The Latest
I'm sure many of you have been wondering if I am, in fact, still breathing. Rest assured I am, despite ignoring an impressively large queue of unanswered instant messages, emails, voicemail, and Facebook requests. If you haven't heard from me recently, take solace knowing that you're not alone.
The campaign has officially consumed my life. Last night I arrived home relatively early at about 7:30 PM. Within 30 seconds of entering the door, work called with a question. This morning, within 30 seconds of getting out of bed I received another call. I'm beginning to wonder if they have cameras hidden in my living room.
At least I knew what I was getting into. Julie didn't quite realize the ramifications of my new job and it's been a difficult task attempting to balance my job, marriage, and household chores. The best approach I've found is to simply redefine what “balanced” means—working 12-13 hours a day is fine, but 14 is just too much!
Despite the workload, I occasionally get a chance to read, daydream, and plan vacations I'm unsure if I'll ever be able to take. This afternoon we've been researching short trips to the Caribbean. We could use some sun and I have new dive equipment I'm eager to break-in. The Bahamas look pretty tempting right now.
My belated post has come to an end. In this break from work, I have dishes to wash and a living room to vacuum. It's all worth it though, right?
To our dear friends and family,
Please accept this electronic message of season's greetings and yuletide cheer. Work and travel plans this year did not allow us time for our semi-traditional photo and letter that we have sent out since 2005—give or take a year.
Having reached a certain age, we have received a growing number of Christmas cards featuring our friends and relatives with their increasing numbers of children. This year saw cards featuring only the children, with the parents only noted as the senders. Not having children, and not wanting to be left out of this trend, I've included a few photos of our friends' children I've been fortunate enough to photograph in the past few weeks. You'll find them below.
Two-thousand seven presented Julie and I with more challenges than we had anticipated for our first year of marriage. New careers, and promotions, along with sicknesses and deaths in Julie's family supplied more drama than we needed. But we have weathered the year unbroken and are looking forward to an exciting 2008.
In January I began a new job developing the Hillary Clinton web site. Campaign work is extremely rewarding, but the long hours, frantic pace and significance of the job occasionally lead to daydreams of packing my camera and GPS in a backpack and hiking the Appalachian Trail for six months. Very soon though, the efforts of our first year-long endeavor will be realized with the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd and New Hampshire's primary five days later. With any luck, we'll then begin the general-election campaign. Please vote for Hillary and keep me employed.
I must now take this opportunity to thank Julie for her patience and understanding this past year. She used to be accustomed to arriving home from work each evening with dinner waiting on the table. Now we're lucky if we eat two dinners a week with each other. It's been difficult to juggle work and marriage (and Louie, of course), but I'm managing better than many people. Thank goodness we don't have children yet.
Julie had a much rougher year than I, with cancer affecting both her uncle and mother. Early in the year Julie's uncle died from a brain tumor. He had been in remission for over a decade, but the tumor came back and there was nothing the doctors could do. Soon after, Julie's mother, Cathy, was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer. Thankfully, after an extensive surgery and months of chemotherapy, she is now cancer-free.
While Cathy was undergoing treatment, Julie spent a good deal of time in California helping out her mother around the house and with daily chores. Despite the frequent trips, Julie became a fully licensed social worker and received two raises and a promotion this year at the MS Society. She no longer has to deal with equipment logistics and mundane transportation requests and is now focused on respite for caregivers and guiding the many local MS support groups.
With all of the drama in our lives we didn't have as much leisure time as we would have liked, but we spent much of our spring and summer weekends biking around DC and took a few short trips when we could. We attended the weddings of Julie's brother Danny and of our friends Mirellise and Tom. The latter was my first paid wedding as a photographer, which was quite a learning experience. Aside from wedding-related travel I took a wonderful four-day scuba diving trip to the Cayman Islands in July. It's been six months since that trip and I'm eager to get back underwater again.
That about wraps it up for 2007. Below are the promised photos of cute children.
Baby Naia (two days old)
Brothers Joey and Anthony
Brent (just hanging around)
I decided it was high time for a minor site facelift and functionality update. Most of the site has remained just as it was, but I've changed the top banner, modified a few font and spacing styles, updated some content and added a bit of new functionality.
I think the new banner anchors the site much better than the old one. I decided to appropriate a standard man sign since I lack a world-recognized trademarked logo of my own. Maybe someday. As for the tagline, while I clearly have the "man" and "web site" part of my life figured out, I'm still working on the "plan" portion. But it will be a great plan, I promise.
In the upper right, I am now publishing my life status. Currently it pulls from my Facebook profile, but I may switch to another service if I find the "Brian is" construct too limiting. (Developer's Rant: If you're a developer and can't seem to programmatically load your feed, it's because Facebook does browser sniffing on all http calls, including feeds. Stupid? Yes. Just adjust your User-Agent string to fake IE or Firefox and you'll be all set.)
I'll have a general life-update to post soon. It's been a busy couple of months and I'm writing up the highlights.
Last weekend, Julie and I attended the wonderful wedding of our friends, Mirellise and Tom. It was a family affair for us: Julie was the Matron of Honor; my stepfather officiated the ceremony; I was the official photographer. Everyone had a great time and I found out just how difficult and fast-paced a wedding is from a photographer's point of view. Despite the frantic schedule, I'm reasonably happy with the results. A few select photos are below and you can view the full set of highlights on my Flickr site.
Here's to Mirellise and Tom!
From July 13 - 16, 2007 I traveled to the Cayman Islands for a weekend scuba expedition. It's a surprisingly short trip from DC and after six months of work with no vacation, I really needed a getaway. Luckily, my local dive school plans these trips almost monthly. I had promised myself I'd go on one sometime this year and get my advanced certification. After several months of conflicting schedules I finally decided July was it and reserved my spot.
I had an incredibly fun, if exhausting time. I improved my diving skills, met some great people and took advantage of the location to do some photography. What else could I have asked for? What follows is a sort of mini-review of the trip, with several photos for visual context. Enjoy!
Grand Cayman Island
Just south of Cuba, the island of Grand Cayman was surprisingly unimpressive. Although under significant development, houses, business, and hotels dotted the landscape seemingly without any master plan. Devastated in 2004 by hurricane Ivan, many smaller dwellings had not yet been rebuilt and debris still littered some of the shoreline. There was a conspicuous absence of large, full trees and much of the greenery looked only a few years old. The beach was nice though, with clear, light blue water lined by golden sand, hotels, and condos. If I were just looking for a beach to sit on though, I would probably go some place less expensive. Everything in Grand Cayman is expensive, especially compared to my last diving experience in Belize.
Diving
This was a dive trip. While I was only in the water three to four hours a day, it seemed as though the entire trip was spent diving. I suppose this is due to the nature of the sport and its required preparation and travel time. If I wasn't actually diving, I was getting into or out of gear, driving to or from the beach, or boating to or from the dive sites. Mixed in with these activities was eating, photo taking and editing (of course), and a little sleep.
Diving is truly Cayman's raison d'êtra. It is easy to forget the strip malls and copycat resorts on the surface when exploring the underwater world just off shore. The marine life was abundant and the reefs were fascinating to explore. I managed nine dives on my trip on the West and North ends of the island. Highlights include a wreck dive (in the day and at night), a deep dive to 35 meters, and a very shallow dive at Stingray Alley. I also nearly swam headfirst into a rather large nurse shark. We were both navigating around a large bit of coral in opposite directions and didn't see one another until we were about a half a meter apart. Thankfully, he (or she) decided it would be best not to run into me and quickly swam away.
The trip was organized by my dive school, SPE Dive School. They booked the rooms, provided transportation, organized the dives and planned the meals. All of the dives were chartered with Divers Down. They were very nice, but we had a few too many people on our boat. The gear was in better shape than other rental gear that I've seen and I got lucky and received a nearly new BCD. Unfortunately, the regulators were unbalanced, making it harder to breathe at depth and towards the end of the dives, but they did the job. Hopefully by my next dive trip I will own my own gear. (Hint for anyone doing some early Christmas shopping.)
Flying, Food, Folks, Fun, and...Hotels
Having the entire trip planned by someone else was a luxury. All I had to do was get myself to the hotel with my gear and be ready to go. Spirit Airlines had a great sale on tickets and got me there in one piece. (The sale didn't look as good when I had to pay $10 just to check a bag and another $1 for a can of Coke.) Due to a few thunderstorms in the area, our flight was slightly delayed and as a result, I was on a boat heading out to the first dive site within an hour of landing.
Everyone stayed at the Sunshine Suites hotel. It was certainly not extravagant, but clean, with a nice pool and a fantastic poolside grill that provided free continental breakfasts. The rooms had small kitchenettes with a microwave that let me reheat my take-home food. They even had free wireless internet access. I would certainly recommend the hotel if you're looking for someplace simple and relatively inexpensive.
Dining occurred mostly at the grill at the hotel. Luckily, the food at the grill was some of the best (and least expensive) I had. Somehow, they made nearly perfect french fries, which I ordered twice. We also went out to two nice dinners, which I didn't think were worth the cost. Disliking seafood, I twice ordered overpriced steak instead. If it weren't for the social aspect of the expensive dinners, I would have much preferred to dine at the grill or the delicious Chicken Chicken! we visited once for lunch.
One great aspect of traveling with a local dive club, was that everyone on the boat was from the DC area. Not only were they from DC, but most turned out to be, well, somewhat like me. That is to say many conversations revolved around which episodes of MythBusters we had seen, where we had been in the world, and what our thoughts were on national politics. These were certainly people with a passion for learning and adventure.
As a solo traveler on this trip, I was "adopted" by a great couple who lives around DC, Erika and Ray Brown. They were great fun to talk with and kindly served as my dive buddies for the weekend. On the morning we departed, the three of us drove around most of the island in search a blowhole on the southern shore and for the town/post office of Hell. We missed it the first time around, but after driving in circles for a while, we finally arrived in Hell. It's basically a site of eroded rock with a colorful and creative post office/tourist trap. Erika and Ray kindly sent postcards to their family members postmarked from Hell. It wasn't long before the Hell puns became excruciating to listen to. For Ray's sake, I hope Erika didn't keep them up on the entire flight home. They were great though and hopefully I'll be seeing them again soon. I wonder if they like board games?
Photos
Here are a few photo highlights from the trip. All of my photos are on my Flickr site. There's also a fun slideshow with some great underwater photography taken by one of my instructors. Of course I took my GPS along with me, so you can see most of my photos placed onto a nice map of Grand Cayman. For $25, I purchased a cheap underwater film camera at the local dive shop. Unfortunately, the images did not turn out well enough to be worth posting. It looks like I'll have to start saving up for a real dive enclosure for my SLR. In the meantime, enjoy the above-water photos.
I bought a bike shortly after moving to DC in 2001. I spent more than I should have at the time (about a month's rent) and decided to get something of quality, that would let me cruise around the city and visit Julie at her apartment. Until this year, I'd never used it for any trips longer than the occasional ride to Bethesda. After Julie and I moved in together she reluctantly agreed to buy herself a cheap bike so that we could ride around the park. She never really enjoyed the rides as much as I did and I think she participated mostly to humor me.
This summer, I somehow convinced Julie she might like riding her bike on longer excursions. Our first trip took us north through Rock Creek Park, out of the District and all the way to Rockville, MD. It was mostly uphill the entire way, but Julie was feeling adventurous and 21 miles later we arrived at the Rockville Metro stop.
Although she could barely pedal when we reached Rockville, Julie somehow wanted to continue biking the following weekend. Perhaps it wasn't as bad as she imagined all those years, or perhaps it was the fact that I let her set the pace—whatever the reason, we've gone riding every weekend since. In six trips we've logged nearly 160 miles and have some ambitious rides planned. We've discovered that the DC area has a huge amount of paved paths and great destinations.
Julie's at the point where she's even considering buying a better bike. If anyone has any suggestions, or a bike to sell, please let us know!
Here we are at Mt. Vernon, about 18 miles south of DC.
Resources
In our search for different paths and destinations, we've found some great resources and tools that have made our trips more enjoyable and easier to plan. Here's a short list that should help anyone interested in recreational riding in and around DC.
Web Sites
- Bike Washington
The name pretty much says it all. This site has maps, descriptions, and advice about many of the local trails and paths. If you're looking for somewhere to go, this should be your first stop. - Bikely.com
I just found this site a few days ago. It contains uploaded GPS tracks of biker's trips that can be viewed online and downloaded into a GPS. - Google Earth
While Google Maps are useful for day to day driving directions, the downloadable Google Earth program is extremely helpful when planning trips. I've had a great time planning the rides and viewing our track logs from our own trips. - WMATA
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority's site is very helpful when planning trips. We will often take our bikes onto the Metro and out of the city. We then ride back in or to another Metro stop. It's a great service as it greatly increases the area available to use to bike.
Gear
- Garmin GPS
I've written about using my Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx before to record my location while out taking photos, but I've recently discovered it is of tremendous help when biking. I have recorded each of our bike trips to keep track of our progress. I've also used it to find restaurants, Metro stops, and to follow other people's recorded tracks. I love this thing more and more every day. Be sure to get the handlebar attachment. - Jelly Belly Sport Beans
Think Gatorade and jelly beans. I saw these on the Jelly Belly web site and decided to try them. They come in small 1 ounce packages. We usually take a few packs along on our trips. Highly recommended! - Topeak MTX TrunkBag EXP
I purchased this at REI looking for an easy way to carry my camera and some food on our rides. (I have to keep Julie well fed at all times.) It's a great bag and rack/rail system with expandable left and right panniers. The panniers are perfect for when you find yourself riding by a Target and suddenly remember you need to buy socks and underwear.
My brother-in-law was married this weekend in Sacramento, CA. While Julie was a bridesmaid, I lacked an official capacity in the ceremony. Seeing this as an opportunity, I assigned myself the role of second photographer for the wedding. The primary photographer was a friend and roommate of the couple who actually has a degree in photography. He (Angel) seemed genuinely pleased to have me help out and fill in the gaps.
The lighting for the wedding as a whole was basically horrible. The ceremony was outdoors at high noon in the hot Sacramento sun. I only took a few photos during the ceremony, but was unfortunately too far away for my flash to provide a decent fill. I don't know if Angel was able to fare much better. He was a bit closer, but I haven't seen his photos yet. Here's a typical ceremony photo, complete with dark shadows under the eyes and face.
Inside the reception hall the light was worse. It was a large dark hall with 20' high ceilings and lit with many (but not enough) incandescent lights. Bounce flash was clearly impossible, but to top it off, the back of the hall had a large window where daylight spilled into the room. Not enough to overpower the foreground, but enough so that when I color-corrected my flash for the incandescent light, the background was still often blue. I managed to put my new 30mm f1.4 lens to good use and took most of the photos with it at around f1.4 - f2.8 at ISO 800 and 1600 with flash.
The best lighting was in the prep rooms and a waiting room that were used between the activities. Large windows and a little bit of bounced flash gave some very nice results. One of my favorite shots of the entire weekend is below. It was taken post-ceremony and pre-reception while waiting for the large formal photos.
Overall, it was a great learning experience. Knowing that whatever photos I took were only going to complement the actual photographer's photos took a lot of the pressure off. Sometimes I screwed up, sometimes I got a great photo. I managed to use my macro lens, Lensbaby, gels, and try a little off-camera flash in a real-world situation. It wasn't easy, but it improved my photography skills.
View my favorite photos from the wedding on Flickr.