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Chris gave me an ant farm for my birthday, and we just
got the ants in recently. Here they are starting away – Chris punched a
couple tunnels in to get them started.

This is from tonight – they’ve made great technical progress!

This is as zoooomed in as I could get!
You can find the ant farm at ThinkGeek.com – a favorite website of mine. They’re harvester ants with some
cool looking bodies – huge jaws, heads, and abdomens. The blue gel is
both structural for the farm and nutritious for the ants.

A Quick Lesson in Apertures and Shutters

On the left - I used a 1/25
sec (fast) shutter, meaning the camera let in light for 0.04 seconds.
The aperature was set to 2.2, meaning the opening was a big as my
camera could handle. On the right - I used a 4 second (slow) shutter, but the aperture was really small (8.0) so that the image isn’t flooded with light.

The foreground is pretty much the same, but the background is
in focus in one and out of focus in the other. When the camera had a
fast shutter with a large opening, only the close objects are in focus,
blurring everything else (on the left). On the right, the foreground
and background are in focus! That’s the result of the slow shutter and
small opening.

You might be wondering about why the
picture on the left
is grainy. Remember buying film? 100 speed for outdoors? 400 speed for
indoors? Digital cameras use this principle too. I used 400 speed
digital “film” on the left which is more grainy but is more sensitive
to light so I could use a fast shutter. On the right is 50 speed film
which does the reverse. An automatic setting on your camera handles all
of these factors, but it’s fun to play with them. In fact, the ants
were always blurry with autofocus, so I did that manually.

More on exposures.

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I find the ability to search the Florida inmate system quite a curious setup. Not too unlike a dating service! Their records are a mile long! Shooting a missile? What the?!?!  Hold onto your checkbook and identity!

                

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet
Caroliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. That was a fun
concert.

Why did I go? My friend’s date fell through, so I had a free ride. Why

Neil Diamond? It was free, and Lehnert is a hot date. Wait, so why did

you go to a Neil Diamond concert? Cuz he’s the new hip!

Did you follow the fashion advice? You can’t see in the picture, but

I’m wearing sequined polyester pants. I did comb my hair straight back

in the Diamond style and wore a collared shirt like every single other

guy there. Silliness.

Puppy Intermission

We found a dozen of these in a customer’s backyard!

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Chicago!

On

Saturday, Chris and I drove down to Chicago to see our older brother,

Perry, whom we have not seen since Christmas! On the left are the

towers for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange with the office he works in

being in the right tower. The corners of the building are such that

there are 4 corner offices per corner, hence more rent to be charged!

Their office is on the right here, with about half of it fitting in
the

picture. The rent? $10,000 per month. Yikes! Not too intense of a work

environment, though, with much of the room being the entertainment

center with an 80″ TV…

Afterwards, we chilled out in Bridgeport where he lives and watched a

whole lotta movies… Late at night we had some good discussions about

family (Perry remembers my mom saying “kitchen closes at 9″ every

morning) and his relating his mom’s house to “being at camp” and being

at our house to “being at boot camp” which Chris and I readily

understood!

I’m going to a Neil Diamond concert tonight at the Bradley Center. I
barely know the guy. Should I bring a lighter for a ballad? Wear my
tight nylon pants with the pink boa over my favorite ruffled white
shirt? Go for the mohawk and put on some dark eyeliner? I don’t wanna
look out of place, so I’m really looking for suggestions on this.

For the fun of it, I scrolled through 8 painful pages of preteen
profiles in the Milwaukee Metro here on Xanga. In what should not have
come as a surprise, I know all but 1 of the 20-somethings listed. What.
Where is the sanity. We need more old people here, and we need more
qualifiers for Xangans Against Poor Grammar & Spelling.

Today, Chris and I were working – maybe it was at lunch – and Chris paused silently for a moment. I knew what he was thinking. I look like my dad. A
startling revelation. Between the two of us, we have years of genetics
training, but it wasn’t until I let my hair air dry when it curled just
like his hair. We have the same hair line, the same waves, everything
but the color. Weird.

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In
several hours, I’ll be hopping on a plane to – get this – Portland,
Oregon. Has anyone ever heard of the place? Leading me on this tour is
the splendid person on the right. The party starts in Portland and
moves south to Corvallis where I’m supposedly sleeping at the Chi Alpha
boys’ house. More like getting the inside scoop on Esther is what is.

Really, though. Great people aside. Oregon = trees. Big trees. For
whatever other redeeming qualities they may have, Oregon residents are
basically infringing on the root space of some of the world’s coolest
living organisms, and I’m looking forward to checking some out and – if
possible – sharing some moments with the bark. In a hugging fashion.

Before.

During.

After.

All smiles at work. Little did I know, there was a hair lump on the back of my head.

After, following Amanda’s styling pointers with girly girly texturizing taffy. That’s right. Taffy. I’ve crossed a new line.

So I like it. Naysayers out there, hehe, face the wrath of Chris Ortiz,
barber extraordinaire. He is the one to have wrought this work upon my
head, and I thank him. It was long overdue!

Sandy Castle, Staff Reporter

Milwaukee, WI – In light of growing concerns over the length of
his hair, Nicholas Crawford is reportedly getting a haircut today.
Having left the locks unclipped for over 15 months, he claims the time
has come to make a change.

“My
hair is a critical part of my appearance, and I want to be sure that my
hair is communicating a consistent message,” Crawford shared in a
candid interview with this reporter. He continued to express a profound
interest in his brown and playfully curly hair, playing with it and
twirling the ringlets between his fingers.

“There comes a day in a
man’s life where the Larry [of The Three Stooges] look becomes passé
and you no longer want to have a mullet or a sloping ski jump on the
back of your head,” Crawford continued. A brief glance on Crawford’s
website indicates that physical appearance is a high priority for his
life.

An acquaintance, seeking to remain anonymous, added that, “Nick’s
flaming metrosexuality plays a key role in his decision-making process,
and I’m not surprised that he is looking for a better look.” Other
calls to individuals given by Crawford as friends were not returned.

He plans to have his hair cut at Jose’s on the intersection of 10th St. and National Avenue on Milwaukee’s south side.

Edit: She got a point ticked off, but the fine was already the minimum.
Props to Menomonee Falls for creating a low-stress environment, but I
would suggest having “World’s Wildest Police Chases” playing on the
flatscreen TVs instead of the weather.

It hurts to see this.

Anorexia, bulimia, cutters, everything. It’s so destructive – but what
can I say? What can I do? The most and best I can do is to just love on
people and bathe them in prayer, just as I would hope people would do
for me when I’m struggling with things.