090/365...Rain!

Today, we've had rain pretty much non-stop. I got outside today just long enough to snap a few pictures.

089/365...Skies

Today was this girl's sweet 16 party at Ft. DeSoto park. After the party ended, we headed down to the beach to take some photos and I caught some pretty wicked looking skies.

088/365...Passing light

Date night with the lovely wife tonight. Took these from the passenger window hoping for some light painting goodness.

A nearly impossible task

Being a dad of an 11 year old and an almost 8 year old, I'm somewhat removed from one of the most impossible of tasks...capturing a toddler on camera. Without the blur. Or the whining. Or the crying. Or their face (finger, toe, toy, etc) pressed up against the lens. Somewhat removed. That's what nieces (and nephews and grandkids, I guess) are for. I really don't know for sure, because I only have nieces. Two. One infant, one very toddler-like toddler.

To my point, I set out to take a picture of my (very toddler-ish) niece Molly. She was being cute. She's pretty much always cute. But this night, extra cute and talkative and playful, and...Molly-like. Not.easy. At.all

The first picture looked something like this:

Fail. Unfortunately, I was too stupid to realize I wanted to blog about this whole picture taking adventure, so the picture above is only a representation, not the real deal. I have a habit of deleting blurry pictures...idiot.

Things got a bit better, especially when she paused long enough for me to get this one:

Of course, this is not a true capture of the Molly we all know and love beyond reason. So the pic that ended up on my blog (and the picture of the day) is right here:

As you can guess, the picture above was taken mere milliseconds after the completely clear picture. So, not an entirely impossible task...just nearly impossible.

087/365...Snappers

I used to love these things when I was a kid. My wife had to take a trip to a fireworks store (long story) today and our dear friend Alisha picked up a box of these things. She bought them for our boys, but my gut tells me they're really for me.

086/365...Mug

I've always loved the whimsy of the bird on this mug.

085/365...Socks

I'm tired and I really don't have the energy for anything else.

084/365...Young the Giant

In case you missed this post, we went to Young the Giant (or YtG for the uninitiated.) Great concert with a GREAT band.

083/365...Oh...

Oh...

Yeah, I know. Bad joke. It was either a bad joke or nothing at all. I probably should have gone with nothing.

082/365...Sick wife :(

My lovely bride has been out of commission most of the night. Here's to her feeling better in the morning.

081/365...Zombies!

Refrigerator art...when you have an 11 year old boy, that is.

080/365...Molly in motion

My two year old niece is in perpetual motion. I was trying to get a good picture of her drawing quietly. It didn't last long and this is one of the happy accidents I caught.

A wedding, a slideshow and one awesome dude

My wedding day was a pretty cool day. It was the culmination of a nine years of friendship with my wife, five of those years being together as a couple. We also had a pretty big circle of friends and acquaintances. We both had grown up around many of the same people with my in-laws also having a pretty wide circle of friends as well. All told, our wedding was, umm, well attended. By almost 700 people. Big wedding, bigger production. There were dancers, songs and a slideshow, all before we even began reciting our vows. And I loved every minute of it. What does all this have to do with anything?

I'm glad you asked. My wife found a little device thing that can take slides and turn them into images on an SD card. Very cool since this now means our very analog wedding slideshow from almost 16 years ago can now think about joining the digital age. No more cha-shink sounds during slideshows.

So, along with the 60 or 70 slides from our wedding, the in-laws also toted over some slides they had from years past, meaning that we spent some a lot way too much time looking at the vintage goodness through the little slide viewer whatchamacallit.

Then, our boys started to get in on the act. As a matter of fact, we spent the better part of one dinner just looking at slides.

We've had boxes of slides stacked in our family room for the past couple of weeks, taking time to peek into the past and generally just goofing around with the slides a bit. This is a pic my lovely bride snapped.

One day, as we're poking at the slides, one of them caught both of our attention, there was a snap of a way-to-awesome-for-words dude on one of the slides. It turned out to be my father-in-law's best man from their wedding over 41 years ago. So, I struck out trying to find a way to capture the slide on my trusty iPhone without the aid of any sort of analog to digital conversion. Not easy. It took me about 30 or 40 pictures, but I was finally able to get the picture-of-a-picture through the viewer of the little slide viewer thingy. The rest is just the pure coolness of a late-60s dude. Just purely awesome...from the hair to the plain T to the glasses and the way they're just perched on his nose.

079/365...Hair

My lovely wife did this with her hair today. It looked super-cool.

078/365...Stormtroopers

Legos. Stormtroopers. 'Nuff said.

077/365...Unplugged

Tonight Friends of Giants played an unplugged show at Smiley's. Yeah, it was good.

076/365...Glass

So tired and so ready to go to bed. This is the best I can do right now, unfortunately.

075/365...Best man, 1969

This dude was the best man at my in-law's wedding in 1969. Cat's just classically cool all around. Hip to the max, from the glasses resting so casually to the JFK hair to the plain T. So.very.cool.

074/365...Sunset

We had to take a little trip to Tampa today and I caught this sunset on the way back home.

Fun with...caterpillars, LOTS of caterpillars

Sunday excursions with the family Long have become quite the treat lately. Last week was a dog walking/kid energy release/photo/foot hate catharsis kind of excursion. That's one eventful Sunday, my friends. I think we're now determined to start making this much more our routine.

This past Sunday was no exception. Sunday afternoon typically means nap time for mama and papa Long. Of course, a nap is not, I repeat, NOT to be missed, so we headed out later in the afternoon to Philippe Park in Safety Harbor.

For the non-locals, Safety Harbor is about as close to small town Americana as you can get in the Tampa Bay area. There's definitely a quaint village-ish vibe with the town and it's a bit segregated from the rest of Clearwater. And, there's a kick-butt park on the north end of the city called Philippe Park. We've been there a few times and figured it to be a cool destination for one of our little fam trips.

One thing to know before we dig in to the adventure—the park has TONS of trees and really big ones at that. It's also, ummmm, Springtime in Florida, which means that its really more like fall and pollen season all wrapped in one leaf-showery, allergy-hell, yellow-dusted mess of a season. Little did we figure that it was also that lovely time of the year when caterpillars are FRACKING EVERYWHERE...especially when you're in the middle of tons of trees. Like in Philippe Park.

This was a shot of the bench that I actually sat on for about a minute before I realized I was sitting in nature. Needless to say, I moved and didn't really sit on any surfaces for the remainder of our little excursion.








Like I said, they were FRACKING EVERYWHERE.  On fence posts...

...hanging from the trees...

...and, finally, much to the amazement (he really was amazed...don't let his face fool you in the pic) of my 11 year old, they were on his stick and affectionately named Bobby and Darby...

...and his younger brother just didn't share the same level of wonder and excitement...

...not that any of us really did. 

We ended up high-tailing it through the "wildlife refuge" part of the park towards the beachy part of the park. See, I told you this place was kick-butt.

Here, things were much more tame and less cringe inducing.

So, we had a great time...albeit a bit too nature-ish and, umm, crunchy at times. Plus, it afforded me the chance to get some of my favorite kinds of shots...sunlight through the trees (and caterpillers and silk webs). Here's to more Long family adventures to come...

073/365...Slides

We recently came across some old slides and spent the better part of dinner taking a look at slides of my wife and I from years ago. The boys were digging looking at them through the slide viewer.

072/365...Webs

This is from our caterpillar adventure in Philippe Park (more to come on that later). Absolutely my favorite shot of the day.

071/365...Mr. T

We were hanging at the local flea market today when I found my Mr. T starter kit.

070/365...Back!

Back in the Sunshine State, I found these hideous flamingos encased in a glass ball in Cracker Barrel. Welcome to Florida!

069/365...Hammond

Nothing is a cool as the whirry-whir of a Hammond organ. Nothing.at.all. I found this bad boy on the platform of the Vineyard Community Church in Marietta, GA. Good find, Mike O'Brien.

068/365...Georgia spring

Went on a road trip to Marietta, GA. Along the way, saw these plants in a McDonald's parking lot. Too gorgeous to pass up.

067/365...Legos

Our house gets overrun with Legos at times. This is one of several buckets we have.

066/365...Ruby's hair

My niece, Ruby has the craziest hair. Here's an attempt to capture all of the crazy that it embodies.

Foot trouble

Last week, my darling bride posted a blog about her fear of self-portraits and how her (insane and completely wrong) image issues come into play every now and again. Now, I'm not ravishingly handsome or anything, but I'd like to think I've got something going on. Otherwise, I wouldn't have got the girl some twenty-one years ago. And don't worry, I'm not going to post a self-pic here. This is about my very real and very founded fear of showcasing my...um, "feet".

Yeah...that's not a picture of my feet. That's just some random dude's feet that I found online.

My feet are, in a word, what-the-fuglyicious. I know...new word (and even better band name, in my opinion). But, this has been the case for all of my 30-something years. When I was a kid, they were bony and skinny. As a teenager (and young adult) they smelled funky and just as bony and skinny. Now, they're just bonier, skinnier, itchier versions of their younger selves. And what-the-fuglyicious. The only good news? Now, they don't smell so bad.

Still, though, I've become brave over the past year or so. I started wearing flip flops. My desire to not look like a doofus in those old man sandals combined with wanting to stay cool in the "OMG I'm dying" conditions of Florida summers overrode my fear of showing my WTFF (what-the-fuglyicious feet...see what I did there?)

So, what does this have to do with anything? For starters, the fam trekked to a local park yesterday afternoon to let the animal and kiddos expend some energy, which they did with gusto. As always, my trusty iPhone 4 was at the ready to snap some pics and things were going well...

Trees...

Pics of the wife, kids and animal taking a stroll...

Even a shadowy self-portrait...



























And then, it happened...

Just as I was lining up some more shadow-portrait shots, I inadvertently snapped a picture that included my WTFF. I was horrified and morbidly curious all at the same time. As it turns out, it's not that wretched. With some post-processing, it's almost nearly passably tolerable.

Well, add another check off my bucket list. One of my features is almost photogenic. Now, to work on the rest of me...

By the way, this was my photo of the day from our little park trip/self-assessment/energy releaser...

065/365...Crescent Lake

Nice lake shot with cool shadows. Nice colors came through.

064/365...Open

The neon open sign at the Dairy Inn in St. Pete. Love the place and gives a very cool retro vibe in B&W.

063/365...Technology, 2005

This was an "MP3" player that I got for free with an SD Card I purchased back in the day. Just a piece of junk at this point.

062/365...Haircut

He hates it when I threaten to take his picture with the little hair clips in his hair and post it for all the world to see. Eh, I'll make it up to him later.