Category: Life

After My Weird Laser Eye Procedure Last Week Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. Sometimes it’s hard to know when something’s wrong. About two months ago now I started noticing black spots in my vision, especially in my left eye. An emergency eye exam showed that I had floaters, boring, typical things of middle age and myopia [...]

Why does all red wine from Chile taste so bad to me? I’m drinking this Carmenere tonight and it just tastes green and tight–just like the rest. Someone educate me.

In typical fashion I am reading three or four things this week, soon to be supplemented by more Bookmooch booty. The theme seems to be England, from 1530-1790: Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey: A biography of Gloriana up to and slightly past the point when she is crowned. Readable, with some [...]

2003 Cuvee de Pena (Vin de Pays Pyrenées Orientales)Tastes like this: old men in South France sitting around cafe table outside in a dusty village drinking this wine out of tumblers after having a long day hunting rabbits. This is a man’s wine and I like it. Sultry animal darkness, bramble-patch murky jam slippery and [...]

I think I like the music best.

Now, I hate being curmudgeonly about people’s honest attempts at Art, but I’m increasingly losing patience with the recent fad of HDR (High Dynamic Range) “photographs” that is spreading like a good dose of the clap on Flickr. It might be technically interesting, there might be more physical colors in the resulting image, it might [...]

Well, as my dearest Mike P. would say: I blogged the hell out of it.

Sunset near Umatilla, Ore. Originally uploaded by lyzadanger. You can buy me one even if you don’t know what one is. All you need to know is: 72mm in .9 What’s a graduated neutral density filter and why might you want one? Here’s a nice shot demonstrating what a difference it can make. Or read [...]

My sister called me from some airport this afternoon. My hunch is that it was Washington’s airport because she lives in DC. The poor girl is on the way to meet my father and stepfather in Nice (translation for geographically-phobic Americans: that’s in southern France) and had bought several books for the upcoming trip and [...]

This week: * I’m all over Bookmooch.com, a used-book swapping site that is ten parts lovingly-crafted-by-a-book-loving-geek and about two parts sanity and logic. It’s a pyramid scheme, but I’m in it until the bottom falls out. * I’m laboriously re-scanning my several hundred books at home into Delicious Library, the book porn application for OS [...]