Bit by Bit (by dip)

That color shifting tells me I need to flush out my pen a little better. Inspired by Richard, I pulled out the dip pen, though I skipped the inkwell and went straight for the bottle. Like my life these days, the pen lightens by degrees.

Did anyone else see the mention of ITAM in the Washington Post's Style blog? It crossed my news feed reader this week. I suppose this means we have an even greater air of legitimacy now. Not having a typewriter out and available does seriously impact my hands-on time. I think I need to figure out a way to keep a permanent block of "me time" on the schedule, and rotate through activities by season. Spring is CYO track and field, October and November are NaNo. It's easy for worker-bee types like myself to forget that we need to take some down time, too, even if it's just little sips now and then.

The pedometer I mentioned is a FitBit Zip, by the way. My wife and I each have one, which I recommend, since we're naturally competitive with each other. (Scrabble games on Facebook get ugly fast.) We're trying to outdo each other's daily steps, knowing that each is quite busy either with an office job or homeschooling. On Fridays, for example, I've been making it a point to head to the library. But it is raining, quite hard at times, and I'm feeling particularly Blerchy today as a result. But I know it's a mile each way to the library on foot, and that will put me in the lead of Mrs. Clickthing. And our dog is rain-phobic, so I know she won't be boosting steps by taking the pooch around the block a few times. Fitness domination is mine!

The Good, The Bad, and the Secondary Characters

Typed on the Camp machine, a Smith-Corona Silent Super

Now They've Gone Too Far

What's wrong with this photo?


Typed, with tongue in cheek, on the re-felted Silver-Reed 750

They Ain't Bitin'

Well, that didn't work.

Not entirely unexpected, but my home-grown fisheye lens didn't work. In fact, it alarmed the manager at Walgreens, who expressed genuine concern over the state of my camera. The lens swap threw it hopelessly out of focus. So that experiment... not so successful. Lesson learned: just because the focal length looks the same doesn't mean that it is the same.

But, there are some positives, like me gaining a better understanding of the workings of Chinese-made plastic cameras (they are all pretty much the same design inside) and finding some fairly ninja-esque directions for completely tricking out this model of camera. Thanks to those, I learned how to keep the shutter open, and use a piece of tape to check the focus. This isn't the easiest thing to see, but this is the landscape outside my window, projected (upside down) onto a piece of tape:



(In retrospect, I should have done this first, since it would have shown that no combination of lenses projects a clear image except the originals.)

So those hoping for clever fisheye photos (me, *sob*) stand down, and watch for more experiments in the future...