Day 63

Pinhole!!! Today, I ran my first two rolls of film through the pinhole camera I built. The first one was a complete bust... light leakage. I went back home, stuck more electrical tape all over the damn thing, and it works! I definitely need to work on my exposure times, but dammit, it works. These are some flowers photographed from about 6 inches away with about a 10 second exposure in bright evening sun. I think the photo guys at CVS think I'm insane.

Day 53

I thought these waterlillies were beautiful.

Day 49

Today was our first trip to the Watertown public pool this year. It's really a great facility to be open to the public for no charge, I'm very impressed. The weather today wasn't quite warm enough (in my opinion, not Nikki's), but we swam for a while anyway. We're going to try going back on the 4th, maybe there won't be so many people then.

Day 46

Technically, I missed Day 46. This is the picture I meant to take that night, but I didn't actually take it until morning. Just illustrating the heat this week.

Day 43

Nikki and I went for a great walk today up the Charles in Waltham. This picture is the fish ladder at the dam by Moody Street. We stopped at the midpoint of our walk and did a little shopping and got some "frappes" (milkshakes to the rest of the country). I bought a pinhole camera, which I spent several hours assembling this afternoon. I haven't seen that much Elmer's Glue since grade school. Hopefully, I'll take a few blogworthy pictures with it soon. I still need rubber bands to hold the whole thing together.

Day 38

I'm barely even tan, and look at the contrast.

Day 37

Last day of the drought: This is my mother's house. Her orchard and garden are doing great this year, but there might be less fruit than usual. They have a blight that's hitting the apples and blueberries.

Day 35

Day three of the drought: This is one of the springs on my dad's land. If you peel the moss back, the water is cold and clear and delicious. I can hardly bring myself to buy spring water, because when I was growing up we had this spring, plus two houses with spring-fed water. Much better tasting than the crap that comes in a bottle.

Day 34

Day two of the drought: This is the foundation and driveway of the house that my father is having built. It's very exciting stuff.

Day 30

We went down to Rhode Island to go to my buddy Jim's cookout on Saturday. It gives me hope that maybe one day I'll be able to have a house and a yard. Of course, I'm not eager to have to move to Rhode Island to make that happen.

It's shaping up to be a very social few days for me. Dinner with Joe on Friday, shopping Saturday, cookout Sunday, and perhaps dinner with Frank on Tuesday.

Day 22

Gee, the poison ivy sure is pretty this time of year. That's one thing I have trouble adjusting to up here. Where I come from, we didn't have any poison ivy or ticks. When we walk down along the river, the entire understory in the woods is poison ivy. It freaks me out just a little bit. After working on it for a while last weekend, Nikki was able to correctly identify poison ivy a few times today. Boy, am I proud.

I have reason to believe that I'm not susceptible to poison ivy. When I worked as a landscaper, I once cleared poison ivy off a lot with a weedeater, and I didn't itch afterward. You know how everything gets shredded and thrown around when you're using a weedeater, how could it not have gotten on me? I'm often tempted to do a controlled experiment and smear a leaf on my arm or something, just to settle the issue. Tempted, but not quite brave enough yet.