The soothing sounds of nature

Turn up your volume, sit back and enjoy.

More old photos

Cynthia, 2001. My sofa was actually louder than my guitar.

Summer of 2001 when Cynthia and I were dating.

Me, self-portrait, age 9.

Nom, nom, nom

Ever since I was a kid, I have always liked the Little Debbie "Be My Valentine" snack cakes. Even though they taste sort of like candle wax and never seem to go bad (much like Twinkies), I still like 'em. My mom bought a box of them for me and my brother one year and I have picked up a box of them every February since.

I stopped at HyVee this week to pick up a box and man, are they good. They are a strange mix of nasty and tasty at the same time, but the tasty part wins out. I've never cared about the nutritional value of these things (because obviously if you are buying snack cakes you're not concerned about frivolous things like nutrition), but for some reason I happened to look at the panel on the back of the box and wow, when it comes to making really unhealthy junk food, Little Debbie doesn't mess around.

The cakes in the box come in clear plastic packages of 2 and they are fairly small. The serving size is for both of those little cakes and the Nutrition Facts panel boasts some impressive numbers. For calories, you get 290 and for sugar, you get a generous 27g to keep your heart buzzing along. I can hardly sit still just thinking about all that sugar. Sure, you could just eat one cake and save the other for later and that would cut the scariness in half, but who would really do that? I mean, c'mon, if you open the package you're gonna eat that second one.

If you think about it (and do a little research), that's more sugar than you'll get from a whole bowl of Frosted Flakes. More than a bowl of Fruit Loops, too. Which raises the question: why would you bother with a bowl of sugary cereal when you can just eat a couple Little Debbie snack cakes? It would save time and milk AND would result in an even stronger sugar buzz. No downside there. Another important note: if you're worried that you might accidentally ingest some vitamins, just read a little farther down the panel: there's a big "0%" next to everything that matters. You're all set!

Old photos

We were looking through some of our photo albums from several years ago and I wanted to scan a few to post here. The scanner won't have anything to do with them, so I had to take pictures of them with a point and shoot. The quality is not so good, but I'm not about to go buy another scanner.

When we lived in Des Moines, there was a huge snowstorm that shut down everything for a few days in early 2003. The snow on our street completely buried all the cars and we couldn't drive anywhere for a while. You can see our Taurus... sort of.

This is from a camping trip in the summer of 2003:

And a trip to Chicago:

Fast-forward to 2006. Rose was only a year old when we took this picture at the Saylorville Dam:

Playing in our front yard in Des Moines:

Rose trying to hide in her toybox:

Rose and Cynthia in front of our old house:

Christmas that year:

Ringing in the New Year in 2007:

Another camping trip:

Rose :)

Winter photos

How many decent pictures can you take while your hands are shaking from cold? For me the answer is: very few. The lens optical stabilizer was given a run for its money as I took some more photos at sunset today. With the ISO at 400, I still couldn't use a fast enough shutter speed to offset the shakes in most of the shots, so I think the lesson here is to bump it up to 800 and risk introducing more pixel noise in favor of better clarity. That's something to try the next time I'm an idiot out wandering the frozen tundra with a camera.

Here are the few that turned out:

Out in the cold

On New Year's Day I went out in the freezing cold to take pictures downtown. Cold weather makes me feel like death – really, I hate the cold – but my enthusiasm for photography outweighed the painfulness of the cold. Or at least it did until I went outside. It was 17 degrees out and even though I wore layers, I froze within minutes of getting out of my car downtown.

The first pictures I took by the City Hall, but the wind blowing along the river made my fingers go numb in minutes, so I didn't hang around long.

I edited the colors in the photo of City Hall for effect, but the rest I left alone. The natural contrast between the frozen, blue river and the sun hitting the side of the building inspired me to mess with the photo a little bit.

Next, I went over to the parking ramp next to the U.S. Cellular Center. Ten stories up, this is the view I took in:

It was so much colder on the top of that ramp and the wind was a lot stronger, so after taking a handful of photos I went back to the elevator to head back to my car. When I stepped inside the building, the sun was shining against the dirty window at the end of the room, which made a great shot. I posted that photo in the previous blog post.

Despite the cold and the fact that my fingers had lost all feeling, it was worth the trouble and the photos turned out OK. Photography never gets old, it's always worth the effort to go snap a few photos, even when the weather isn't the best. The more I take pictures, the more I want to make time to take even more.

OK, that's all.

Looking forward

Looking back on 2012, it was a year full of variety on Rekelekt. Photos, poetry, renting a studio, playing guitar, trying to stop bullets with a laptop, planning for the end of the world, and of course more wacky dreams than anyone wants to hear about. I'm still getting the hang of blogging and I imagine there will still be gaps here and there in 2013, but I plan to post more.

I'm really looking forward to 2013 and I hope to accomplish a lot this year. My resolutions for this year include building my photography business, writing more, and procrastinating less. That last one I keep putting off each year, so we'll see how it works out this time!