Me daps are falling apart and no longer providing the comfort and style onlookers have come to expect so we nipped out today to Ross (Dress for Less) to get some new footwear. Footware? No. Footwear. Anyroad, on the way back we stopped at Albertsons to pick up some essentials and there was turkey bowling in full swing.

I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate as everyone’s certainly au fait with the minutiae of the sport, but just in case… It was basically a way of collecting phone numbers and trying to get people to sign up for banking. Imagine skittles but instead of a ball, a frozen turkey (in a plastic bag), instead of 9 pins, 10, and instead of a skittle alley in some frozen outpost of a local pub, you’ve got a supermarket aisle with rolls of kitchen towels as buffers. I got 2 strikes and 1 gutterball (Butterball?) and won nothing but did better than the old couple before me who risked their health and well-being for an Albertsons T-Shirt. I’d left me camera in the car I’m afraid so no pictures…

Last night I was coerced into attending a Project Runway Party. Couple of points. A runway in the US is more likely to mean a catwalk than a landing strip. And Project Runway is an American programme in its 4th season or so where designers are deprived of sleep for a few weeks and then bullied by a bunch of European fashionistas into designing and making clothes in some pseudo-darwinian battle of who can sew the fastest. I can usually stomach about 10 minutes. Anyroad, last night some colleagues of DrSita organised this party. Everyone was split up into teams of 2 and then sent off to the charity shop to buy 5 dollars’ worth of materials then put together an outfit themed “Presidential Inauguration 2008″ in 20 minutes. I refused point blank to take part. Or be a judge. But found a nice little dive bar near the house while everyone shopped. Yeah, I’m an aguafiestas, but that’s how I roll. I don’t do dressing up or public speaking. It says as much on my CV. In true Portland style, everyone won.

This morning it were gorgeous, fog slowly lifting, heavy dew, a nip in the air. So I took a few pictures and am quite please with this one which’ll probably be tomorrow’s post for me photoblog. (sign up to be emailed a daily e-slice of Portland here.)

I love the smell of bokeh in the morning

I’ve got it as my screensaver at the minute, please help yourself.

And that is the news.

I never thought about the roots of the word “business” before. Busy-ness. Just thinking out loud, anyroad moving on…

My photoblog’s getting revamped at the minute mainly because of the number of people asking about the vintage viewfinder contraption when I’m out. I’ve found a great template for it and have been tweaking it to my liking.

Still to do? The title (”Say Cheese, It’s Gwyn’s Photoblog”) needs rethinking… I need a proper archives page, more straightforward tag system, and to write some updated copy for the About Pages…

Might I implore you to sign up for email updates? Sign up below, confirm, then when I post a new picture it’ll wing its way to your inbox with the description too, never more than once a day. You can cancel at any time… I’m going through some of my older photos at the moment but I’ll soon be posting new ones.

Any thoughts on the site or pictures are, as always, most welcome in the comments here or over at the phlog. And if RSS feeds is how you roll, it’s replete with that kind of nonsense too.

I’d also like to plug Uprinting.com and the Web Resources Depot who are doing all these cards for free ‘cos I won their competition. Once the cards arrive I’ll say nice things in my professional blog too. Though judging by recent news I’m going to be a lot busier soon…

I’ve been posting about some of my latest projects over at agaveweb.com in the hope of drumming up some business and lending a bit more colour to the CVs I’m sending out to temp companies.

Other than that, it’s been pretty quiet this side of the pond/Rio Grande. It was frosty this morning and has since given way to glorious sunshine. I can see it through the little window in my underground bunker… I nipped out to the park yesterday with the PenDak Chimera and took a few longer exposure shots. I think I’d need some kind of retort stand to properly keep everything still enough for anything longer than 1/5th of a second, but I liked this one…

Exposed

The next step is learning how to focus more ‘into’ the image, rather than on the border and dust particles. I might have to re-engineer the cardboard and I’m guessing there’ll be something to do with the aperture too.

Sally & Martin arrive tomorrow night. Driving from LA to here in 2 days is quite a trek.

View Larger Map

and a quick way to put a couple of thousand miles on the odometer. So we’re thinking of things to do (expect yet more waterfall pictures…) and where/what to eat.

Judging from the pageview stats, no one cares in the slightest about my lifestream… I’m not taking it personally, FSM knows I’m happy enough you keep coming back to read this nonsense. But give it a go, cos if this page hasn’t been updated there might well be something of interest over there. There’s a distinct bias towards photography tutorials and flickr activity, but once I find out how to put my reddit faves in there as well, there’ll be a lot of good stuff.

I won’t mention it again.

Gwyn’s (For-the-love-of-all-things-holy,-Get-a) LifeStream

Probably.

Life is good

I don’t know how the voting works or whether they’ll use you email address for nefarious purposes but there’s all kinds of camera equipment to be won. A few votes would not hurt my chances from amongst the 5000+ entries…

Please click on over to the LA Times and “Vote as Best”…  

If you want to enter your photogenic mutt, you can enter too… Details here.

According to Peter Trigg’s Calendar - “My kind of Somerset”… It’s the first of September, meaning we can look at a grainy picture of All Saints’ Church, Aisholt for 30 odd days. Stateside, we’re at the end of a bank holiday weekend (Labor (sic) Day). And summer is officially over.

Oi loves the rain! Loves it oi does... Tis good for they radishes

On Friday we went out to a Greek restaurant down the road, Eleni’s I believe it’s called, which is muy fancy, pricey and delicious and then after that to our nearest pub, the Black Cat or somesuch… Saturday was a race against time to get both cars emissions tested which took far longer than it should have. They both passed the test, but due to inadequate directions we probably contributed more greenhouse gasses into the environment while we driving two cars around lost for an hour than would be ideal. The next step is going to the DMV to get Oregon plates for the cars. You have 60 days after moving to do this, but Drsita needs them to get a parking permit up at the uni and you feel very self-conscious driving around with California plates as they’ve a reputation for uncourteous, reckless driving. And rightly so, I’ve not heard a single car horn beeped in anger since getting here. And, of course, everyone cycles or uses public transport.

On Saturday evening we went with a couple of friends to El Toro Bravo, a tapas bar would you believe. Again, excellent food. And after that we started on The Wire season 4…

Yesterday we set out early for a new set of waterfalls… Photos abound over here. Incidentally, I’ve started flagging any photos with people in on Flickr as “only available to Friends & Family” since I’m a bit wary after Sita’s picture got used in an academic paper and I only found out about it when it turned up on BoingBoing… If you’d like to be added as a Flickr friend let me know, it’s one level above ‘contact’ and you’ll get to see people as well as waterfalls and skies.

After the waterfalls we went to a farmers’ market and there I took my favourite picture of the day:

Realising the tomaydoughs are only little will help you scale this