to us digitally, i’ll get them up here so we can embarrass #1 Son, who really has no reason to be embarrassed at all.

obviously, i need to get a little point-and-click with a decent zoom lens, where i can shut off the back screen and any other lights so i can illegally photograph her dance performances. that, or a nicely compact extreme telephoto lens i can put on something like the D70. bah.

at any rate, these are from #1 Daughter’s Christmas Concert on December 4, 2007. she’s quite the ham, isn’t she? once i figured out where they were, i tried to capture some of the neighbor kids as well, but that really wasn’t my focus, of course.

on to the photos…

bah.

a truly anomalous event occurred here over the past couple of days. the snow was not unique, but the snow-without-wind most certainly was. usually, the wind is blowing strong enough when we get snow that i rarely have to shovel off the back porch and only parts of the driveway. but this time, we had a nice, gentle blanket of snow on everything. one might even say it was quite picturesque.

but did i manage to haul my stupid ass outside with a camera and take pictures of it before the wind started picking up early this morning?

hell, no.

did i even manage to have a camera in the car this morning, when the clear sky and the early-morning frozen fog would have been so picturesque, even with the slight wind clearing the snow off the evergreens, fences, other other surfaces.

no, i’m apparently WAY too intelligent for that. gah.

so, in potential partial recompense for my stupidity, here are a couple of things:

Thing 1: guess who has the cover of this month’s issue of Toy Trucker Magazine? The cover story is on the collection of Paul Westhoff, who is a friend and the owner of Hard Tops of Sioux Falls. I do their business cards, too. Look ‘em up and call ‘em and ask ‘em why they don’t have a website of their own! (i kid, i kid…)

Thing 2: ~from our recent trip up to Big Stone Lake for Thanksgiving. i have several plans for this photo, so this is kind of a sneak preview of an original that will probably never be released itself. in the background, you can see the point of land which is the subject of Big Stone Autumn. several of the trees back there were severely damaged by an ice storm last winter, so my plan to do a seasonal round of that point from the same vantage point were made moot. which was kind of okay, because the marks i made for the tripod didn’t last….and my father-in-law’s dock is a seasonal thing anyway. it’s not like it goes into the lake at literally/exactly the same place each year. so, i’ll be picking another place, or places, along the shore for that endeavor.

which reminds me. i need a sugar-daddy to buy me a GPS that’ll work with the cameras. i’m WAY too cheap to buy one myself, you know….

i took this photo late saturday evening on November 24th of this year, after three days of hunting with my brothers-in-law. the orange is so intense because of a) a recently-harvested corn field was being burned (it’s a method of putting nutrients straight back into the soil), and b) a cross-process filter which also deepened the blue and removed the haze from the smoke. my angle on this wasn’t exactly perfect, but i don’t think i would have brought up a lot more of the trees in the foreground if i had dropped to one knee. as well, the sun disappears rather quickly this time of the year, and i didn’t have time to go running across the field to get more of the trees in the foreground. i’m hoping that a future version can be derived that will highlight the trees and make a nice progressive triptych with other versions. i released it anyway, because….well, i like it.

you’re welcome to read the release announcement. terribly exciting stuff, i know. it was also added to my portfolios.com portfolio.