Thursday, April 28, 2011

Miracles

Shawn: Whatcha reading?
Me: An article about how to take better
photographs
. This guy says that everyone
should read their user manual.

I agree. And you never read the
one that came with your camera.

It's a Canon Rebel XTI, I figure it's close
enough to the film Rebel that I didn't need
to re-read the manual.

I'm just saying that I read the
manual for your camera and you didn't.


A few days later when I pulled the manual out to read it:

Shawn! Quick! we need to call the Pope!
What? Why?
Because you've performed a miracle and
we should let him know so you might be
canonized one day.

hunh?
You managed to read the user's manual
for my camera without opening the packaging
that the manual came in. That's a miracle!

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Squat Stand

A few months ago, Shawn decided that he wanted to REALLY get into Cross Fit. That meant we needed to buy rubber bumper weights. So after a trip down to Houston to pick up said weights, we had an Olympic barbell (45 pounds) with 230 pounds of bumper weights plus an additional 30 pounds of weights we had purchased at Academy.

The problem with this whole set-up? we didn't have any where to store the stuff, AND possibly more problematic was that in order to do squats, we'd have to load up the bar, do a hang clean, do a push press, lower it to the shoulders, do the squat, stand back up, do a push press, back to the clean position before putting the weight back on the ground. So basically it was a ton of extra work to do one measly squat, and you could only squat as much as you could clean because there was no way to put the bar on something, load it with weight, and then do a squat.

So we needed a squat stand or rack or power cage or something. Shawn found some that he liked online. They could be flattened for storage, and they had added features like pull up bars, dip bars, and what have you. After balking at the cost of these stands (starting at about $700), Shawn started lamenting that if only he knew a welder who could weld the stand for him. When I told him he did, he scoffed and was like "yeah, sure, in COLORADO." So I reminded him that Garden Blogger Bob (to differentiate him from 'your father, Bob') was a welder by trade, and he would probably be happy to weld together some stand thingy that Shawn would design.

That's how it came be that a few weekends ago we spent the day at Bob's place where Bob actually let Shawn weld (with supervision and with an eye toward making sure that the welds would actually hold) the squat stand together.

Here are the men-folk after the stand has been welded and was placed in the truck ready to be taken home. I spent the day with Bob's wife, who broke her arm a few weeks earlier.

Of course, when using raw materials, you will have to paint things. So we went to the store and got some rattle-can black spray paint.

Shawn rattle-can painting the squat stand so it won't get black dust on us every time we move the thing.

Total cost of this adventure? about $100 which was the cost for the materials as Bob didn't charge Shawn anything for teaching him how to weld.

Of course, Bob also has some cool Jax looking things which are apparently .22 pistol walking targets which look pretty cool, if I do say so myself...and, while I wouldn't use them for target practice, I probably would like them for decoration purposes. Oh the possibilities!

Friday, April 22, 2011

Shutterbug: Milestones (part 2)


Ground Breaking Ceremony for the Waller Creek Tunnel. The tunnel will divert water from 12th street to Town Lake and significantly reduce the floodplain of Waller Creek in the Downtown area. More information can be found here: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/wallercreek/


-Catch of the Day
-Unlikely Duos
-Murals
-Those were the days
-Milestones
-State Parks
-Birds
-At the Fair
-EEK!
-Fall Leaves
-Curious Cats
-Man's Best Friend
-Heroes

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Queens, New York

"Katina..."

"Yes, Ma-Belle"

"Do you want me to put this make up on you?" (while holding up an eye-shadow palette that has all the colors mixed and is obviously one of the ones that her mother gave her because the make up is old)

"Not particularly"

"But if I can put the blue eye shadow on you, you'll look like a queen!"

::laughing snort:: "Yes, I'd definitely look like a queen. Thanks, but no thanks."

Saturday, April 09, 2011

Shutterbug: Milestones (part 1)

I took my camera to the groundbreaking of the Waller Creek Tunnel on Friday. I took photos. I downloaded all of the photos to my computer. I deleted the photos off of my memory card. I came home. I went to post a picture on my blog. I remembered that I deleted all of the photos off of the memory card, but they're on my work computer. Now I have to email myself from my work computer at some point in time in order to put the one photo I want on this blog for the world to see. Damn.

Saturday, April 02, 2011

Critter

A few weeks ago, our friend's wife delivered a healthy baby boy. Jesse (the husband/father/best man at our wedding), dutifully, sent out an email to everyone letting them know about the fact that "critter" was finally here. What follows is the conversation that Shawn and I had...

Shawn: Looks like Jesse and Kristie had the baby yesterday.

Katina: Cool, what's his name?

Riley Race

ooo, they went with the superhero name.

:::I sign into facebook to see photos:::

Dork. The baby's name is Owen.

Ah, that explains it.

Explains what?

The email was signed "Jesse, Kristie, and Owen", and I thought it was odd that Jesse was including the dog on the email signature instead of the baby.

The dog's name is Hendrix, remember?

Well, NOW...Okay, so Jesse and Kristie had the baby yesterday, his name is Owen Riley Race.