It was raining and a solitary flower had bloomed in anticipation of a spring that ended up being delayed by a sudden cold front and snow just before the first day of spring. I went out with my macro lens and the ring flash mom got me recently for Christmas.

Just in case the captions for the photos don’t appear on your RSS reader or on Facebook, here’s what I wrote as the caption to the photos:

“Inspired by title I chose for my photo for the twins’ four month photo which didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, I decided to do this image. I love how it came out.”

I also usually don’t post more than one version of a photo - I have a definitive version and just go with that, but this time Scarlett came up while I was trying to to figure out which one I preferred and she insisted on a different one than I would have chosen, so I decided to share them all.

I wanted to do this earlier - somewhere around 2 month portraits. I was re-energized to try the idea after seeing someone do a photo that made it look like their kid was bounding out of the crib with her stuffed animals. I did not take the Sam and Stella images from some other random image. They were right there where you see them. All I did was erase my body (or I’d be in here thrice). Still, if I were to do it again, I’d have Sam and Stella flying near me rather than against the wall. They end up too small and it lessens the impact of the shot. Well, there’s always next time. (And there’s always less edited shots!)

Yesterday Sam’s teeth started erupting - making him the earliest of the three kids to get their teeth and also explaining the last few days of insane amounts of drooling. (this was not a pre-published post)

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Video Games

Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games.  I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents about what energy drinks they have, what they ate, what they did between video gaming, and other topics.  However, they always get back to video games and provide a really fun podcast.  Segments include What You’ve Been Playing, News of the World, and EMAILS!  My favorite parts are “What You’ve Been Playing” and “Emails”.  It can be a bit geeky in the same way that some of the tech podcasts I listen to are geeky. First Ryan passed away and then Vinnie went to New York. With the podcast being so personality driven, the changes almost drove me away, but I’ve stayed and the new talent is pretty good. (Approx 2.5 hours long)

While I enjoyed the new theme overall, one thing was nagging at me as I went to bed last night - the padding around the menu, header, and site identity took up WAAAAAAY too much space. So I made the menu more nested to make it appear on the right as it does in the example site for the theme. I might need to make a few more tweaks to that to make sure certain pages are surfaced rather than hidden.

Welcome to a new set of posts in which I take a look at the t-shirts I’ve accumulated and comment on why I have them and what they mean to me.

It was the 1990s. I was fully into my Christian revival and the USA was into swing music. I was at a concert to see my new, favorite ska band, Five Iron Frenzy.

I was there with friends from school/Church:

I was looking around recently at the Wordpress annual themes and was looking into Twenty Sixteen. While it hadn’t spoken to me when it was released, it did have some features that seemed perfect for me now. The first is that images are given even more room to breathe in this theme. Since I’ve featured photography quite a bit on my blog over the past 11 years, this was something I definitely wanted. I have toyed with the idea of having a separate blog for my photography that has a dedicated photography theme, but since my tastes are always shifting, I think it’s better to just keep it all together on one blog. Another feature is the addition of pull-quotes - something I was trying to figure out how to do via plugins. Finally there is the sub-title you see above - I love those. I plan to have some fun with it in the future.