Posting...

...to blogs. This is surely self-evident, but regardless I thought I needed to add that I like posting to blogs, which includes adding comments to other people's blogs. If I had to pick a top ten advancement for this decade, blogs would definitely be in the mix. Of course as you all know, not only do blogs give you a convenient soap box (or rameumptom for some people) from which to throw out your opinions for the world to see, they are also a wonderful mechanism for rediscovering and keeping up with friends and family. And since blogs are so much easier to maintain than websites and easily allow visitors to post responses, blogs are very useful for huge collaborative research projects, such as discovering a family's origins. I myself, maintain over 10 blogs (primarily genealogy related), so I have plenty of opportunities to enjoy this activity. And since I enjoy reading as much as I do posting, please feel free to add comments anytime.

Photo Editing

I have found that editing photos, particularly repairing and even coloring old photos, to be quite enjoyable. It is so wonderful to have the technology to easily do things such as erase random people out of the background, airbrush blemishes, or even fabricate meetings with famous people. Of course the later comment highlights the growing need to be skeptical about a photo's authenticity.

I primarily use simple tools such as gamma correction to lighten up an underexposed photo, thus revealing a face that had once been covered in the shadows. I notice too often people post images that are too dark to see anything. Please tell such friends to use gamma correction, which most graphics programs have, and it can be free through open source software.

This week I played around with coloring old b&w photos, and discovered that I could get decent results by copying the image to several layers, coloring each layer to the color of the specific area, and then erasing the areas to be colored differently on each respective layer. The results can be seen in two of the images in the below arrangement. (I know I should have "Photo Chopped" my double chin, but I was going for as much authenticity as possible.)

Fraternity

Perhaps it is my extroverted personality, but I've always enjoyed being around friends. Unfortunately, I have come to realize that it is hard to find friends as a guy, particularly due to my religious beliefs (i.e. it is easy to find drinking buddies). I mean women in the church have their book clubs and stuff that strengthen their sororitorial (yes, I made that word up) bonds, but if you don't like the ironic fist fights, cussing, and bench warming that bear their ugly heads during church basketball, you are really at a loss for male bonding. This is particularly true for men, like myself, who move away from their hometowns.

I have been trying to rack my brain about why it is so hard for guys to make friends, especially when as teenagers we always roamed in large packs. One thing I have come up with was that as teenagers, we always talked about girls and were thus never at a loss for discussion topics. Now happily married, I am not going to get together with guys to talk about girls, so that puts us behind from the start.

Many men seem quite content and/or are too busy for the brotherhood, but I know that there are others out there like me. Here is some advice for these three categories:

To those who are content, quit playing your video games by yourself, and realize that making friends (aka networking) is good for your career. You have more chances at boosting your income, thus making your wife happier, which in turn makes you happier.

To those who are too busy, same networking thing. You also can always have kid friendly get togethers, allowing your wife a break, thus the happy thing again.

To those who want to form friendships, plan activities that would energize the other two groups. And don't wait for someone else to initiate, or you'll still be sitting at home.

Else we are forever destined to be occasional dinner friends with the spouses of our wives' friends (I only have one wife, you know what I meant).

To get you going, here are some possible activities/places to go to get you started:

• Playing sports other than basketball (tennis, flag football, controlled rugby, broom hockey, dodge ball,volleyball, tug-o-wars, golf, cycling, boating, all the stuff you used to think was fun)
• Shooting range (ok, this can go in the sports category, but I just wanted to highlight it)
• Sports to watch (try something new like going to an Irish Pub to watch rugby, horse races, what the rest of the world calls football)
  
• Game night, to include board games and/or video games (if done in couples, invite more than just one couple)
• Of course movie nights
• Taking kids to park or restaurants (at the park play some father-kid games, perhaps something like kickball)
  
• BBQ (probably should be coed, but doesn't have to be. Some Costco's have root beer kegs)

In the comment section feel free to add more potential activities.

Frogs

Ok, maybe not back to the manly rugby posts, but more boyish at least...I like frogs. I have been fond of frogs forever. While I delve into my love of frogs, I'll interweave my general love of nature.

As a kid how wonderful it was to go on nature hikes with my mother, taking time to look at tadpoles and trying to catch frogs. Of course snakes were cool too, so I can't leave out the story my mother loves to share about the time she picked up a rock, saw a snake, screamed, quickly dropped the rock, and had me begging her to lift the rock back up so that I could see the snake. My love of nature for certain was my mother's doing.

From my earliest memories, my mom was always taking us to the parks, farms, zoos, etc. We would frequent places like Winton Woods, Farbach-Werner Nature Preserve, Fantasy Farm, the Cincinnati Zoo, Krohn Conservatory, and farms where we would drink cider, pick berries, or get a pumpkin. As my mom was actively involved in a gardening club and Girl Scouts, I had even more opportunities for hiking and camping at the various parks and nature preserves (Yes, yes, I tagged along with my mom and sister on Girl Scout activities).

My favorite magazine growing up was Ranger Rick and eventually I graduated to a World Wildlife Fund magazine. I was inspired by a book I read about Teddy Roosevelt (one of my favorite presidents), and had my personal natural history museum in my room, complete with rocks and minerals, fossils, snake skins, insects, drawings, and nature books. My mother was kind enough to build me a nice display area and was always very encouraging. But before you label me an environmental extremist, know that while I love trees, I also believe in using the resources (wisely of course) that God has given us. This means I conserve and recycle, but also support more domestic oil drilling, and would never spare an endangered salmon at the cost of the lives of brave forest fire fighters.

Anyway enough of that and back to frogs...I remember my first frog was a bull frog that grew to over12" long. He lived in the pond in our backyard. Unfortunately our concrete pond, believe it or not, was too pristine and didn't have enough dirt in the bottom for my poor frog to survive the hash winter temperatures in Cincinnati, alas he froze, and I cried...but lesson learned.

I know that at least on one occasion my mom sent away for mail order tadpoles. I don't know if they were part of the mail order, but once I had two leopard frog tadpoles that I kept in a jar in my room. I enjoyed watching them transform into frogs. Unfortunately, I didn't have a net over the large jar they were in and when the first one reached froghood it jumped out. I left a pan of water under my bed, and I begged my sister to help search for it. Several months later I found its dried corpse under my sister's bed, and I of course blamed her for the tragedy and it took a good while for me to forgive her. Of course I now rightly blame myself for letting it get out in the first place, and I don't know for sure that she didn't search. Again lesson learned.

A few years back my wife learned of this cool environmental project called Frog Watch. We went to a meeting where we learned all the different frog calls and were then assigned a local pond to watch. On a weekly basis we would go to the pond and make an account of all the different frogs we heard (mainly spring peepers), and perhaps even listed how many we heard. We always loved to hear what my wife calls the "bully bull frogs," with their deep guttural, truly cow like call. Anyway great fun, I highly recommend it.

Fragrances

Ok, I know it sounds kind of girly, but you know how I like sweet nectar by now, and taste and smells go hand-in-hand (I mean chou dofu, aka stinky tofu, smells like a dumpster on a hot summer day, and tastes like it too)...I like things that smell good. This includes of course food smells (no details needed), cologne/perfume, flowers, air dried laundry...the list is long.
As far as cologne/perfume, I first off Happy by Clinique (of course not for myself). Certainly sweet nectar for the nose. For myself I like Cool Water, Drakkar, and Tommy for Men...in that particular order. I used to like Ralph Lauren Polo, but that was in the 80s. I also like shower gells and lotions that smell like those colognes, or tasty fruits such as lemon, melon, grape, or mango. (Yes, I am expecting to take some ridicule for this posting.)



I discovered that my favorite flower smell is the subtle but flavorful fragrance from the tall red tulips. If anyone knows of a perfume that has captured that smell let me know, if not I claim it first and want a hefty portion of the predictably high volume sales.



Finally, I remember when I lived in Japan, nothing beat the fresh crisp feel and smell of a futon mattress that had been beaten and hung outside all day. Truly the best nights sleep that I have ever had, well yeah, of course that was after hours of proselytizing door-to-door.

For the record I am only 20% girly, according to the "How girly are you?" blog quiz!

Meetings

I have discovered that I like meetings...yes I know that makes me the type of person people hate, but hear me out. I do not like having a meeting just for the sake of meeting, as I think doing is most often better than just talking about doing (I say most often, as of course doing the wrong thing is not better). I am also all too familiar with meetings that drag on, or are so boring that even five minutes seems like five days in solitary confinement (not that I have such an experience).

What I like is having good meetings where I have something of substance to contribute, even though the love of meetings sort of goes against my nature. My Myers Briggs tends to be ENTP (it fluctuates a little), so I would say that the E makes meetings appealing, as I like to work and be around people. However, the P in me (ha ha...I know what you just thought) goes against meetings, as I just want to get right to a task, as I said I value doing. The MacGyver in me knows that planning is essential to success, but with the doing mentality my approach is "get it done and over with as quick as possible.) I'm a haptic learner, meaning I am a hands-on kind of guy, so I don't like reading the instruction manuals. This of course does produce some errors, but I accomplish tasks within an accepted tolerance very fast.

So why do I like meetings? It is hard to say. As I said, I like being around people and I like having my comments valued, but beyond that it could just be that I have finally started working on issues that are interesting to me.

My new office is undergoing a transformation and they are trying to apply an Agile project management framework, which has been quite interesting. My personality shys away from theories and business practices, because I feel that they slow down my doing something...I mean don't tell me about how to figure out how long it would take a monkey to fall from a tree after shooting it, just give me a gun and a stopwatch (don't worry, I love monkeys, and would never shoot one of those or any other cute furry creatures. )That said, I am starting to enjoy learning new frameworks for doing business, even though I think half of them are just plain common sense.


Perhaps my love of meetings stems from the fact that I will get to be Scrum Master for a new working group. My wife says the word "scrum" reminds her of the word "scrod," which is a baby cod fish. But since it is derived from my favorite sport of Rugby, I am quite pleased that I will be Master of Scrum!