Dallas Brass

For my birthday this year my parents surprised me with some tickets to a concert by the Dallas Brass at the Coral Springs Center for the Arts. I didn't really even know that this place existed. Although it is not 2 miles from our apartment it is sort of off the beaten path. Our seats were very good and the concert was outstanding. I was a little leery as part of the deal was that they had spent some time holding clinics at local schools and they had a group of middle schoolers play with them on one piece and a group of high schoolers play on another group. I was pleasantly surprised at the middle school performance, which was a Star Wars medley. It was excellently arranged so that the middle schoolers could carry some of the melody while staying well within their range of ability. The high schoolers did a patriotic number (the theme of the concert was "An American Journey") and did it very well.

The members of Dallas Brass were very impressive, and some point in the concert they each got a chance to steal the spotlight. They also injected a lot of humor (especially from leader Michael Levine) which the young audience especially appreciated. I think my favorite thing was the horn player. His tone was gorgeous and you don't hear a lot of horn these days (unless you are watching Star Trek). They also did a vocal piece in which most of the audience really liked the soloists, but I heard some outstanding falsetto coming from his general direction. The trumpet players showed off quite a few different instruments including some very nice piccolo trumpet work. The tuba player was extremely familiar, but I can't figure out where I've seen him before. Ferris? Western? Somewhere. He played an outstanding solo featuring some very innovative techniques that clinched my feeling that I've seen him somewhere before.

This was a really nice evening and I'm very thankful that my parents are so thoughtful.

Something You've Never Photographed Before

Something You've Never Photographed Before
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer: Take a photo of something you've never photographed before. This is a beaded flower I've been working on for some time. But I haven't yet finished the stem and haven't started the pistol/stamen. Then I have to figure out how to stiffen it so it won't droop. One book suggested some Future Acrylic Floor Wax, which I keep forgetting to look for when I'm at the store.

Round

Round
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer from yesterday (almost there!). Take a picture of something round.

Socks

Socks
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for Saturday: Take a picture of your or someone else's socks. These are my favorite socks. I find that socks are normally way to big for me. The heel ends up at my ankle when I first put them on, never mind after I've worn them all day. It seems silly to get so excited about socks, but I didn't realize how frustrating it was to have to rearrange them all the time.

Choice

P4280001
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for Friday: Make a decision. I chose to take a picture of my dinner options. The winner? The pizza dough on the bottom shelf. It is currently coming up to room temperature in the kitchen.

Dream

Dream
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer from Thursday: Take a picture of a dream. These are the shoes Anne wore at her wedding. She sent them to me a while later when I was taking a ballroom dance adult education class with Roland. My dream is to take regular lessons and learn how to dance.

Milestone

Milestone
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Still playing Photogamer catch-up: 04/21/2008 Take a picture of milestone. For a groan-worthy pic from one of my favorite Photogamers, click here.

Sproing

Sproing
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Roland took some really nice pictures at practice today. He also ran Bleys for the first half of practice. We should have left it that way since when I took over Bleys didn't do very well. I worry that we might be starting to see some of the exercise intolerance that accompanies a worsening of his heart murmur. We will just have to wait and see, but I'm trying to prepare myself for the fact that we might not be attending too many more tournaments. We can still play on Sundays, but if he stops enjoying it... There are some more pictures over in my Flickr stream if you're interested.

Surplus

Surplus
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 20th - Take a picture something you don't need. Well here is the pile of stuff I've been collecting for Goodwill. This prompt was appropriate because I've recently started on a bit of cleaning/sorting rampage. Roland and I have been toying with the idea of moving to be closer to his work and that got me thinking about all that goes into moving. So I've been slowly going through some of my stuff to purge. It doesn't feel like I've made much headway at this point, but I'm hoping to keep at it.

Antique

Antique
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 19th: Take a picture of something antique. I don't really have anything antique so this was a tough one. The best I could come up with were these books that belonged to my grand parents.

Band

Band
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 18th - Take a picture of a band. I had to think about this one for a long time before I came up with something. I chose some of my hair bands shown on the shower curtain rings that they live on.

Purchase

Purchase
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 17th: As many of you know I've been training Bleys to play flyball for the last year or so. We've done very well, Bleys has lost the extra weight that caused us to join up in the first place. He is running full runs without errors for the most part. However our major stumbling block has been actually catching the ball from the box. Given that he started out unable to catch a piece of food we're going alright, but I've been getting frustrated with my inability to teach Bleys what to do. At the suggestion of one of the flyball team member I ordered these balls. They are foam and semi-squishy. They are a little smaller than they claimed on the website, so that's a little harder, but overall I'm hopeful that these will help.

Journey

Journey
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer is back! I'm not sure what the issue was, but when I checked today it was up and running. So here are some of the back prompts. April 16th: Journey. This is the Trip Tik that Dave and I used when we drove up to Michigan. Not only does it have the usual map information and they nice AAA lady filled in the known construction zones, but it also gives you a nice description of what you will be driving through on each page. For instance between Chattanooga and Knoxville...leads through rolling farm and dairy country and some wooded hilly terrain with good views. Several lakes are situated only a few miles from this route.

Practice

Shutter Lag
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Today we had flyball practice and we took my new camera. I didn't have much time to take pictures but Roland managed to get in a few. Including this one that shows the camera has a little shutter lag. We also found out that Julie and John are engaged! Julie is one of the ladies on the team and John started coming to practice when they started dating. Congratulations John and Julie.

One of our long distance team members drove down for a Disc Dog competition yesterday and practice today, so after practice we all drove our dogs home and then met up for lunch. I took some pictures there, but they weren't very good (you can still check them out at flickr). I still have a lot to learn about my camera and taking good indoor shots appears to be one of them. I think I'm going to have to spend some time with the instruction manual and have a chat with my Dad about how to handle it.

Flurry

Hannah and Kodi
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

This weekend was a busy one! The flyball team I take classes from had a demo scheduled for Saturday. The SPCA Wildlife Center has a Walk for Wildlife every year to raise money and has a pet fair afterwards in the park. There were many booths of local rescues, pet stores, food vendors, and even Lowe's who brought out a cool project for the kids to build and take home with them. They had a lure course set up and a dog fun area. We also set up a little area and did a demonstration and had a few dogs come in and try it out.

It was a bit of a challenge getting the area fenced in (to prevent dogs from walking through and watering the equipment and because our dogs are off leash when they are running. We got it figured out though and the actual demo went okay. We only had four dogs, so we were just running doubles, but that was fine. Bleys was actually one of those dogs and he did a really great job. He still doesn't really do the catching thing, but he brought the ball back and really seemed to be running fast (for him). He even practiced some passing and didn't do too badly. Roland was super-awesome and ran to the store and then boxloaded for one of the teams. I don't know how I lucked out with such a great guy.

One of the big draws of this event is that Jeff Corwin comes and starts off the walk and this year he did a nice question and answer session with the kids. I thought that was pretty sweet and the kids really seemed to like it. All in all a nice day at the park.

Machine

Photogamer for Monday: Machine. I'm currently unable to access the Photogamer site to find out what each day's cue is. It seems that other people can still get to it though because they are posting for cues I haven't seen. Can any of you get to there?

Time for a fun new game.

Yesterday on my walk I tried out the zoom on my new camera, it has a whopping 20x optical zoom. So take a look at these sets of pictures, they were taken from the same spot only seconds apart. The only difference was the first was taken at full width, the second on full zoom. No digital zoom was used in this experiment.









There are couple more sets on my Flickr and you can really see the difference better at the larger photo sizes available there...So check it out.

Heron

It's been very nice weather here for the past couple of days. Temperatures in the 70's and a brisk breeze. Since I had this camera to try out I've been taking the dog on a long walk the past two mornings to try it out. Unfortunately we are having some internet connectivity issues so it's taken me longer than expected to put them up.

This one I took today. I was passing by a pond and saw the head of this dude poking up over the hill. I was able to walk a little closer to get more of his body in the shot, but since I had the dog with me I really couldn't get much closer without spooking him.

Left

Photogamer for this past Sunday: Left. I chose to take a picture of some of my sewing scissors, which are all left-handed. Both in the handle and more importantly in the blade. A lot of manufacturers will make the handle left-handed without rearranging the blade, which is less useful.

Sign

Sign
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for this past Saturday: Take a picture of a sign.

Postcard

Postcard
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for last Friday: Postcard. I though this was appropriate since I just found out that Anne and Karl are going to come down to visit Disney this fall. Woot!

Ball

Ball
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer from last Thursday: Ball. I found this bunch down channel from the tennis facility. There were a lot of waterlogged tennis balls and one big ball with a star on it.

Intro

For my birthday this year I asked for a nice digital camera. I have a really great pocket camera that I got as a hand-me-down from my Mom, but I wanted one that wasn't all about the size. I wanted some more features, increased zoom, better pixel density (my little one is only 3 mp), the ability to manually chance the aperture size and shutter speed. I decided against an DSLR because of the cost and my ability level. Anyway, here is one of the first pictures with my new snazzy camera. Of course the first thing I look to take a picture of is the fuzz-bucket. Isn't he anerable?

Awesome

I've been a little slow on the photogamer for the past few days as the pictures I want to take just don't seem to turn out. The last one I put up was for the chocolate challenge, and I was just going back through some of the other entries and found what is probably my favorite. I love the golden reflections on the chocolate walls and the Ferrero Rocher at the end is the perfect touch.

Chocolate

Chocolate
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for today: Chocolate. I took a picture of my favorite kind of Hershey's Kiss for today's photogamer...Then I ate it. I thought the wrapper would make a good picture too, and I ended up submitting this one instead.

Half

Half
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for yesterday: Half. I tried taking a picture of half of a Benadryl that was lying on the table (the dog's allergies are really bad at the moment), but it just wasn't turning out. So I turned around and there were the kitchen shears drying by the sink.

Four

Four
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for yesterday: Take a picture of four. I chose to take a picture of my cross stitch book. I'm doing a very large cross stitch for Roland that will hopefully be done sometime this century. There are over 80 symbols for this project, one of which was the number 4.

Looking out a Window

Looking out a Window
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for today: Take a picture looking out a window. This is looking out the weird little window in our small bathroom.

Keys

Keys
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for yesterday: Keys. My favorite is this one.

Square

Square
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for April 1st: Square

XP

I'm a little tired today, but I have a good reason. Yesterday I did something rather un-me like. A few weeks ago one of the people on the flyball list sent a message that caught my attention. The book Marley and Me is being made into a movie and they were looking for extras with dogs for an obedience scene. So I sent in a picture of Bleys and a picture of me, and I was lucky enough to get an email back that I was invited to come.

Don't get too excited though, you won't be seeing me in the movie as it was very background extra type stuff, but mostly I wanted to see what a movie set was like. There were 12 or so extras that got to be in the class with the actors, but from something someone said it sounded like they all came from the same obedience class or something. Maybe someone associated with the movie knew a trainer down here? It would have been mega-awesome to be in that class!

Anyway, we had to be there at 6:30 am yesterday, and there was down in Miami. It was quite a hike from here so I ended up leaving my apartment at 5:15 or so. We checked in and got looked over by the wardrobe people. I got a pass on the clothes I was wearing and didn't have to change, which was kind of nice at the end of the day because giving back their clothes added to your wait to go home. After that we sat around until 2 or 3 in the afternoon while the class that Marley was in filmed. It was interesting to watch how they filmed it. I wonder if it will change my perspective on watching movies?

They did provide us lunch although it was a little weird. I'm told that often the extras just wait until everyone else has eaten, which makes good sense to me. But this time they had a separate area with some pretty sad food, which was sitting out in the sun. The food wasn't very good, plain rice, broccoli and corn (that looked like it was a week old or came from a can), and some chicken. They also had some fruit salad which was definitely past its prime and some salad which may have started out fine, but was suffering from sitting out in the sun. Perhaps there was a reason to do it that way, but I sure came home hungry!

I did get to see, but not meet, Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson. Both seemed very nice to the people they were working with even though it was very warm and they were being consistently (and on purpose) jumped on and slobbered over by an exuberant young yellow Labrador. They actually had three different labs playing Marley yesterday, I don't know how many they have all together. They were well trained and did very well doing what they were supposed to be doing. I think I only saw one thing they were trying to get the dog to do they he didn't really understand what they wanted. And that was a tough one. To have the dog run away from the trainer full speed, stop on a mark, turn and look back at the camera, and then run full tilt back to the trainer. He would do most of it, except once he got to the mark he sometimes would look around instead of back at the trainer. Or he wouldn't go straight to the mark he would swing wide around a tree. But I think they eventually got what they wanted and I can't even imagine starting to train that sequence with Bleys!

Those of us not in the regular class did actually get to participate late in the day, but like I said it was very much in the background and I doubt it will be very visible in the final movie, if at all. We ended the day at about 7:30 pm and then I drove back back home with one extremely tired dog. All in all it was a good life experience and I'm glad I did it. Although I'm also glad that I could sleep in this morning.

Yay me!

Sometimes on the Photogamer site they pick a photo from all the pictures for that challenge to put on the website. Anne had one a while ago with her picture of Karl and Logan (scroll down to February 14th) for the challenge 'Love.' Today I saw that they picked mine for the 'Bottle' challenge!