 You didn't see them, because they were pretty dull, but I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to take a picture of a slug. What was interesting is that I stumbled upon something in my camera I didn't realize I had. Or I sort of knew that it was there but hadn't given any thought to the implications. The Canon T2i has a way to zoom in on the live view on the camera's LCD. Now this was mentioned as a feature for video. On my previous video camera, I ignored the digital zoom because it's essentially useless. So on this camera I figured this was the same thing and ignored it.
But then I accidentally turned the zoom on while taking stills. And then a real use for the feature hit me. It makes focusing on tiny objects much easier. With the slug, this wasn't all that exciting. It was only marginally more interesting zoomed in than it was at regular size. But some things are genuinely much more interesting in the extreme close up. This beetle for instance. This shot was take with the kit lens that came with the camera. But I was still able to get a tight focused close up. Pretty cool. Now I'm excited to break out the macro lens again to see what I can do with this.
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 Even though I take a lot of photos of plants and flowers, I'm bloody awful at growing them. Cacti have died under my watch. That's the kind of awful we're talking about here. But despite that, my love of a home grown tomato causes me to try and grow the blasted things just about every year. The results have been firmly in keeping with my skill level. What that means is that usually around September we can pick a couple of misshapen dwarfish tomatoes too small to make more than a token number of BLTs.
Last year wasn't my fault. No, really. They were literally drowned by a flood. The year before was my fault. I planted them much too late and never fertilized. And then there was the year I tried those funky upside down pots. Let's not talk about it. The two years before that they kept getting some sort of rot that turned the bottoms black. Experience tells me to take the blame for that too but I really don't know the reason. That brings us to this year. I planted them on time. They've been fertilized. There hasn't been a flood or a serious heat wave. They're getting watered regularly. And in this photo you seem the first signs of the coming goodies.
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 I'm going to be annoying and not say what this is. It's purely because I want people to guess. Did you ever read Games magazine? I don't even know if they still publish it. But it used to have this contest where you had to try and guess what things were based on extreme close up photos. This isn't exactly an extreme close up but there's nothing in the photo but the one object, so it's similar.
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 In the latest installment of "John Knows Squat About Plants," we have this fellow. This patch has hundreds of the things, next to a tennis court. I have not even the slightest idea what it is. But it is common as dirt around here. If your lawn hasn't been mowed regularly, you have this critter in great abundance on your property.
Mostly I like this photo for the way this plant pops compared to the heavily out of focus background. It almost feels like a 3D movie, only without the irritating glasses, high ticket price and incessant braying by fanboys about how awesome it is.
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 We had a little thunderstorm this afternoon. Naturally it occurred while I was trying to grill some ribs for dinner. But I took the delay in stride, grabbed the camera and tried to see what sort of interesting water action I could capture from cars going by. In case you haven't noticed, I'm fascinated by what fast things look like when frozen by the camera.
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 There is a field next to my house and while outside tonight, I noticed that it was just lousy with fireflies. There seemed to be thousands of them buzzing around in that field. And I thought there must be a good picture in that somehow.
Well maybe there was. But I sure as hell couldn't pull it off. This is one of the better attempts. You can see a few green streaks in the shot. Bleah. This was a huge disappointment. If not for the whole picture a day for a year thing, this shot would never have made it out for public viewing.
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 Okay, this one was a lot of work and frustration to come up with just okay results. It's a nice picture but there were 150 rejects to get this one. And it's just nice.
So yes, you can expect me to be trying this again in the future. I'll need more light for one thing. I had three lights on this at close range but more would be even better so I widen the depth of field. And a better container for the water would be good. And a better backdrop. And a better fruit than frakking blueberries. Strawberries would have been much better. Ah well, it is a learning process after all.
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 Here's my cat, who inexplicably decided to climb behind the window shade to look out into the dark night, just as I was approaching the front porch with my camera. I love the bright dot from her eye, even though she wasn't facing the camera and there was just very dim light on her.
That's it. No story of my life or anything today. Just a cat.
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 For Father's Day I was given this lovely new grill. I like to cook and love to grill even more, so this was a great present. Not pictured is the old grill, which had long outlasted any expectations of it. Most of its internal parts had been replaced multiple times. The side shelf had all but disintegrated. It was no longer capable of producing anything even vaguely resembling an even flame. And it had a tree dropped on it, cracking the metal hood. We had that grill about a decade.
As I was putting together the new grill, I started thinking about putting together the old grill and was suddenly struck by how massively my life had changed in between. My wife and I lived in Virginia at the time. I worked in finance and she was a teacher. We had no kids. And my parents were still a couple. Now I'm an aspiring screenwriter and my wife is a budget analyst. We live in New York. We have two boys. My parents are divorced and my mother has passed away. In the present, the changes rarely seem major. Things shift little by little and then you look back and see that you are nowhere near where you were before. I don't have any sort of message in all this. I'm just kind of amazed by it all. And maybe even more amazed that a beat up old grill was somehow the marker for that change.
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 Come home from work, exercise, grab a quick dinner and sit down to eat it while watching a movie. That's my exciting evening. And this is what it looked like. And for the record, the movie was The Puffy Chair.
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