 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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 This is my son's second grade teacher, Mrs. Wharton. She's retiring this year. I'm not sure how long she's been teaching but since she was teaching second grade when I was in that grade, it's been quite a long time. After giving out awards to the second grade students at a ceremony this morning, she was given these flowers by her colleagues. How much this all means to her is written all over her face.
She will be deeply missed at the school. My son took to her right away and had far and away the best year of school he's ever had. He's not a natural for the school environment but she did a wonderful job of drawing him out and engaging him. It's been a great joy to watch this year. So while I am grateful to her, I'm also sad for the next batch of second graders, who won't get that experience.
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 Mom was deadly phobic about spiders. Just pictures of them would give her a horrible screaming case of the heebie-jeebies. I was trained, nearly from birth to exterminate spiders on sight. And yet despite all of this, I couldn't resist picking this creepy shot. This little guy (girl?) was hanging out by the front door. Far from the fearsome fanged beast you see here, this spider is pretty small. Maybe a quarter inch long at most. Without the macro lens, I couldn't even tell that it was red and speckled.
This may not have been the best shot I took today. Chances are that this shot was better. Or maybe even this one or this one. But the spider shot is the one that made my son start yelling "Ewwww!" And I just couldn't pass up that sort of warm fuzzy feeling to share with you all. You're welcome.
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 I don't know what it is. I spotted it a few days ago, growing on the side of a hill above a marshy area. It's big, probably about six feet tall. This shot is from about thirty feet away and only shows the very top of the plant.
The hardest part of this shot was keeping still, since my dog was with me. Walks are the high point of her day so she races about like mad, trying to sniff everything imaginable. Which means I'm trying to keep still while a seventeen pound missile on the end of a line careens recklessly around me. I pretty much had to sit on her to get her to stay still for a minute. This is exactly why I don't usually take the dog and the camera out at the same time.
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 Nothing worked yesterday. None of the shots I attempted turned out worth a damn. I had high hopes for some spectacular sunset shots but when I loaded them up on the computer, they all sucked. Just a heaping pile of crap. So I'm giving you this shot, which isn't great but was kind of a cool effect that I stumbled upon accidentally.
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 No, not a top secret unreleased phone. This is the edible sort of blackberry. These aren't ripe yet, obviously. They grow in prodigious numbers in my yard. It might not be accurate to call them wild since I do actively encourage them growing there. But I didn't actually plant them. So let's just call their wild status a bit ambiguous.
Whatever. They are delicious. A couple years ago my wife found blackberries at the grocery store and bought me some, knowing how much I love them. These were the farmed variety and were much bigger than my wild ones. And they were awful. The wild ones have a much more intense flavor. Admittedly, the wild ones are pretty seedy but it's a small price to pay for the taste.
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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.
